After lodging upwards of 50 infringement suits around the world against Apple, Samsung finally won one in Holland. The District Court of The Hague found that Apple trespassed on a FRAND-promised 3G patent of Samsung’s and ordered Apple to pay unspecified damages limited to the Dutch market and unlikely to be near the 2.4% rate Samsung wants. During the process three other Samsung 3G/UMTS-essential patents were thrown out. The Koreans wanted to get iPads and iPhones enjoined – probably to get Apple to cut a worldwide settlement – but that gambit failed.
In a previous article I mentioned the Companion App. Basically a Companion App is one that extends the reach of an existing brand, even a brand that could be a TV/Film or a non-mobile system. I have stated my opinion before that if you are a brand, then you have got to have a app store presence with a mobile app. This is mostly due to consumer expectations or even internal pressure to keep ahead of your immediate competition. That presence in turn reflects on your company and the perceived way you do business with the mobile majority whether they be internal worker (Information Worker), external consumers or partners.
I was recently asked how to calculate the ROI after implementing a Mobile App and immediately thought of the less tangible part Prosumer Satisfaction. I have mentioned in a previous article that to aid creation of Mobile Apps that the Enterprise needs, companies should be putting in place a regularly meeting group of specialized individuals... the MIC (Mobility Innovation Council). As a recap think of the MIC is an incubator/ideas lab powered by the CMoO (Chief Mobility Officer) along with the architects, developers and most importantly key stakeholders from the business users, aka Prosumers!
When did you last hear Apple being sued for issuing ads that were “fundamentally and designedly false and misleading”? That is what happened to SIRI which is the first major innovation coming from “post-Steve Jobs” Apple. Suit filed by Frank Fazio alleges that Apple is in violation of the Consumers Legal Remedies Act, California’s Unfair Competition Law, is in breach of warranty, and has committed both intentional and negligent misrepresentation. (Apple has filed its motion to dismiss the consolidated class action complaints.)
Building innovative Enterprise Mobile Apps starts with a great idea from your MIC (Mobility Innovation Council), which in turn is made up of key a Business Users and Stakeholders - think of the MIC as an ideas factory. These seeds of an idea should then be formed into an ADS (Application Definition Statement) of a mobile application that will ensure the secure delivery of Enterprise Content to the Information Worker Where and When they need it! The key point is that the mobile app you need to build should ensure that the mobile user has access to the important information they need regardless of the location, even if that location has NO access to cellular or wireless networks!
In a traditional modern enterprise, information can be a key factor in delaying business process control, as people who own information can own control over the process. Mobility is challenging this traditional process control hierarchy by making it easier for decision makers (this means decision makers at all levels of an organization) to have direct, un-delayed access to information. This means control will move away from executive levels and closer to the people who are hands-on with customers, processes and products... The Information Workers. Already more mobilized employees (and even customers) spend less time going through a hierarchical structure to “get” information, they need it immediately. Mobile information consumers find their own paths to the information they need. But will corporate authority structures allow this to happen? In a word, YES!.. Ricoh UK earlier this year completed a study which shows that nearly two thirds of business leaders in their market expect just such an evolution in decision making.
When finance managers think of data consumption, it is often in the context of controlling mobile phone bills and business mobility costs. Yet application developers are busily creating new mobile applications that provide mobile information workers with greater access to corporate data, in more innovative ways than before. Many of these applications also collect standard data, as well as new forms of data and feed it back to corporate information systems. Recently I happened upon this remarkable statistic.
Apple has gone back to the International Trade Commission with a fresh complaint that claims the HTC workaround that let its Android widgets clear US customs is a bunch of baloney and that HTC is still infringing Apple’s data tapping patent. The ITC enjoined some HTC imports into the US effective April 16 and customs seized a couple of shipments until it was persuaded HTC had changed the code in two new phones.
The powerful mobile computing platforms of today 'SmartPhones' have so little in common with “phones” of yesteryear and in fact with the introduction of Tablet Devices into the mix, we should start calling them Converged Mobile Devices. While processor, battery and software technologies have taken leaps forward over the past couple of years, there is still one thing small mobile devices can’t be. Big. And herein lies the rub, because a lot of the perceived limitations imposed by form factor are really just side effects of trying to make CMD's act like little tiny laptops. Leveraging speech recognition in mobile business applications could be one way to enhance the power and functionality of mobile devices.
Memorial Day is the official start of summer and the weekend that many people travel for vacation. If you are planning to drive on a trip from some rest and relaxation, be sure to check out these iPhone apps. For people who hit the road without many plans, there are several apps to help you find hotels. Kayak is an app that compares the prices of hotels at different travel sites to ensure you get the best deal. The Priceline app is a way to get a deal on a hotel room by naming your own price. Priceline also offers a Tonight-Only Deal with savings up to 40% for all you folks who don’t know where you’ll be one night to the next. Wondering if that hotel is going to be as nice as the pictures? Use TripAdvisor to find out from other reviewers if you’re staying in nice place or a dump.
A product that Steve Jobs would never agree during his time as CEO, a smaller iPad, also called iPad Mini is on the tide of the hot rumor. It is said that this 7.85-inch iPad Mini will be released this fall.
Shipments of two new HTC smartphones have been seized for inspection by US Customs because of the limited import ban Apple got from the International Trade Commission in mid-December. HTC was found to have infringed an Apple patent on “data tapping.” That’s when you, say, tap on a phone number and the dingus dials it for you. The Taiwan company wouldn’t be in this predicament if it had followed through on its initial decision to just rip the functionality out. Instead it ultimately decided on a workaround and the customs people are checking to see if it’s abiding by the rules. That means that the HTC One X that AT&T just started selling out of shipments that beat the ban’s April 19 enforcement date is now listed as “out of stock” and the HTC Evo 4G LTE that Sprint was to start selling this Friday has been put on hold. Sprint is taking pre-orders.
Hmm, apparently Samsung has pushed one too many of Apple’s buttons. According to DigiTimes Apple has bought up half of Elpida Memory’s total chip production of mobile DRAM rather than give the iPad and iPhone order to Samsung, its largest supplier, accused of ripping off its technology in courts throughout the world. Reuters said the report – citing unnamed industry sources – cost Samsung, the world’s biggest DRAM factory, $10 billion worth of market cap on Wednesday. Hynix also took a hit.
Apple plans to use a larger screen on the next-generation iPhone and has begun to place orders for the new displays from suppliers in South Korea and Japan, people familiar with the situation said on Wednesday. The new iPhone screens will measure 4 inches from corner to corner, one source said. Read the full [...]
Apple is readying a brand-new, 15-inch MacBook Pro that will sport an ultra-thin design, a higher-resolution Retina display, and USB 3.0 ports, according to a new report.Citing unnamed supply chain sources, 9 to 5Mac said the updated laptop is currently in test production, and is slated to come out this summer. Read the full story [...]
Far from the first time Apple’s Siri has made headlines, new reports have suggested that asking the voice commanded service the seemingly self evident question “What is the best smartphone ever” has seen a number of surprising answers. Read the full story at T3.
A California Superior Court last Friday threw out Proview Electronics’ three-month-old infringement suit against Apple over the iPad trademark. The dismissal only came to light the other day. Proview claimed Apple duped it when Apple bought the iPad trademarks from it in 2009 for $55,000 because it didn’t disclose who its middleman was working for. The trademark was reportedly registered in 10 countries. Proview wanted the 2009 deal set aside and Apple stopped from using the iPad name. Proview Electronics is the Taiwanese subsidiary of Proview International Holdings, and a sister firm of the Chinese Proview that sued Apple in Mainland China claiming to still own the mark. In probably the kindest rendition of the facts the Taiwan company apparently sold Apple the Chinese trademark without authorization. Apple claims it reneged.
Apple has just released iOS 5.1.1 update for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. This update fixes a number of bugs, including a particular annoying one affecting the iPad 3 which resulted users losing access to their cellular data connection until they rebooted their tablet. Read the full story at ZDNet
Apple has made an offer to resolve the imbroglio over the Chinese iPad trademark according to Roger Xie, a lawyer representing the Proview Technology (Shenzhen), the bankrupt company that claims the mark wasn’t included in the rights Apple acquired from a sister company in 2009. Whatever amount Apple’s offered it apparently isn’t enough to satisfy Proview, which owes $400 million to Chinese banks. Apple has been under pressure from a Chinese appeals court to settle but has been reluctant to sit down. It is believed the court could uphold a lower court’s decision that Proview owns the trademark.
In my last post, I discussed how 2012 is the golden year for apps. And how many missed the boat when the Internet was the hot spot, and how many are seeing the opportunity that mobile apps are presenting now. I shared the prediction that I made in December 2011 that ‘by the end of 2012, app users will start to become app creators,’ and well, it’s already happening. It’s easy, fun, and profitable for almost anyone to make an app. Today, I would like to go beyond the app prediction that’s coming true as we speak, and discuss a theory with you. A theory that could be referred to as 3D Internet that follows what we could call ‘the deep then wide method.’
Mobile management and security vendor Good released its quarterly device activations report. The report states that iOS dominate Android four to one in the enterprise. This is in spite of Android devices having an equal or slightly larger market share compared to iPhone. Is it because iPhone is much better tailored for enterprise need? That is not a likely reason. If you do a feature comparison between iOS and Android the difference will only be marginal, not enough to account for such a large difference. To understand why it is so, we need to understand how enterprise manages new technology.
The Guangdong High Court in southern China that heard Apple’s appeal of a lower court decision awarding ownership of the iPad trademark in China to Proview Technology (Shenzhen), the financially desperate Chinese display maker that ostensibly sold Apple the trademark, is now reportedly trying to mediate a settlement between the two. Despite claims to the contrary, it’s unclear whether Apple is actually considering settling knowing full well it’s expected to buy its way out of a predicament it believes it’s on the right side of for some sky-high sum. Apple won’t say anything about it while Proview booster Ma Dongxiao, its chatty public-facing lawyer, claimed last week that “I don’t know if Apple has changed its attitude, but I believe that the key point now is the price.” (Yes, well then Apple’s attitude would have to have changed now wouldn’t it.)
One of the really nice features we released in Tiggzi Mobile App Builder in April is the option to get iOS binary file for your app (similar to PhoneGap Build). Now you can create your mobile app in Tiggzi and instantly build the iOS binary file (or Android).
After the bears lopped $70 billion off of Apple’s value in the last few days, the company went bear hunting Tuesday crushing estimates. Net profits in the March quarter were up 94% year-over-year to $11.6 billion returning $12.30 a share compared to estimates of $10.04 on revenues of $39.28 billion against projections of $36.81 billion. Apple sold a completely unexpected 35.1 million iPhones, up 88% and only two million short of Christmas, plus 11.8 million iPads – up 151% even though the new one was only released mid-quarter – and even a respectable 7.7 million iPods, down 15%. Macs, another spot that had the bears worried, were good for four million units, up 7% and in line with estimates, although Apple admitted they suffered iPad cannibalization. International sales accounted for 64% of revenue.
Right after agreeing at the court’s, um, insistence to sit down and parlay with Apple about settling, Samsung up and filed a countersuit claiming Apple’s iPhone infringes eight Samsung patents including a couple that are supposed to be standards-essential and FRAND-protected. (The European Commission, which is investigating Samsung for FRAND abuse, ain’t gonna like that.) The Samsung suit, which comes under the jurisdiction of the very same judge that’s having them try to settle with Apple, is a response to an Apple suit, filed in February, seeking to get Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus phone banned in the United States. FOSS Patents says, “So far, none of Samsung’s infringement claims against Apple has succeeded anywhere on Earth, despite efforts in nine different countries, but Samsung keeps on fighting.” The blog also thinks it’s not smart to provoke the EC.