Google Bids $900 Million For Nortel Patent Portfolio

Besieged by patent claims, Google is arming to defend itself, and perhaps to enter new markets. 

Google cultivates the image of an unconventional company, but the vigor with which it continues to push the envelope of intellectual property law appears to be waning. Its copyright policy of seeking forgiveness rather than asking for permission, exemplified by its book scanning effort, was recently dealt a setback by a New York judge. And having lobbied for years without success for patent law changes, Google is now pursuing a conventional patent strategy: The search giant wants to buy Nortel's patent portfolio in a bankruptcy auction to strengthen its defense against patent infringement claims.

Google on Monday said that Nortel had selected its offer as the "stalking-horse bid," which represents the baseline offer for Nortel's patent assets. Nortel disclosed the amount of the bid: $900 million.

"The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits," said Google SVP and general counsel Kent Walker in a blog post. "But as things stand today, one of a company's best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services."

If Google possessed such assets, it might have an easier time defending itself against Oracle, which believes Android infringes its Java patents, and might be able to better support its Android partners against the saber-rattling of competitors like Microsoft, which recently sued Barnes & Noble for alleged Android-related patent infringement.

Robert Kunstadt, managing partner of intellectual property law firm R. Kunstadt PC and an opponent of Google's book scanning project, sees Google's bid as a smart way to improve its defense against patent litigation. "If Google can purchase a portfolio covering areas where they haven't been active, it gives them the potential for counter-claims," he said in an interview.

Telephone and wireless technology, Kunstadt said, are areas with significant conflict. The stakes are particularly high, he suggested, because many claims seek to block infringing products from importation through the U.S. International Trade Commission.

As Walker observes in his post, Google is a relatively young company and has not built up a patent portfolio comparable to other tech industry leaders. Patent portfolios offer some degree of protection against patent infringement claims because they provide both a protected path for innovation and litigation deterrence in the form of a potential counter-suit.

IBM is the poster child for armoring itself with patents. In January, IBM said that it had received 5,896 U.S. patents in 2010, the most of any company for the 18th consecutive year. The enterprise computing giant also noted that its patent total was larger than the combined number of patents awarded to EMC, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Google does not even appear on IFI Patent Intelligence's 2010 list of the top 50 U.S. patent assignees.

As a point of comparison, Apple received 563 patents in 2010, a 94% jump from 2009. Apple's evidently heightened interest in patents highlights the intensity of the patent warfare presently raging in the mobile computing arena.

Nortel's portfolio consists of about 6,000 patents and patent applications covering wireless and wired communication technologies. Whether Google sees Nortel's patents as a way to enter new markets remains to be seen, but the telecom company's portfolio could prove useful with the development of software-defined networking (SDN), which Google is promoting through its participation in the Open Networking Foundation, or with the development of white spaces networking, among other projects. Google says that if its bid is successful, Nortel's patents will help it and the open source community with projects like Android and Chrome.

If Google wins the June 2011 auction and courts in the U.S. and Canada approve, the deal will rank as one of Google's biggest, behind only its purchases of DoubleClick and YouTube, and its 2005 search deal with AOL.

Posted on 6:22 PM / 0 comments / Read More

Firefox 5

For the record, these are new features which Firefox 5 intends to build, but these are not new features at all and are already available in other browsers today. As I had posted earlier, Firefox 5 did want to add site specific features like Internet Explorer 9 has right now. All in all Mozilla is shunning innovation and does not have it’s mind in the right place and I frankly think that Firefox and Mozilla have seriously lost it.
Since Chrome came out in late 2008, each and every browser has just tried to mimic it, but most have failed miserably. This could be in my eyes only, but many browsers including Firefox have been doing nothing but mimicking the look and feel of Chrome and I have hardly found a compelling reason to switch from Chrome and go to another browser. I really don’t count the "new tab related features" Firefox 4 built in, because I know that several users including me don’t even care about it.
Chrome is fast, Firefox 4 is fast, IE9 is fast, Opera 11 is fast. However, the fact remains that all these years you (Mozilla) promised to provide users with a alternative to Internet Explorer, which was a pain in the posterior and sucked. But somehow Microsoft took away the momentum from Firefox with IE, if not Chrome, and introduced a new feature in Internet Explorer 9, which Mozilla will be now call "Social sharing" in Firefox 5?
Also Firefox is thinking about an inbuilt PDF viewer after Chrome already did it, and a new home tab that is similar to Google Chrome and Opera? Where is the innovation Mozilla that kept you apart?
What happened to you Mozilla? Weren’t you the leader in browser innovation? Why did you slack off? Why did you create Firefox 3.0 all through 3.6 which hung my PC more often than any other software ever did? Why does Firefox eat so much memory that I find my 6GB rig an ancient model from 1980s?
I am not the only one to pan the next beauty from Mozilla. You might want to check out the comments on Slashdot and it is really not looking good. I will just post few of the comments here and you shall get the general perception about Firefox:

Facebook? Twitter? Since when did Mozilla integrate commercial websites into their browser? Since integrating the Google search engine? Since AOL? This is why Netscape and Mozilla were originally kept separate. To keep the commercial bloat in the Netscape browser and allow the community to use Mozilla.

We need a security and functionality oriented fork ASAP. Performance matters also.
Nobody asked for changes to the interface. The interface to Firefox was never broken and nobody complained about it.

Nobody asked for the "awesome bar" or whatever the hell that is. If it improves productivity then fine, tabs make sense, but the majority of this shit is just gimmicks. Integrating the cloud makes sense but not when it’s specifically "facebook" and "twitter", but to allow anyone to select anything and make it completely transparent and open. They are going commercial in a really bad sell out kind of way, and you can tell the developers I said it.

Why not just take the Chromium tree and figure out how to run Firefox extensions on there and just call that Firefox? Would save time and have much better memory use and performance. Firefox is basically converging on a Chrome clone with slightly worse performance and some dumb UI hacks that will end up largely unused/abandoned (like Panorama). Isn’t all this what the extension ecosystem is for? Why would a team that already is overwhelmed by the task of testing its product incorporate MORE features to test? My main issue with Firefox right now is not a lack of Facebook integration (-_-) but the obvious memory leakage in the released FF 4 with AdBlock/NoScript, which was present through the entire last half of the beta cycle. Mozilla has really wandered off the reservation here. I want a solid, fast browser that supports the great extensions that Mozilla didn’t write, and continues to support developments in the core web standards space. If I want Chrome or Flock, I’ll just download those, seriously.

For more on such beauties visit Slashdot. I am really disappointed with you Mozilla/Firefox. This does not make it any better.

Posted on 6:18 PM / 0 comments / Read More

American Airlines Resume Doing Business Together Effective Immediately

Earlier in January, we heard that American Airlines’ fares and links were removed completely from travel bookings site Expedia, after the two companies failed to come to a distribution agreement. Today, American Airlines and Expedia have made peace, announcing a new ” memorandum of understanding” that will allow the companies to resume doing business together effective immediately.

Financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but clearly, the airline and travel site were able to come to a mutual agreement that suited their interests financially. American had a similar issue with travel search site Orbitz, and also removed its listings in late December 2010.

American itself has been trying to build up its own bookings site, and industry insiders thought that the airline was planning to adopt Southwest’s model of offering fares and booking solely through its site. As Airfare Watchdog reported earlier this year, the benefit of having consumers buy their flights on AA.com is that the airline makes money from the extra upgrades, including seat upgrades, insurance products, vacation packages, and hotel and car reservations.

While American didn’t expect a significant drop in sales from removing fares from Expedia, the fact that the two companies eventually reached an agreement makes me wonder if there was a financial impact for the airline after all. American also recently signed a distribution deal.

Posted on 5:57 PM / 0 comments / Read More

Yelp Increasing Their User From 50 Million A Month To 17 Reviews

Over the last couple years, there’s been a huge surge in the suite of online services referred to collectively as ‘local’. There’s Facebook Places, which prompts users to check-in and claim deals. There’s Google Places, which recently launched its own check-in feature and also aggregates reviews from a variety of online service. And of course there’s Foursquare, which popularized the check-in model in the first place and recently launched a new Explore feature.

But despite all of this new competition, Yelp — which has been focused on local since 2004 — is still growing at a clip pace. Today the company has surpassed 50 million monthly unique users (as reported by their internal Google Analytics), up from 46 million the month before. And they have a total of 17 million reviews for venues around the world. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says that the service is seeing a faster rate of growth for both contributions (reviews) and users than it has historically— in Q1, users wrote 2 million reviews, while most quarters average 1 million. In other words, even if some of these other services are gaining traction, it isn’t hurting Yelp.

To compliment its directory of user-submitted reviews (and to compete more directly with the aforementioned services), the company has launched its own local deals product and check-ins, though it’s still best known for its local reviews.

On a related note, here’s a video Yelp just shot about its most recent Hackathon. And if you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to check out our tour of Yelp’s office on TC Cribs.

Posted on 5:51 PM / 0 comments / Read More

$6.5 Billion In Cash For Texaz Instrument Acquires national Semiconductor

Wow. Texas Instruments has signed an agreement to acquire fellow semiconductor manufacturer National Semiconductor for $6.5 billion, or $25 per share, in an all-cash deal. The boards of directors of both companies have unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected close in six to nine months.

Santa Clara-based National Semiconductor is a semiconductor manufacturer, specializing in analog devices and subsystems. The company’s products include power management circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions.

Texas Instrument’s Chairman and CEO Rich Templeton said in a release that the “acquisition is about strength and growth…National has an excellent development team, and its products combined with our own can offer customers an analog portfolio of unmatched depth and breadth.” He explains that the combination of TI’s sales team and National’s portfolio of analog products will help increase the joint company’s profitability and expand to additional markets.

Upon close of the transaction, National will become part of TI’s analog segment, and sales of analog semiconductors will represent almost 50 percent of TI’s revenue. TI will also continue to operate National’s manufacturing operations, located in Maine, Scotland and Malaysia.

Posted on 5:45 PM / 0 comments / Read More

All Will Be Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter

You all might have seen this trend of copying product ideas in technology products. Folks at The Joy of Tech has created a nice funny cartoon which shows Google’s founder Larry Page and Sergey brin talking about the latest Android to be similar to Apple products and then the recently released +1 button to compete with “Like” button from facebook. Similarly Facebook founder Mark Z. thinking about getting into search and the legend Steve Jobs thinking about getting a pie of Social networking with Ping and at last Bill Gates who says “They’ve all ended up being Microsoft”

Posted on 5:29 PM / 0 comments / Read More