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Nice timing, Acacia Research Corporation. The mother of all patent trolls patent acquisition, development and licensing company, which was profiled in depth by BusinessWeek just two days ago, this morning announced that it has been awarded a total of $12.4 million in a patent infringement case against Yahoo.
On May 15th, 2009, a federal court jury decided that Yahoo's messenger program with IMVironments ¿ which revolves around interactive backgrounds that users can add to IM conversations ¿ infringes US Patent Number 6,205,432, filed by a trio of inventors and published back in 2001.
Category: Uncategorized Page 11 of 16
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It used to be that Twitter followers were worth something, or at least people thought they were worth something, which is the same thing. It was only about a year ago when Jason Calacanis was offering $250,000 to buy a spot on Twitter’s Suggested User List, which would have guaranteed him perhaps a million followers before Twitter ended up revamping the SUL to be less monolithic. He never got on the list, but if his offer would have come to roughly $0.25 per follower.
Today, you can “buy” followers on eBay for less than a penny each. Some of the Buy-It-Now listings include 5,000 followers for $20 (which comes to 0.4 penny/follower), $5,500 for $40 (0.7 penny/follower), $1,100 for $10 (0.9 penny/follower). You are not actually buying followers outright (Twitter doesn’t allow people to transfer their followers), but rather services which “guarantee” getting your account up to the promised number of followers through “proven and safe methods.” -
Users of Apple Inc.’s popular iPhone may now be able to save money by making Internet-based phone calls over AT&T Inc.’s cellular network.
Apple this week allowed new versions of several Voice over Internet Protocol services to begin working on the iPhone, according to those services. Previously, iPhone users needed a wireless Internet connection to make such calls, but the change will allow calls from anywhere that receives a strong enough 3G cellular signal.
By using VoIP applications to sidestep the phone’s normal calling software, iPhone owners could avoid using up their monthly allocation of minutes from AT&T, potentially allowing them to choose cheaper plans.
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Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.
In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt. -
As an online retailer, Web forms are your bread and butter. There’s no use putting effort into designing great product pages and getting your customers to the checkout with bulging shopping carts only to have them bail out because your checkout process sucks.
All businesses lose a percentage of customers during the checkout process; what percentage you lose depends on how badly your forms perform. Here are several ill-conceived practices that create bad checkout experiences — and how to avoid them.
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With the recent release of the Mojo software development kit, Palm is hoping to open the floodgates of application for its Palm Pre smartphone. But early impressions suggest webOS SDK won’t be as strong as Apple’s iPhone platform for high-end mobile gaming.
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It might seem an odd move for a company that relies on money from advertising. Yet AOL is reducing the number of ads it shows on its home page and some other Web sites it runs.
The maneuver is one of the changes new CEO Tim Armstrong, 38, has brought to the long-struggling Internet company since he took over AOL in April. The former Google Inc. executive was hired to recharge AOL and lead its spinoff from Time Warner Inc., undoing a legendarily disastrous deal.
To prepare for AOL’s rebirth as an independent company later in the year, Armstrong and other executives say they are trying to recapture elements of the culture AOL had when it was a startup — back when it was America Online and on its way to becoming the dominant provider of dial-up Internet access.
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After nearly eight months without a leader, the Tech Council of Maryland plans to announce Monday that it has tapped Renée M. Winsky, a current board member, as its new executive director.
Winsky, 46, spent the past nine years at the Maryland Technology Development Corp. — she has been president and executive director since 2007 — and has long been involved in the state's technology community. She previously worked at the Information Technology Association of America and the National League of Cities.
"I'm looking forward to getting back to my true association roots," she said last week. Winsky will start her new gig in September.
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It might seem an odd move for a company that relies on money from advertising. Yet AOL is reducing the number of ads it shows on its home page and some other Web sites it runs.
The maneuver is one of the changes new CEO Tim Armstrong, 38, has brought to the long-struggling Internet company since he took over AOL in April. The former Google Inc. executive was hired to recharge AOL and lead its spinoff from Time Warner Inc., undoing a legendarily disastrous deal.
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Nokia (NYSE: NOK) sold its Symbian Professional Services unit to Accenture for an undisclosed amount, the companies said Friday.
The unit handles product development and engineering consulting services for the Symbian operating system and its clients include cellular carriers, chip manufacturers, and handset makers. The 165 employees of the division will transfer to Accenture, and the deal is expected to close in September. -
On the Official Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Docs blog, Google posted an entry with the headline “Pardon our Dust.” This is Google’s way of saying that change is on the way, with a brand new interface due to appear on Google Docs in short order. Anything interesting? You betcha.
According to Google, the changes will take place over time, and not all at once. Google says that the small changes will be implemented over the coming weeks, with the final result being “a brand new shiny interface.” Oh, the rapture.
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A company that’s redesigning its Web site recently called me to discuss the possibility of my firm assisting them with their SEO efforts. First, I congratulated them on being one of the few companies to consider SEO prior to re-launching their site (that’s the way it’s done, people!). Then we talked about their domain name.
This company was planning to move their site to a new domain because the old domain (and by “old,” I mean 10 years old) no longer represented the company. As many of us do, they typed in about 100 different domain names into GoDaddy’s search and eventually found an available domain name that was more in line with their core business.
One problem: their domain name choice was absolutely horrible. It had five keywords crammed together. It was confusing, hard to recall, and terrible for branding, SEO purposes, and any other measurement that you wanted to put to it.
But, the domain name only cost $9.99 per year. What a deal, right? -
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Monday outlined a host of new features that will be included in its forthcoming Office 2010 home and business productivity suite. Not surprisingly, many are geared toward users steeped in Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other popular Web 2.0 tools.
For starters, Microsoft revealed that the Office 2010 release, slated for the first half of next year, will include free Web versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Office, and Notepad. The move is in keeping with the “Work anywhere” theme the company has attached to its new offering.
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As the recent financial crisis has showed so dramatically, networks exist everywhere. Global inter-linkage of loans and mortgages — which were intended to distribute risk — actually ended up spreading it far and wide. Similar network-based impacts are at work in fields as diverse as information security and supply chain management. But while networks create new risks, they also generate new opportunities, write Paul R. Kleindorfer, Yoram (Jerry) Wind and Robert E. Gunther in their new book, The Network Challenge: Strategy, Profit and Risk in an Interlinked World (Wharton School Publishing). In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Kleindorfer and Wind discuss the themes of many of the 28 essays in their book.
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In What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen (Wharton School Publishing), author Michael A. Roberto aims to help leaders identify problems before they become major disasters. He discusses why problems go undetected for so long, how to spot patterns across an organization and how to avoid the “isolation trap” that prevents senior executives from seeing problems that are festering beyond their control, among other topics. Roberto, a management professor at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., wrote an earlier book entitled, Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer. Below is an excerpt from a chapter in his current book.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
— Shunryu Suzuki, Japanese Zen priest
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UnitedHealth Group and Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) Wednesday announced they're launching a multi-million dollar initiative to build a national telehealth network. Although the initial focus is on patients in rural and inner city communities, the companies envision providing a platform for delivering health services wherever distance or shortages of clinicians present obstacles to affordable care.
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While Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch is drawing a lot of attention in the application space, GetJar said Wednesday its mobile store has surpassed over a half billion downloads.
The company offers an independent over-the-air app store that enables users to browse, buy, download, and install programs onto a variety of handsets including smartphones and feature phones. The company offers more than 50,000 apps in over 200 countries, and GetJar has been chosen to handle the backend for Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson's upcoming app store.
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Google just announced that Tasks will be the first feature to graduate from Gmail Labs to become a default feature for all Gmail users.
Gmail Labs, which launched about a year ago, holds a collection of experimental additions to Gmail that users can try out by enabling them within their Gmail’s settings. It also provides an interesting window into Google’s application development philosophy.
Tasks provides a to-do list within Gmail optimized for mobile access and integration with Google Calendar. Senior product manager Keith Coleman says the decision to add it to the main product was partly based on how many users had signed up to try it, and how many have continued to use it. Coleman adds that a handful of other Labs experiments will likely graduate in the near future. -
Gmail has had Gmail Labs for a while now. Gmail Labs are a great place to try out experimental Gmail features if you are so inclined. The mad scientists who are Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s engineers have cooked up an entirely new set of Labs, this time for the Google Calendar.
Google says it has been pleased with the response its Labs has seen in Gmail. There are tons of features in Gmail Labs for users to test out. I have quite a handful activated that have become essential to my Gmail experience.