Patent lawsuits are burying companies and technologists in expenses. In contrast, the cost for the patent trolls is relatively minimal — even if their case loses.
In a GigaOM guest post, Twitter legal counsel Ben Lee writes, “meritless lawsuits cost us money in attorney fees, and force our engineers to spend time with lawyers rather than improving our product.”
He talks about a recent patent litigation where a patent lawyer fought Twitter over a “patent issued by the Patent Office with a near-zero cost-of-invention.”
“When you hear engineers complaining that the patent system is broken, a system that last year issued a record-breaking 247,000 new patents, this is the type of thing they are talking about,” Lee writes.
“According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s 2011 survey, an average patent lawsuit costs between $900,000 to $6,000,000 to defend,” he continues. “In the last month and a half alone, Twitter has received three new patent troll lawsuits. The law currently does not allow us to recover the millions of dollars in fees we spent to defend ourselves — nor does it compensate us for the time spent by many Twitter employees who worked on the case. The law only allows us to ask for certain types of minor fees, which is why the court was only able to order this particular patent troll to pay us $10,447.85.”
These costs do not include settlement fees. As Lee points out, Twitter has never agreed to settle a patent lawsuit.
He concludes by advocating for Congressional bills like the SHIELD Act that aim to improve the current patent system by placing the financial responsibility for “trivial patent lawsuits” on the patent trolls.
In an attempt to “confront the compressed audio inferiority that MP3s offer,” musician Neil Young is releasing a line of portable Pono players next year, a music-download service that could rival iTunes and a digital-to-analog conversion designed to “present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions,” reports Rolling Stone.
Young hopes that the high-resolution music service will help unite the recording industry with cloud storage “to save the sound of music.”
“It’s not like some vague thing that you need dogs’ ears to hear. It’s a drastic difference,” musician Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers) says of analog vs. digital music recordings. “MP3s suck. It’s just a shadow of the music.”
The bassist recently tested out Pono and has since expressed support for the venture.
The “Big Three” record labels — Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music — have reportedly expressed interest. Even before WMG partnered with the Pono project last year, the label converted its 8,000-title library to high resolution, 192kHz/24-bit sound. UMG and Sony have not yet reported any partnerships with Pono, but have been approached.
“This has to be an industry-wide solution. This is not about competing — this is about us being proactive,” says Craig Kallman, chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records. “This is all about purely the opportunity to bring the technology to the table.”
Some have raised some doubt about the venture, however, noting that consumers may not want to repurchase songs just to get the upgraded quality.
Ania Ahlborn’s “Seed” was originally self-published, yet rose to the top spot on Amazon’s horror book rankings after being picked up by 47North, Amazon’s in-house science fiction, fantasy, and horror imprint. Now Amazon is adapting the book for film.
“‘Seed’ is the story of teen boy, who sees an unspeakable horror — an evil of some kind — on a rural road [and] flees his home,” explains The Hollywood Reporter. “Years later, after starting a new life, Jack, the boy-turned-grown-man, encounters the evil again when his wife and two daughters are caught in — but survive — a terrible car crash. Now Jack must stop it before it kills him and takes over his youngest daughter.”
Amazon Studios, the original content arm of the online retailer, started in November 2011 and has since put 21 movie scripts and seven episodic series in development.
Noting the book’s success in Amazon’s rankings, “…we already have a sense of the mainstream attraction of the story and are excited to keep the project in-house for movie development,” says Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios.
“Amazon Studios recently ran a fan book trailer contest for ‘Seed,’ awarding $3,000 to the winning trailer ‘Grinning Demons,'” the article states.
After the Kinect for Xbox took off for enhanced gaming, many have imagined other uses for the motion-recognition technology. But when it comes to personal computing, the Kinect cannot quickly and accurately detect hand and finger movement. 3Gear wants to change this.
The San Francisco startup has created a gesture interface that can track finger movements using two 3D cameras positioned above the user on either side.
“3Gear’s system uses two depth cameras (the same type used with Kinect) that capture 30 frames per second. The position of a user’s hands and fingers are matched to a database of 30,000 potential hand and finger configurations,” which takes only 33 milliseconds, explains Technology Review.
3Gear has made the technology available to developers for free until November 30.
“The hope is that developers will create useful applications that will expand the reach of 3Gear’s hand-tracking algorithms,” notes the article. “Eventually, says Robert Wang, who co-founded the company, 3Gear’s technology could be used by engineers to craft 3D objects, by gamers who want precision play, by surgeons who need to manipulate 3D data during operations, and by anyone who wants a computer to do her bidding with a wave of the finger.”
Interest in gesture-recognition has increased, but in personal computing the technology must compete with the familiar keyboard and mouse.
“One problem with gestural interfaces — as well as touch-screen desktop displays — is that they can be uncomfortable to use,” the article states. “They sometimes lead to an ache dubbed ‘gorilla arm.’ As a result, Wang says, 3Gear focused on making its gesture interface practical and comfortable.”
Four out of the top 10 scripted broadcast television shows have more activity on social TV startup GetGlue than on Twitter, and for cable scripted TV, the number is even higher at 9 out of 10.
The data suggests that GetGlue, with one million active users, is competing — and in some cases surpassing — Twitter with its 140 million users. But as AllThingsD points out, measuring social TV chatter is complicated.
For example, you can interact with different services in multiple ways (on Twitter, you can tweet, retweet, or ‘favorite’ a comment), not all of which are accurately accounted for.
“The numbers that GetGlue is using here only tell us about the volume of chatter, not the total number of chatterers,” the article states, suggesting much of the activity could come from individual users. Another possibility is that social TV talk just isn’t that popular.
“For instance, a new episode of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ draws around 12 million viewers. But even if you use the most generous interpretation of GetGlue’s stats, the combined active GetGlue + Twitter social audience would be under 65,000 people — much less than 1 percent of CBS’s total,” the article explains. “If you try the same math with HBO’s ‘True Blood,’ the most social show on cable, the numbers might top 3 percent, but that one’s very much an outlier.”
On the other hand, big events like awards shows or sports finals see a large amount of social interaction — mainly on Twitter, and much less on specialty services like GetGlue.
Facebook announced that it passed the one billion user mark in September, but the news only “confirmed expectations on Wall Street that growth is actually trailing off,” reports Reuters.
The social network acknowledged that the new-user growth will slow down, and there are doubts that “the company can squeeze more and more dollars out of each network member — given well-publicized struggles to monetize the growing ranks of users who access Facebook from mobile devices,” notes the article.
“Facebook has rolled out a spate of initiatives to spur more growth, including a new advertising platform and measurement methods to show marketers they are getting bang for their buck,” Reuters reports. “But it is also exploring options beyond advertising, which accounted for roughly 84 percent of the total revenue in the second quarter.”
This week, the company said it was introducing a fee-based feature that will help U.S. users boost their visibility. It also has a new gift-sending e-commerce effort.
“In its last earnings report, Facebook said revenue increased by 32 percent to $1.18 billion in the second quarter. But that marked the slowest pace of quarterly revenue growth since the first quarter of 2011 — the earliest data available.”
“Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,” Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post.
Facebook is getting pressure from privacy advocates to lock down user information while also receiving a push from investors to ramp up digital advertising. In a move that reportedly complies with privacy laws, Facebook has released new ad offerings that allow marketers to more effectively target users.
One method uses email addresses and phone numbers listed on profiles. Another option, called retargeting, pulls information from Internet surfing outside of the social network to be “retargeted” as ads.
Facebook has also teamed up with data-mining company Datalogix to study the correlation between Facebook ads and users’ shopping habits at brick-and-mortar stores. According to Facebook, the research shows every dollar spent on its advertising equates to $3 in incremental sales.
Using its massive user data, Facebook has also expanded its ads to other websites and apps. “Analysts think the experiments point to Facebook eventually establishing its own advertising network, making Facebook ads omnipresent across the Web and smartphones,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
Even though some of Facebook’s new methods aren’t new to the world of online advertising, privacy concerns have been raised. “Facebook maintains it doesn’t sell data about individual users to advertisers, or even let them directly see the data,” notes the article. “But privacy advocates say Facebook deserves special scrutiny because it has in many cases more personal information about people’s real identities than other Internet companies, raising the potential for abuse.”
Better-targeted ads have better click-through rates, and retargeting has shown increased ROI.
Previously, Facebook “has not been the best place for us to advertise,” says Shoebuy CMO James Keller. “Now we are taking whatever inventory we can in the Facebook Exchange because it is working.”
LinkedIn previously had a deal with Twitter that allowed tweets to appear in LinkedIn streams. That partnership has since ended, but LinkedIn hopes to continue a more relevant type of engagement on its platform with the launch of promoted accounts.
“Yes, it’s sort of like Twitter — if Twitter were only for following bigwigs like Sir Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, even President Barack Obama. And instead of reading what these guys are having for breakfast, LinkedIn says they’ll share things that you actually care about,” Mike Isaac writes for AllThingsD, suggesting users could access valuable business tips and advice.
While the previous Twitter feeds “weren’t always germane to what users were visiting LinkedIn for in the first place,” the promoted accounts have noticeably less (but more targeted) content now, the article notes.
“It’s a small beginning, mind you; the product kicks off with only so many launch partners,” notes Isaac. “If the idea works, though, I imagine the product will scale and become available to more over time. More people to follow means more content flowing through the pipes, which could result in increased engagement on the site.”
The success of the venture relies on these promoted people sharing quality content, he adds.
The promoted accounts allows users to “follow” influencers without requiring a LinkedIn connection request, much like the “Subscribe” feature on Facebook.
TBS announced it will present its postseason Major League Baseball programming with added features like 3D holographic images.
“Specifically, TBS says it will use ‘innovative 3D imagery [to] illustrate detailed examples of pitch grips while demonstrating the pressure points, release points and rotation. Analysts will use the tool to explain how pitches work and how the hitter approaches each type of pitch,'” TV Technology reports.
“The network will also triple the number of super slo-mo cameras it typically uses during the postseason,” notes the article. “It will again integrate Bloomberg Sports statistics into the telecasts, and use Pitch Trax in-game pitching location technology during its coverage.”
The 2012 MLB postseason will kick off this week with TBS’s first-ever Wild Card game coverage on October 5.
“In the first year of the new postseason format, two Wild Card teams in each league will play a single-elimination game with each winner advancing to compete with the three division championship from its respective leagues in the Division Series,” the article explains.
Turner Sports has created a Facebook page as well as Twitter accounts and hashtags to increase participation.
Top consumer electronic makers in Japan including Sony, Panasonic and Sharp are seeing their stock plummet and their staff cut after missing some key opportunities to innovate and stay relevant. Now, Apple and Samsung are fighting over market share as these top-name companies are fighting for survival.
“Japanese companies were busy defending old business models that the world simply bypassed,” says Michael Gartenberg, industry analyst for Gartner. Although these companies still offer high quality products, consumers are moving towards paying less for good-enough quality.
“In the past there was a huge gap between the best of breed and second best,” Gartenberg says. “Now, maybe there’s still a small gap between a Sony high-definition screen and an LG screen, but most consumers can’t see it. And if most consumers can’t see it, it’s not there.”
These companies also completely missed the smartphone revolution. And even though Sony was quick to adopt e-book technology, it couldn’t create a software or library service and was quickly surpassed. “It’s been years since they’ve turned out products that people feel they need to have,” writes The Washington Post.
Once known for their TVs, the companies have started cutting back this now profit-losing sector. They’ve also made significant salary and workforce cuts. Some have looked to other sources of revenue such as developing solar panels or even medical devices.
“And Sharp is taking it a step further, laying out a plan in its 2012 annual report to ‘create new essential products that people realize they always wanted’ through a ‘shift in categories.’ This means developing medical diagnostic imaging monitors, 3D high-definition digital mirrors and electronic textbooks,” explains the article.
Oracle is making a late appearance to the cloud market as it branches into Amazon’s territory, the public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) business.
Oracle’s new public and private clouds will use “our OS, our VM, our compute services and storage services on the fastest most reliable systems in the world — our engineered systems, Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, all linked with Infiniband,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said at Oracle OpenWorld Sunday night.
“The promised Oracle 12c (the ‘c’ stands for cloud) database will be the software foundation and Ellison said this iteration of the database will put multitenancy — the ability to securely keep separate sets of data in one place — at the database level where it belongs,” GigaOM writes, noting that Ellison himself used to call multitenancy an aging technology.
“By moving multitenancy into the database, software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) providers can relinquish that workload to the database and use database query and business intelligence tools to work with them instead of having to come up with application-specific tools,” the article continues.
Oracle must make a case for its hardware though, critics say. On Twitter, people said the venture would be more impressive if Oracle had a list of customers and/or partners that have come on board.
“In addition, Oracle’s decision to use very high-end specialized hardware to power its cloud flies in the face of conventional wisdom espoused by Web giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon that yoke together thousands of commodity servers in webscale data centers,” the article states. “Oracle’s take is definitely scale-up in what appears to be an increasingly scale-out world.”
FreedomPop is a startup looking to provide every American free wireless with a pay-as-you-go service that offers 500MB of data each month at no cost.
Users do, however, have to buy hardware to access the free wireless. They can opt to pay a refundable deposit for a “Freedom Spot” hotspot or the USB dongle “Freedom Stick.”
FreedomPop also will offer $99 iPhone and iPod cases in four to six weeks that double as a hotspot — or triple as a battery charger, as is the case for the iPhone option.
“For the time being, the touted 4G service will come courtesy of Clearwire’s WiMAX network, but FreedomPop says it will switch to Sprint’s LTE spectrum sometime in early 2013,” Engadget writes. “In the meantime, though, you can expect speeds anywhere between 4 and 10 Mbps down, and 1 to 2 Mbps up.”
Consumers can pay for faster 4G; the company will also offer packaged deals, “hoping to recoup the costs of that free data by selling premium services, with three to start and more coming later,” the post states.
There are ways for users to add to their monthly free allotment by watching ads — a 20 second clip earns an extra 3MB — or recommending a friend, which gets users 10MB for every month they stay with the service.
Business Insider has created a list of the top 30 social media advertisers based on total social impressions served from January to August of this year.
Researcher comScore calculated the number of ads served on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace, Pinterest and others. While these impressions didn’t all cost the same for advertisers, there is no simple way to track the ad spending on social media as there is for TV.
The top social media advertiser was AT&T, generating 12.9 billion impressions. Interestingly, this number was three times that of the second place advertiser. The telecom company has 11 separate Twitter accounts, six Facebook pages, three YouTube channels, a Flickr account, eight blogs, a LinkedIn page, and a Google+ profile.
Microsoft came in second with 4 billion impressions after having bought the business-oriented social network Yammer for $1.2 billion this last June.
JustFabulous follows in third with 3.9 billion impressions. “JustFab’s marketing strategy relies almost entirely on creating the feeling of a one-to-one relationship with each customer,” the post states. “Users sign up, take a quiz to determine their personality, and are then assigned a stylist who creates a shoe collection for them.”
Additional leaders in social ads include Disney, IAC, State Farm, Amazon, Weight Watchers, Universal Technical Institute, Netflix, Google, Guthy-Renker, Nestle, Capital One and Procter & Gamble.
Check the link for the full list with each brand’s number of impressions.
Ad-related companies are convening in New York for Advertising Week, and the media buying/research group ZenithOptimedia has made some forecasts regarding where the ad dollars are expected to go.
Overall, ad spending is expected to fall; Zenith cut its forecast from 4.3 percent to 3.8 percent in light of financial problems in Europe.
Even as new media grows, TV remains “dominant and unmoved,” AllThingsD writes. “Digital’s growth, to date, remains fueled in large part by the decline of print,” the article adds.
An interesting aspect of Zenith’s report is how digital ad spending is divided up. Where before Internet advertising was essentially synonymous with paying Google for search advertising, that has changed with the rise of display ads.
“Globally, display ads will be growing at a 20 percent clip the next couple years, Zenith says, while paid search will move at 14 percent,” the article explains. “Google is a big player in display advertising, too — it has been spending heavily on acquisitions there for years — but it doesn’t have anything like the lead it does in search.”
“That’s a big growth story for Facebook and a potential lifeline for Yahoo and AOL,” AllThingsD continues. “And if somebody else wants to build a business based on selling ads — not just eyeball acquisition, but the actual work of turning those eyeballs into marketing opportunities — that’s a real opportunity for them, too.”
A survey of more than 50,000 early Windows 8 users found that 53 percent prefer the current Windows 7 operating system.
Conducted by the support site Forumswindows8.com, the survey found that only 25 percent of participants said that Windows 8 was their preferred version of the operating system.
The strongest selling feature for most was the fast boot and shut down. The easy installation was the next popular feature followed by Internet Explorer 10. Only 22 percent of respondents claimed the Metro UI as their favorite feature.
“Microsoft claims that Windows 8 is the first version of Windows to be designed for both tablets and desktops, with users able to switch between the new user interface and the more familiar desktop mode. This was viewed to be a weakness by 18 percent of respondents,” reports TechWeekEurope.
“However the biggest concern was price, with 35 percent believing that this could be improved. It is possible to upgrade to Windows 8 for just $39.99, but without promotional prices, the cost is around $199.99. Just over a quarter were worried about system requirements while 25 percent feared incompatibility,” the article notes.
Despite the bad news, the Windows 8-based Microsoft Surface was the tablet of choice for 35 percent of participants, beating out Android tablets and Apple’s iPad.
