This graphic from Thomson Reuters shows just who is suing whom in our current patent wars.

Thomson Reuters Corporation (NYSE:TRI)? has announced tonight that they have acquired GeneGo. GeneGo is a San Diego based company with offices in Moscow and Michigan that provides biology and disease information and analytics to pharmaceutical companies for research and development purposes. GeneGo will be integrated into Thomson Reuters’ Healthcare & Science business. GeneGo’s flagship product is called MetaBase, which is a knowledge base of all GeneGo’s products.

Thomson Reuters Corporation (NYSE:TRI) has bought Highline Financial. Highline is a website that provides analytics about banking trends. Reuters has been working on building its subscription business with traders and investment banks. Reuters plans to integrate Highline’s database information and tools into their Eikos system. [paidContent]

Thomson Reuters Corporation (TSX:TRI) has acquired Discovery Logic, Inc. Discovery Logic Inc. is a company that mines data for major clients. Discovery Logic takes databases and connects them in order to put together trends and measures performance. Thomson did not announce the financial details of the acquisition. Discovery Logic designs a line of software products called ScienceWire. ScienceWire uses algorithms to search through information on databases. Below is the full press release of the acquisition:

Intel Corporation has exceeded the Wall Street forecasts for the third quarter.  The reason why is because of strong demand for their chips.  This is good news for the economy considering Intel is the biggest chip company in the world.  This indicates the economy as a whole is strengthening in the tech sector.

Intel expects sales for the quarter to be roughly $8.8 billion to $9.2 billion.  Thomson Reuters analysts expected Intel’s Q3 revenues to be about $8.55 billion.  Intel themselves were surprised by their revenues because they expected the economic downtown to drastically affect business.

Dell, the second largest PC manufacturing company also expects to have a solid year.  “There are a lot of moving pieces in the PC industry as we prepare for a new operating system from Microsoft,” stated Doug Freedman, an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech in an interview with The New York Times.

The Chairman of The Associated Press said that he is “mad as hell” about those who “walk off with our work.”  Unlike The Associated Press, rival Thomson Reuters embraces blogs.  At least according Thomson Reuters’ President of the Media Group Chris Ahearn.

In a Reuters guest column written by Ahearn, the executive wrote: “To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting ‘resources’ (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.”

I applaud Ahearn for embracing blogs.  The barriers to entry for online journalism are decreasing.  And the First Amendment backs them up.  Threatening to sue those that use the words of an Associated Press article may not be the best business strategy according to the Reuters exec.

“Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.”

Ahearn said that a better approach to handling borrowing one another’s content is by giving credit where it is deserved.  When I quote from the Associated Press, I personally link to their articles and report that the AP deserves credit.  Does the AP always give credit back?  No.

Here is a news story about former Facebook application Scrabulous being renamed Wordscraper by the Associated Press.  Who broke the story?  Pulse2.  Who are the ones that gave us credit? Mashable and Ars Technica.  Who didn’t give us credit?  The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.  Treat those how you would like to be treated, Associated Press.

Last year Thomson Reuters filed a lawsuit against Virginia’s George Mason University.  George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media had created a bibliography software called Zotero and Thomson Reuters believed that they violated copyright as a result.  George Mason had supposedly reverse engineered Thomson Reuters’ bibliography software called EndNote.

Zotero has the ability to open files using EndNote and save them as open formats.  Thomson Reuters’ license agreement prohibits software from having that sort of functionality.  Thomson Reuters was asking for $10 million in damages as a result.  A few days ago the lawsuit was dismissed by a Virginia Circuit Court judge.

Zotero works as a Mozilla Firefox plug-in that enabled people to store and organize research.  It has been downloaded over one million times since last September.  George Mason University said that they had no renewed a license for EndNote and will not make any changes to the software.

[via TechDirt]

Thomson Reuters is announcing tomorrow that they are launching a video-on-demand (VOD) service for financial service clients.  Clients will be able to search for thousands of videos and transcripts from Thomson Reuters’ archives.

“We’ve created something completely new here,” stated Devin Wenig of Thomson Reuters. “This is meant for the 550,000 financial professionals who have a Thomson Reuters screen on their desks.”

Thomson Reuters is not creating the service to compete head-on with CNBC or Bloomberg TV, but rather to make their financial services more attractive.  Each video will have a transcript and clicking on a portion of the transcript will automatically fast-forward to that portion of the video.  A number of clients have already signed on for the video service including Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Argus Research.

[via NYT]