For the past couple of months we have been working on a really exciting project. We are re-creating the Tiggzi app builder in HTML5 and JavaScript. The current version is pretty slick and many people ask us if that’s JavaScript, but all you need to do is to right-click and you will see that Tiggzi uses Flash/Flex.
District Court Judge Lucy Koh, who’s hearing the Apple v Samsung patent infringement case, warned the companies Wednesday of the risks they both face in letting the suit and countersuit go to the jury. The Wall Street Journal says she has urged their CEOs to speak by phone to resolve their differences before the jury starts deliberating.
With the sand draining out of the judge’s hourglass – Apple and Samsung are limited to 25 hours apiece in their patent infringement case in California – Samsung put two expert witnesses on the stand Thursday who testified that Apple could owe Samsung as much as $421.8 million in royalties if it’s found to infringe Samsung’s patents.
The Apple v. Samsung patent trial of the century has cooled off a bit since the hits poured out last week, but a few choice items continue to emerge from San Jose, California. Samsung argued earlier this week that whether or not its Galaxy tablets made use of Apple’s protected technology and designs, that IP [...]
The police caught the burglar who broke into Steve Jobs’ empty house in Palo Alto on July 17 and made off with Macs, Apple gadgets, Tiffany jewelry, champagne, a letter to Jobs, and even Steve’s wallet, which the AP says had his driver’s license and a dollar in it. The thief was reportedly apprehended because he connected a stolen iPad to Apple’s servers and reinstalled the operating system but not before he sold the jewelry to an online dealer in Pennsylvania that he had goggled.
Apple is apparently more reasonable than it lets on. Back in 2010 it offered Samsung a license. Apple estimates that it might have cost Samsung $288 million back then. Now it’s asking $2.5 billion and that’s just in the current case in California. FOSS Patents calls it “the most spectacular revelation of the ongoing trial.”
Eastman Kodak was hoping to garner $2.2 billion-$2.6 billion from its broadly licensed 1,100 patents to repay creditors and reorganize. It reportedly got opening bids of $150 million-$250 million from two consortia involving Google-RPX-Samsung-LG-HTC on the one hand and Apple-Microsoft-Intellectual Ventures on the other according to the Wall Street Journal. The bankruptcy court has thrown a cloak of invisibility over the process until a winner emerges but Kodak is reportedly unlikely to see more than $600 million. Of course there’s no telling where it could wind up although its prized patent was invalidated by the International Trade Commission last month.
On any given day, it’s not uncommon for a company to generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, pushing the amount of data that must be processed and managed to unimaginable levels. Because of the requirements for power and low-latency connections that such data growth entails, many companies have become more inclined to outsource their big data needs to colocation data center facilities. In turn, this has created a huge demand for colocation space as additional processing grounds for big data. According to analyst firm Nemertes, colocation providers will not have the available space to capitalize on approximately $869 million of market demand by 2015. This is with good reason, though, as colocation data centers offer huge benefits for big data, including high-density power, opportunities to decrease latency and a community of like-minded companies with which to cross-connect.
First thing Thursday morning a desperate, financially struggling Nokia said it was selling off Qt, the commercial and open source cross-platform development platform it acquired when it bought Trolltech in 2008 for upwards of $150 million. Actually the news came from Digia, the publicly owned Finnish software house that’s taking Qt off Nokia’s hands. It picked up the Qt (say cute) licensing business from Nokia last year and now it’s getting the technology and developers. Terms were not disclosed but it’s assumed Digia is paying nowhere near the $150 million originally spent on Trolltech to defend its own operating systems against the iPhone.
From the outside looking in on the so-called “trial of the century” – and bearing in mind that it’s only maybe halfway through – but Samsung looks royally screwed. It should have paid more attention when Google told it in 2010 that its tablets looked too much like iPads and should be made “noticeably different.” Apple’s got the Samsung e-mail saying so. It’s also got top designers’ formal evaluations telling Samsung the same thing about its phones. And better yet it’s got a seemingly damning 132-page “Relative Evaluation Report” – that Apple got admitted into evidence Tuesday over Samsung’s strenuous objections – showing the Korean company’s product engineering team dissecting every element of the iPhone in 2010 from packaging design to physical appearance to user interface to operating system architecture to browser, home screen and built-in apps and comparing it side-by-side with their original Galaxy S.
Apple has increased the amount of money it thinks Samsung owes it in damages for allegedly ripping off its iPhone and iPad widgetry. It’s gone from the $2.5 billion calculation of a week ago to $2.88 billion. Some 28 Samsung devices are accused of infringement. Its original Galaxy S smartphone is the biggest offender. Only about $80 million derives from Samsung’s tablets.
Apple is in talks to acquire Pinterest rival, The Fancy, according to Business Insider. The fast-growing social e-commerce site is backed by Twitter creator and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. The 20-man start-up calls itself “part store, blog, magazine, and wishlist” and actually has things for sale. Business Insider says it is “much farther along in linking its users to transactions” than Pinterest and takes 10% of any purchases. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who’s not the type, started using the site after meeting its CEO Joe Einhorn at the Allen & Co Sun Valley conference earlier this year. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also taken a fancy to it, so to speak. The Fancy raised $10 million on a reported $100 million valuation last fall on top of the $8.7 million it previously got.
A slip by Samsung’s lawyer gave Apple the chance to introduce evidence into the patent infringement trial in San Francisco that Samsung wanted suppressed, evidence culled from Samsung’s own documents that Apple hinted it had before the trial began last week. According to an internal e-mail by JK Shin, Samsung’s head of mobile communications, the advent of the iPhone in 2007 created a “crisis in design” for the Korean company. “Influential figures outside the company come across the iPhone, and they point out that ‘Samsung is dozing off.’ All this time we’ve been paying all our attention to Nokia, and concentrated our efforts on things like Folder, Bar, Slide,” Shin wrote. “Yet when our UX [user experience] is compared to the unexpected competitor Apple’s iPhone, the difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth. It’s a crisis of design.”
Apple’s beef with Google and Android has pushed it to drop YouTube in the test versions of iOS 6 for iPhone and iPad due out this fall. Apple released a statement Monday saying that “our license to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended; customers can use YouTube in the Safari browser and Google is working on a new YouTube app to be on the app store.”
Apple just got in touch with us regarding the removal of the YouTube app in the latest beta of iOS 6, and while it wouldn’t say much, it did confirm the obvious: it’s not there for a reason. The licensing deal it had with Google “has ended, but users can still use YouTube via the Safari web app.” The company did affirm, however, that Google “is working” on another version — presumably a standalone app that’ll have to survive the same App Store approval process as Google Drive, Gmail for iOS and the rest of the bunch.
If Apple gets its way it’ll win its high-profile patent infringement case against Samsung in San Francisco without there being much of a trial. They’ll go directly to the damages. It wants Samsung punished for attempting to influence a seated jury with a ruling from the bench that “Apple’s asserted phone-design patent claims are valid and infringed by Samsung.” “At a minimum,” it says “the Court should (i) instruct the jury that Samsung engaged in serious misconduct and that, as a result, the Court has made a finding that Samsung copied the asserted designs and features from Apple products; and (ii) preclude Samsung from further mentioning or proffering any evidence regarding the ‘Sony design exercise’ for any purpose.
On Thursday, Sharp’s new president, Takashi Okuda, said that his company will begin shipping iPhone displays starting this month, according to a report from Reuters. Okuda made the statement at a press event following the release of Sharp’s quarterly earnings report. Sharp’s president didn’t make note of the display’s size, but Reuters reports that the screens are destined for the next version of the iPhone. “People are expecting a new iteration of the iPhone to hit the market sometime in the September-October time frame, so this kind of comment fits in to what we’ve been hearing in the market, generally,” IHS analyst Vinita Jakhanwal told Wired.
If you look over at TechCrunch today, they have an interesting article on how the largest carrier in Russia is fighting with Apple to get a reasonably priced iPhone for their market. Current smartphone penetration in Russia is only estimated at 15%; however, that number is expected to jump to 60% by 2014. According to the TechCrunch article, the VP of strategy and corporate development of OAOMobile TeleSystems (MTS), Michael Hecker, believes a price reduction would help Apple take advantage of the huge vacuum of smartphones in emerging markets. iPhones can cost up to $1000 in the Russian market, a completely ridiculous price. The argument from Tim Cook, Apple CEO is that, he: ”firmly believe[s] that people in the emerging markets want great products like they do in developed markets. The goal is to make the very best product, and that’s more important and overshadows all other things.”
So far this year, I have been on a few travels and presented to many hundreds of people interested in Mobile in the Enterprise and what SAP are doing to make the development and deployment of Enterprise Mobile Apps easier. On one trip to Slovenia I became my alter-ego of the Mobile President to address the 380+ strong attendees on the "State of The Mobile Union" in the building that Slovenia built, when they became the head of the EU for a while. I covered a number of subjects during the 40 minutes presentation which you may find interesting and the whole presentation was filmed by SAP Slovenia and is available for your viewing pleasure at ...
To recap quickly, in the first article we discussed the fact that 2012 is THE year for apps and how those who put on their ‘Appreneur’ hats on & take action will find success. Then in the second article, we talked about a theory that we referred to as 3D Internet that follows what we call ‘the deep then wide method;’ through mobile apps, mobile devices are taking Google’s ‘wide then deep method’ of “searching” and flipping it! Apps allow for us to go deep and straight to the source and then go wide to find even more valuable content! In the last article, we talked about one of the hottest topics in business right now and that’s behavioral analytics a.k.a the main reason Facebook acquired Instagram.
Wall Street and the press are clinging hopefully to an iMore blog rumor – that some like Reuters and Bloomberg checked with their own Apple sources – saying Apple will introduce a major product – presumably either the iPhone 5 or the supposed unconfirmed seven-inch iPad mini – or even both – on Wednesday September 12. Naturally there could some time shifting. Unlike its timeless predecessors, the iPhone 5 is expected to be thinner, have a bigger four-inch screen and work on LTE wireless networks. It would reportedly be available nine days later on Friday September 21. There could also a new iPad Nano.
Apple has quietly offered to buy publicly held AuthenTec Inc for roughly $356 million, according to an SEC filing discovered last Friday. Fourteen-year-old AuthenTec does sensor-based fingerprint authentication, encryption and identity management for mobile devices. Two weeks ago AuthenTec signed up Samsung, which Apple is suing for patent infringement, to use its VPN widgetry in its new Android-based Galaxy smartphones and tablets. There was speculation the alliance provoked Apple to act.
Photographs of what could be Apple’s next iPhone surfaced Sunday, giving impatient iPhone fans an idea of what Apple could be unveiling sometime during the next few months. Maybe. Possibly. It all depends on whether the parts are actually from Apple. Chinese-language repair site iLab.cc reports it assembled an iPhone 5 using individual parts that [...]
I distinctly remember marveling that a bankrupt Chinese company dragging around at least $400 million in debt owed to Chinese banks was able to afford lawyers to sue Apple when it lodged a short-lived suit against Apple in America. Well, according to a Google translation of a Chinese-language story in Sina Tech, Grandall, the Chinese law firm, was fronting Proview Shenzhen’s expenses and now it’s suing Proview in China for a piece of the $60 million Apple agreed to pay to get clear ownership of the iPad trademark in China that Proview contested. Apple, of course, claimed it had already paid for the privilege.
Dear, dear, dear, dear. Five days before the great Apple patent trial starts Monday – a trial Apple has got to win – Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal sanctioned Apple’s opponent Samsung for destroying evidence. It seems Samsung didn’t preserve e-mail and meeting notes ahead of the litigation like it was supposed to. The rules say when you’re “reasonably” sure you’re gonna get sued you have to keep all the relevant evidence for discovery. Samsung’s been down this road before so it knows the rules. And it was probably pretty sure what would happen after Steve Jobs and Tim Cook appeared on its doorstep in August of 2010 complaining about infringement.