The Motorola CLIQ is powered by the Google Android operating system and has a heavy focus on social networking features. The device will be available on pre-order between October 19 and November 1. The cost is $200 and voice plans start at $30 per month. The data plan will cost an additional $25 per month. The company dubbed the CLIQ as the “first phone with social skills.”
Uniloc Corporation is a security and copy protection software company that filed a lawsuit against Microsoft worth about $388 million. Uniloc claimed that Microsoft was violating a patent held by the security company. Judge William Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island overturned a ruling by a jury that decided Microsoft did not have the rights to use their intellectual property.
“We are pleased that the court has vacated the jury verdict and entered judgment in favor of Microsoft,” reported Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz in a statement. This case has dragged on for about six years and went through several courts. Uniloc said that Microsoft used their patented technology for software activation. The patent in question is #5,490,216. Below is a process chart of how the patent works.
Uniloc CEO Brad Davis said that the company plans to appeal the case again. “We are disappointed by the decision the trial judge has made to overturn the jury’s unanimous verdict in Uniloc’s patent infringement case against Microsoft,” stated Davis in an interview with seattlepi.com. “We believe that the jury’s verdict in April was thoughtful, well reasoned and supported by the evidence presented. Since the patent status remains unchanged, Uniloc will continue to protect its intellectual property and appeal the Judge’s decision to override the jury’s verdict to the US Court of Appeals. We are confident that Uniloc will ultimately prevail.”
Earlier this week Google invited 100,000 people including many developers into the testing phase of Google Wave. Anyone that has an invitation to Google Wave can invite 5 people to the service. Google Wave starts with four modules.
The module at the top left is the navigation, the module at the bottom left is the contacts, the module in the middle are archived messages and e-mails, and the module on the right is real-time collaboration like IM, video-conferencing and document-sharing. Some of the extensions already made for Google Wave include Ribbit, Lab Pixies for Sudoku puzzles, Lonely Planet, and AccuWeather. SAP, Salesforce.com, and MediaWikiWave have developed prototypes using Google Wave for their respective software.
Google Wave was developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen. This is the team behind Google Maps too. A Google spokesperson said that Wave is “how email would look if it was invented today” in an interview. “It would be collaborative and there would be no barriers between live instant messaging, email and documents and so on.”
The Walt Disney Company bought ClubPenguin, a kids social network in May. And now Disney is picking up on another trend, e-books. Disney is selling access to Digital Books for $8.95 per month. Kids can access about 500 Disney e-books including those in the Hannah Montana and Winnie the Pooh series. The e-book reader works on browsers and the books have animated illustrations including authentic character voices.
“Plusmo’s technology will help us build upon the success and momentum we’re experiencing in mobile local search, which continues to see strong growth,” stated AT&T Interactive CEO and President David Krantz. “The addition of Plusmo adds a new dimension to our technology prowess through its multi-platform approach. It highlights our commitment to invest in mobile application innovation and search leadership.”
AT&T announced today that they will be acquiring Plusmo, a mobile applications company that receives about 100 million monthly pageviews. The company makes mobile applications for the iPhone, Google Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Java/J2ME, and Windows Mobile. Plusmo will become a subsidiary of AT&T Interactive. The financial details were undisclosed.
Plusmo’s mobile platform decreases the development time for building widgets and applications. Plusmo uses web development standards across different mobile operating systems. Plusmo also has several sports applications such as soccer, football, cricket, etc. Plusmo was started by Krishna Vedati and Srinivas Mandyam. New Enterprise Associates invested $4.41 million into Plusmo around May 2008.
Back in February of this year, I wrote about how four Google executives are being taken to court for a video being uploaded of a teenager with Down’s Syndrome. Google claims that they have not committed any crime and I definitely agree with them. When you launch a website that depends primarily on user-generated content, then you should not be responsible for videos unless the community flags them. The video of a teenager with Down’s Syndrome being bullied by four students slipped through the cracks.
The Google employees on trial are David Drummond (SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer), George De Los Reyes (board member) , Peter Fleischer (Global Privacy Counsel), and Arvind Desikan (Google Video Marketing). The video was uploaded shortly before Google acquired YouTube. And then the video stayed for a few months before Google was notified about the objectionable content. As soon as Google found out about the video clip, they removed it.
Google also provided the information of the user that uploaded it. The four students ended up being expelled from their school in Northern Italy. The actual victim withdrew from the lawsuit, but a Down’s Syndrome advocacy group called Vividown decided to pursue the case. A verdict is not expected to be made until this December.
When Manoj Gupta walked into the Apple store in the SoHo area of New York, he did not expect the employees at the Genius Bar to tell him that his phone is acting normally. Gupta came in to find out why his iPhone was dropping so many calls. It turns out that the average iPhone user in New York was seeing a 30% dropped call rate, while Gupta’s iPhone was seeing about a 22% dropped call rate.
The Genius Bar at the Apple store found out how Gupta’s iPhone was performing by doing a stat dump. Since Gupta’s phone was acting normally, they could not really do much to fix his phone. AT&T does plan on launching a service to improve the wireless service within a household or office by using 3G micro cells, but improving the overall service around the country will take the telecommunications company some time.
Essentially what this means for iPhone users in New York is that you are getting the shaft. However AT&T does plan to add wireless spectrum to the Big Apple as announced earlier this month. If you live in New York and have an iPhone, please let us know what you think in the comments section of this post.
JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan estimates that AOL is worth $4.2 billion. As you know, AOL is preparing to spin off from parent company Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX). When Google bought a 5% stake in AOL back in 2005, the valuation of AOL was estimated to be about $5.5 billion.
To make Khan’s estimates even credible, Rich Greenfield of Pali Capital pegged AOL’s valuation to be around $4 billion also. The valuation is based on the following estimates by JP Morgan.
Sedo.com is a website where people can sell their domain names. AdLINK Group, the parent company behind Sedo purchased the 24.06% remaining shares in Sedo recently. Those shares were purchased for 5.5 million Euros and 4.25 million shares of AdLINK stock. Based on the valuation of AdLINK’s stock and the cash given for the remaining shares, that puts Sedo at a $130 million valuation.
Tim Schumacher, a Managing Director at Sedo will become the CEO of AdLINK as a result of the acquisition. AdLINK also plans to change their name in 2010. AdLINK’s revenues for the first half of 2009 was 102.1 million Euros. This was a 10.3% drop from the previous year during the same time period. Sedo also saw a drop in revenues due to less domain names being submitted. However Sedo’s number of registered users grew to 894,000.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has hired Michael Tchao as the VP of Product Marketing. Tchao was one of the original developers of the Apple Newton PDA. Tchao joined Apple this past Monday as the VP of product marketing. Tchao will be reporting to Apple SVP Phil Schiller. Tchao joins Apple after leaving about 15 years.
Tchao’s most recent job was at the Nike Techlab as the general manager. Nike Techlab designs armbands and sneakers for the iPod. It is uncertain what Tchao will be working on specifically at Apple. Tchao had convinced former Apple CEO John Sculley to make the Newton a consumer device. After that device failed to take off, Tchao parted ways with the company. “He’s got the scars and the great ideas,” stated a former Apple employee in an interview with The New York Times.
This may indicate that Apple is making a tablet computer after all. An Apple tablet with App Store download capabilities would be awesome.
NewEgg.com is an online retail company that sells electronics such as digital cameras, cell phones, and laptops. The company plans to file for an IPO and raised roughly $175 million in the process. NewEgg.com started in 2001 and made about $2.2 billion in revenues last year. Insight Venture Partners invested $20 million in NewEgg.com around 2005. Insight Venture Partners has a 12.7% stake in NewEgg.
Newegg.com Inc. is based in City of Industry, California. Newegg was founded by Fred Chang and the company is run by CEO Tally C. Liu. When NewEgg.com was founded, it was a subsidiary of ABS Computer Technologies Inc. NewEgg has about 1,500 employees. The funds raised will be used to fund operations expansion in Canada and China. The company has even been profitable since they started in 2001. The IPO is being managed by JP Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Citi.
Xerox Corporation (NYSE:XRX) is getting into the IT consulting market by acquiring Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (NYSE:ACS) for $5.5 billion. The deal was made in cash and stock. This was one of the first major moves made by Ursula Burns, the current CEO of Xerox. This move is in direct competition with Dell’s recent acquisition of Perot Systems and HP’s acquisition of EDS.
After the acquisition was announced, Xerox’s shares fell 14.48% to $7.68. Xerox bought Global Imaging Services (GIS) for $1.5 billion in April 2007. Xerox has been able to efficiently integrate both companies together since then. So it is surprising that the stock price dropped.
Xerox has about $1 billion in cash and said that $3 billion of the deal will be financed through capital markets. If the deal ends up being terminated by Xerox, then ACS will be compensated $235 million. If ACS terminates the deal, Xerox will be paid $194 million.
This past summer, interns at Google designed an equation editor for Google Docs. This makes it easy to easily complete math problems and write papers. It also makes it easier to take notes while in class because symbols such as derivatives and fractions. Google Docs also has subscripts and superscripts for writing chemical compounds and algebraic expressions.
Google Docs has added several additional features too. The service now also has translations features. Either single words or entire documents can be translated. This makes it useful for writing foreign language essays. Anyone that wants to make surveys using Google Docs can create a “Go to page based on answer” option. This can also be used for making tests. If a person answers the question right, they can move on to the next question. Google Docs also added a footnotes and header notes function too.
The new features were announced by Google Docs Summer Interns Rita Chen and Stephanie Vezich on the official blog. Below is a video of the new feature.
“The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,” stated Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a press release. “The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.”
Apple has announced today that over 2 billion applications have been downloaded from the App Store. The App Store is currently the largest applications store in the world. There are about 85,000 applications available for download as of today and there are about 50 million iPhone and iPod Touch customers around the world. In the Apple iPhone Developer program, there are 125,000 (registered) developers.
As Peter Kafka points out, in the last 76 days Apple sold 500 million applications. On average, that is about 6.6 million downloads per day in the last 76 days. Between the 85,000 applications, it is estimated that Apple is making roughly $200 million per month. Since Apple keeps 30%, that means the company would be making $720 million per year just from the applications business.
