The U.S. International Trade Commission judge overseeing the lawsuit between Motorola Mobility — now being acquired by Google — and Microsoft found that Microsoft infringed on four Motorola patents in making its Xbox gaming consoles, but the fifth patent in question was not violated.
“The patents in the complaint are for technology like wireless connections for the Xbox to the Internet and video compression to speed transmission,” explains Reuters.
A final ruling will be issued in August after the full commission reviews the judge’s decision.
Motorola Mobility is looking to have the infringed devices banned from importation into the U.S. Even so, Microsoft remains “confident the commission will ultimately rule in Microsoft’s favor,” the company said in an emailed statement. Motorola Mobility is also “confident in our position,” the company said in a statement.
According to a report from The Consumerist, eBay could be removing listings for digital copy codes on the grounds of copyright infringement, setting a standard that selling digital copy codes bundled with Blu-ray discs is illegal.
One user claims that eBay removed his listing for an UltraViolet movie code on the basis of copyright infringement. “The owner claims that despite the existence of similar listings and explaining that the code was legally obtained, eBay maintained its stance,” reports The Verge.
“The resale of physical media, such as DVDs, Blu-rays, and games has long been sanctioned under the first-sale doctrine, while the rights for owners of digital content have been hotly contested,” explains the post. In regards to digital copy films, only the individual who accesses the one-time use code is affected by service terms.
“Ultimately, the rules for digital copy versions of films require further definition, though it seems unlikely that this particular instance will spark the debate,” the post suggests.
Your tweets are now less protected following a decision by New York Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. who ruled prosecutors need not obtain a subpoena for deleted tweets, since “they are considered public information owned by a third party,” reports TG Daily.
This decision is strongly opposed by Martin Stolar, a lawyer representing Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris who was arrested for disorderly conduct.
“There’s a whole other recent series of decisions from Supreme Court and New York State, about whether or not using a GPS device to track someone uses a warrant,” Stolar told the Atlantic Wire. “People’s locations while on the street are generally public, like tweets are, but it’s the accumulation of all that information, like someone’s whereabouts, that the courts have said a subpoena is necessary … I think that’s more analogous to tweets than the bank records are.”
Stolar is working to reject a subpoena of Harris’s user information and three months’ worth of tweets.
Even though Facebook saw sales rise 45 percent to $1.06 billion, the growth was a drop from the 55 percent increase in December. Along with the slowing sales growth, Facebook saw its marketing cost more than double, causing the company’s first-quarter profit to drop 12 percent right at the brink of its initial public offering.
Facebook is looking for a $75-100 billion IPO valuation, which would raise $5 billion in the largest-ever Internet IPO.
“Facebook unveiled a new benchmark that showed monthly revenue per user climbed 6 percent to $1.21,” Bloomberg reports. “The company valued its shares at $30.89 apiece at the end of January, up from $29.73 at the end of the last year.”
Advertising still provides the majority of Facebook’s revenue but it dropped to 82 percent from 83 last year. The company’s revenue from social gaming company Zynga also dropped to 11 percent of the total from 13 percent in the last quarter.
“Our costs are growing quickly, which could harm our business and profitability,” the company said in the filing. “Providing our products to our users is costly and we expect our expenses to continue to increase in the future as we broaden our user base, as users increase the number of connections and amount of data they share with us, as we develop and implement new product features that require more computing infrastructure, and as we hire additional employees.”
Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, has a vision of lighter traffic and fewer fender-benders, a goal he considers within reach if car makers can collaborate on “an integrated system that uses real-time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale,” he said in a TEDTalk.
The plan would develop a mobile network to redirect drivers from congested areas and allow cars to communicate with one another. One potential problem is the demand on wireless carriers’ bandwidth, which would be overwhelmed with Wi-Fi in every car. The bigger hindrance, however, could be lack of cooperation.
“But competition between automakers may prevent that vision from ever happening, since companies pioneering the technology, like General Motors, see it as a competitive advantage and not something to work on together with rivals,” Mobiledia writes.
For now, many innovative apps are working to address the traffic issue. One app, Waze crowd-sources traffic navigation while another, Signal Guru (not yet public) gives suggestions of alternate routes and tells drivers how fast to drive to make lights.
“Ford’s vision for smart cars requires a lot of cooperation from automakers, wireless providers, phone makers and government regulators, and it may be difficult to pull off without a nudge from the government to entice businesses to stop competing and work together towards a common goal — cars designed to avoid clogging up the streets and running into each other,” explains the post.
According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, 65 percent of technology experts and stakeholders agree that mobile payments will be widespread by 2020.
Considering the strong push into mobile payments by PayPal and Google, eight years might seem pretty long but those polled felt the transition will take time because “people will resist technology that wants to learn everything about their personal purchasing habits,” AllThingsD reports.
“There is nothing more imaginary than a monetary system… Of course we’ll move to even more abstract representations of value. Other countries are already content to use their phones; we’ll catch up eventually,” Harvard professor Susan Crawford told Pew.
“The 2020 date might be a bit optimistic, but I’m sure that this will happen. What is in your wallet now? Identification, payment, and personal items. All this will easily fit in your mobile device and will inevitably do so,” commented Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist.
A new forecast from Strategy Analytics suggests that global revenue from mobile advertising and content will surge to $67 billion this year.
Total mobile media will reach $148 billion with $82.8 billion coming from mobile data subscription sales, the firm predicts.
GigaOM offers the following highlights from the Strategy Analytics report: “App downloads will grow 38 percent to 23 billion… App spend will grow 30.7 percent to $26.1 billion… Apps will make up 18.9 percent of mobile media outlay… Mobile ad spend will grow 85.4 per cent to $11.6 billion… In-app ad sales in the U.S. and western Europe will overtake mobile web display sales ($934.5 million).”
In contrast to the vibrant ad and app growth, video’s increase is not as impressive. “Despite the huge audience of 271 million users, ad revenues from mobile video are tiny — a meager $223 million globally in 2011,” the report states.
New findings from Nielsen suggest Hispanic consumers in the U.S. are often the top users of smartphones, online video, social networks and other media.
“According to the study, Hispanics outpace all [other] ethnic groups in mobile downloads of music and photos, and are more likely to watch video online and on the their mobile phones than others,” TechCrunch reports. “Specifically, Nielsen says that Hispanic video viewers are 68 percent more likely than non-Hispanic White viewers to watch video on the Internet, and 20 percent more likely to watch video on their mobile phone.”
Hispanic consumers send and receive more SMS text messages than any other ethnic group and also make 40 percent more calls than the average U.S. customer.
The study also found Hispanic adults are 25 percent more likely to follow a brand; 18 percent more likely to follow a celebrity; 21 percent more likely to post links, articles, videos and websites; 17 percent more likely to build or update a personal blog; and 7 percent more likely to have one or more social networking profiles.
“Says Nielsen, ‘mobile presents a significant avenue of opportunity for marketers looking to reach Hispanic consumers,’ and the firm also notes that the group has ‘amassed significant buying power, despite perceptions to the contrary,'” the article states.
TechCrunch points out that this not only represents an opportunity for marketers, but also for developers of apps and services.
Scientists from the University of Texas at Dallas have developed an imaging chip for smartphones and small cameras that gives the user a super-human power: a form of X-ray vision.
The technology taps into an unused range of the electromagnetic spectrum, called the terahertz range, which our eyes cannot perceive.
“The breakthrough here is that scientists have figured out how to combine seeing into this terahertz range with the chip manufacturing technology called CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor), which is used to make chips for computers, smartphones, HDTVs, game consoles, and many other objects we take for granted,” reports Digital Trends.
The ability could have negative repercussions such as privacy issues, so for now the team is only working on a version that operates within four inches. Even at that range, however, the technology has great potential like finding wall studs, authenticating documents and eventually wireless communication, the article states.
Despite an overall good earnings report, Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division, which houses the Xbox and Windows Phone, saw a 16 percent drop in revenue from last year.
While Xbox remains the leading game console, sales were down 48 percent due to the “soft gaming console market,” according to Microsoft.
“But with the console market slowing down — which won’t pick up until the next generation console war begins next year (not including Nintendo’s Wii U release this Fall) — it’s becoming increasingly clear that Windows Phone will have to start earning some money for the Entertainment & Devices division,” reports VentureBeat. “Microsoft can’t afford to have two major product lines sagging and bringing down an entire business division.”
So far, the Nokia Lumia 900 has had a promising start, selling out in various retail stores. The phone could be the launching pad for the Windows Phone platform, but it has certainly been a costly endeavor for Microsoft.
“According to Microsoft’s 10-Q quarterly filing today, the division’s operating income also decreased, due to payments made to Nokia (Microsoft is paying Nokia $1 billion over the next few years for the Windows Phone partnership), a 33 percent increase in R&D costs, and a 50 percent increase in sales and marketing expenses,” the article states.
According to media giant Viacom, the second most popular means of viewing television programs is now via a tablet, with Apple’s iPad leading the trend.
Viacom recently surveyed 2,500 consumers about how they watch full-length TV shows, finding 15 percent of total viewing takes place on tablets.
“The change has largely been at the expense of computer viewers, as Viacom’s study says that the most popular genres on tablets, comedy and music, most closely align to those who’d normally watch on their PC or smartphone,” The Verge reports. “Traditional television has maintained dominance in reality TV, along with drama, sci-fi, and sports.”
The study also addresses multitasking, indicating that “many respondents use tablets to multitask or as a complementary experience” to the TV experience.
Additionally, a recent Nielsen study determined that 26 percent of U.S. tablet owners use their devices “several times a day” while watching television.
The Verge asks, “…with tools like Hulu and Airplay making watching TV on a tablet easier than ever, how long will the traditional TV set be able to hold on?”
In response to the release of Project Glass, a Forrester analyst recommends that “smart developers should start experimenting with applications for wearables on the ‘big five’ platforms (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook) today,” TechCrunch reports.
Sarah Rotman Epps says within three years, wearables will “matter to every product strategist,” but before they go mainstream, they’ll have to be backed by one of the “big five.”
“Indeed, Forrester’s analysts think wearables will follow a similar path to that of the smartphone market: In the first phase, Apple will create an early app and accessory ecosystem for wearable computing. Google’s open platform, however, will give developers more freedom and broader wearable experimentation. Microsoft, thanks to its recent shift toward open Web standards, will then be able to offer something akin to an ‘anti-platform’ platform for a future operating system for wearables that could be even more flexible than Apple’s and Google’s offerings,” the article states.
In a related Engadget post, the Oakley eyewear company has been working on ways to project information onto sunglasses since 1997.
The company hopes to “start by augmenting the world of sports before ultimately blending into more consumery pursuits with shades that could run solo or pair up with a smartphone,” according to the post. It hopes to trump the likes of Project Glass by focusing on style.
While the function of the glasses is important, so is the design, notes Oakley CEO Colin Baden, who understands that when it comes to putting something on the face, consumers can get very particular about the look and feel.
A survey of 1,000 TV viewers by Accenture offers insights into advertising via Facebook and Twitter, finding that about one-third have tweeted about the brand or show or “liked” their Facebook page after seeing the social media logos.
“The most common action for those who did interact with a show or ad while watching TV was liking its page on Facebook (20 percent). About 7 percent of viewers searched for a show’s hashtag on Twitter and 5 percent used Shazam while sitting on their couch,” TechCrunch reports.
“Surprisingly, the survey also found that 11 percent of viewers scanned a QR code while watching TV. That’s a rather large number, given that QR codes are still far from mainstream,” suggests the post.
However, those polled were less interested in being social or connecting with people of similar interests; rather, about a third of participants wanted to get coupons and others wanted to enter sweepstakes.
The survey also found that the majority of viewers who received content from these social media symbols were generally satisfied with what they found.
Advertisers are starting to reach out to consumers where they are spending their time: on their devices. A new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau found online advertising in the U.S. reached $31 billion last year, increasing 22 percent from 2010.
“Mobile grew the most of all categories — 149 percent — but still represents a puny share of the overall market — $1.6 billion — according to the report issued on Wednesday. Digital video also rose 29 percent to $1.8 billion, search was up about 27 percent to $11.7 billion and display advertising jumped 15 percent to $11.1 billion, or 35 percent of all revenues. Search is still the largest category with 47 percent share,” reports Mashable.
Retail remains dominant in terms of ad spending, making up 22 percent of the overall total. Telecom and travel/leisure followed at 12 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Internet ad spending still trails that of TV — which amounted to $38.5 billion in 2011 — but the increase shows the gap could be narrowing.
For its coverage of the 2012 Olympics in London, NBC Sports announced it will stream live video of all 32 sports via nbcolympics.com.
“The broadcaster, which launched its official Olympics website today, will offer access to the sports in real-time — before the time-delayed coverage that airs on the traditional TV stations in America. The site will also provide users with lots of archived content, stats, and other supplementary material,” VentureBeat reports.
The videos will be archived online shortly thereafter and then there’s the traditional TV broadcasts, which NBC doesn’t expect to be negatively impacted by the online offering.
“We’re not scared of cannibalization… Anytime you have a great event that happens before it shows on the air, it increases ratings and generates buzz,” Rick Cordella, vice president and general manager of NBC Sports Digital Media told The New York Times.
