Intellect Wireless, a tiny company based in Reston, VA has filed suit against Apple over mobile picture/video messaging technology it claims to have successfully patented years ago. The patent infringement suit was filed on 28 January in Illinois Northern District Court. The complaint states that Apple infringed on the company’s patents when it provided wireless portable communication devices (you know, like the iPhone) that “receive and display caller ID information, non-facsimile pictures, video messages and/or Multimedia Messaging Services.”
Intellect Wireless, a tiny company based in Reston, VA has filed suit against Apple over mobile picture/video messaging technology it claims to have successfully patented years ago.
The patent infringement suit was filed on 28 January in Illinois Northern District Court.
The complaint states that Apple infringed on the company’s patents when it provided wireless portable communication devices (you know, like the iPhone) that “receive and display caller ID information, non-facsimile pictures, video messages and/or Multimedia Messaging Services.”
It was easy to retrieve court documents showing Intellect Wireless is seeking about $10 million in damages from Apple for allegedly infringing on its patent, but it sure was a whole lot harder to track down what this company has effectively produced with the technology it claims to have enriched the planet with. In other words: it’s a non-practicing entity, aka patent troll, hard at work in this case.
And judging from this article on the General Patent Corporation blog, Intellect Wireless is a feisty one at that.
To learn more about the technology Wireless Intellect has invented, try making sense of this magnificent slide deck from self-proclaimed inventor Daniel A. Henderson, the man behind the company.
This isn’t exactly the first time Intellect Wireless has turned to courts over alleged patent infringement: the company sued T-Mobile USA, Virgin Mobile USA, Helio and U.S. Cellular Corp back in February 2008, Motorola, LG Electronics and Sanyo Electric in March 2008, Samsung Electronics in October 2008 and HTC in May 2009.
Calvin Chin is an American entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai. He founded Qifang, a P2P lending site for Chinese student loans. You can read more about Qifang here. He attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this last week, where China was the center of attention. We asked him to write this guest post and share his unique perspective as an American building a startup in the heart of China. Here at Davos it seems China keeps coming up in two ways - neither of them positive. One, with the worst of the crisis behind us, people are turning from last year’s hopes of China as economic savior to China as free-rider keeping its currency cheap, bullying its minorities and shirking its responsibilities in Copenhagen. Two, in the tech community, seems everyone is talking about Google, Chinese government hackers and censorship. My view, and I think it’s one that many in China would probably share, is that while free access to information and the rest of the world is inherently a good thing, so is political stability. The Chinese government has earned a lot of slack for raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and if things did go out of control a heck of a lot of people would get hurt. So even if they want China to be plugged in to the rest of the world to encourage innovation and Chinese tech entrepreneurship (which I think they do), they’d put that priority after getting most Chinese people better lives.
Calvin Chin is an American entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai. He founded Qifang, a P2P lending site for Chinese student loans. You can read more about Qifang here. He attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this last week, where China was the center of attention. We asked him to write this guest post and share his unique perspective as an American building a startup in the heart of China.
Here at Davos it seems China keeps coming up in two ways – neither of them positive. One, with the worst of the crisis behind us, people are turning from last year’s hopes of China as economic savior to China as free-rider keeping its currency cheap, bullying its minorities and shirking its responsibilities in Copenhagen. Two, in the tech community, seems everyone is talking about Google, Chinese government hackers and censorship.
My view, and I think it’s one that many in China would probably share, is that while free access to information and the rest of the world is inherently a good thing, so is political stability. The Chinese government has earned a lot of slack for raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and if things did go out of control a heck of a lot of people would get hurt. So even if they want China to be plugged in to the rest of the world to encourage innovation and Chinese tech entrepreneurship (which I think they do), they’d put that priority after getting most Chinese people better lives.
It’s kind of the same deal that Chinese startups all make, to try to do build cool stuff but while working within the system. So Tudou and Youku screen their videos and the fastest growing microblogging service is run by a portal that has the infrastructure from screening blogs to be able to screen tweets. All these companies are making the same decision that Google made to enter China in 2004 too (and stay for now), but for Chinese entrepreneurs they don’t have the option of not being in the China market. It’s what they know and where they have their best shot at success. And I’m sure if you’d ask them, they’d sincerely agree that eliminating poverty and keeping things stable comes way before access to a few articles in a foreign language about events that don’t mean much to them. I don’t think many non-Chinese would like the aggressively patriotic and self-important China that would probably be the outcome of democracy there today anyways.
The Chinese market for startups is growing so fast, is so competitive and is characterized by so many unfair advantages for the big players, that local entrepreneurs just keep their heads down and roll with the political and market changes. Take Digu for instance, they launched as a pretty simple copy of Twitter that focused on celebrity accounts, then pivoted to a social game model when all the startup microblogging platforms got shutdown and Sina (with a lock on celebrity blogs) launched Weibo, and are now back to straight microblogging with a better ability to keep the tweet streams “harmonized.” Digu didn’t whine, they just sucked it up and forged ahead.
This is typical for Chinese startups. Whether they are localizing an international hit, copy-2-china style, at a much cheaper price and a better UI like Kuukie. Or they’re a fit for Chinese net culture with a product that you don’t see elsewhere like Douban’s social network for talking about books (and now other media).
The thing is while the majority of Chinese netizens really don’t care that much about what’s going on outside of China, the ones who do care, people who would start companies, people who want international news, all know workarounds to use services they like or read about sensitive topics from other perspectives. They use Twitter clients like Bage or free (http://hotspotshield.com/) or paid VPNs. So much so that Twitter won in the grassroots Chinamode awards.
So actually, the Chinese government kinda gets the best of all worlds: most Chinese netizens are sufficiently inconvenienced so they’ll never stumble into places they shouldn’t, motivated innovators still find out about, get to, and can track any going on globally, and international companies that would otherwise compete for local market share get locked out.
Popular location-based social network Brightkite has simultaneously released mobile apps for some Nokia as well as Palm smartphones. The release of the apps follows earlier launches of Android, BlackBerry and iPhone applications.
Popular location-based social network Brightkite has simultaneously released mobile apps for some Nokia as well as Palm smartphones.
The release of the apps follows earlier launches of Android, BlackBerry and iPhone applications.
The Nokia app can be downloaded from the Ovi Store already and should run fine on all Symbian S60 5th Edition phones, including the Nokia N97 and the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.
Brightkite curiously doesn’t use its own brand name for the Palm app, which was baptized Parafoil instead. The application was custom-developed for Palm’s WebOS platform and is compatible with the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi devices.
I’m told the reason that it isn’t named Brightkite, is because the program was actually developed by two Brightkite users, John Barker and Kyle Johnson, based on the startup’s open API.
As you can tell from the third screenshot embedded below, Brighkite has adopted the ‘check-in’ moniker to let people update their friends on their current locations and what they’re up to.
Brightkite says the United States remains its biggest market, but that international markets are growing in importance, which prompts the company to expand its range of handset support. The company adds that it currently sees about 2 million people using Brightkite on a monthly basis, across all platforms (though the vast majority uses it on a phone).
A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as BreakingNews are hugely popular because they offer up stories to their 1.6 million followers (and even more through retweets) instantaneously. Topicfire, a realtime news aggregator we covered in December is now trying to extend that concept to all different topics. While there are no shortage of services attempting to leverage Twitter to distill information for different topics, Topicfire’s streams seem pretty solid thanks to the use of their HeatRank technology, which is the same thing that powers Topicfire itself. While there are a few factors that go into HeatRank, the main driving force behind it are comments on stories. If they’re coming in fast enough, the HeatRank will get pushed to 10.
A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as BreakingNews are hugely popular because they offer up stories to their 1.6 million followers (and even more through retweets) instantaneously. Topicfire, a realtime news aggregator we covered in December is now trying to extend that concept to all different topics.
While there are no shortage of services attempting to leverage Twitter to distill information for different topics, Topicfire’s streams seem pretty solid thanks to the use of their HeatRank technology, which is the same thing that powers Topicfire itself. While there are a few factors that go into HeatRank, the main driving force behind it are comments on stories. If they’re coming in fast enough, the HeatRank will get pushed to 10.
If a story hits 10, it will then get tweeted out automatically to its specific Twitter account with a link to the original story as well as the story’s page on Topicfire. This method of curation ensures that followers won’t get overwhelmed by stories that perhaps aren’t that important.
You can see the full list of the 24 Topicfire accounts here. As you can see, they range from Apple news, to design news, to skiing news, to surfing news (though ski and surf don’t have a ton of news items).
By Andrew Liszewski I’m hesitant to post this since the spy shot above was submitted by an anonymous tipster, but it’s too exciting a rumor to pass up. Supposedly the team at Apple responsible for the new iPad has also been working on a compact version of their new tablet that’s not only pocket-friendly, but also [...]
By Andrew Liszewski
I’m hesitant to post this since the spy shot above was submitted by an anonymous tipster, but it’s too exciting a rumor to pass up. Supposedly the team at Apple responsible for the new iPad has also been working on a compact version of their new tablet that’s not only pocket-friendly, but also adds a digital camera and phone capabilities! It will supposedly work with all of the existing software available in the iTunes App Store, and while it looks like it will lose the ability to add your own wallpaper, our tipster claims it’s pretty much capable of doing everything the new iPad can, and maybe even more!
Now on one hand it’s kind of crazy for Apple to release a new product that’s essentially the exact same thing as one of their existing products, only smaller, but imagine being able to surf the web, check email, watch videos, read ebooks and even play games on a device that’s just a fraction of the size of the iPad! Not surprisingly our tipster had no idea when Apple was planning to release the new device, but since it would probably cut into the iPad’s sales (who wants to carry around a 10-inch device when they can carry this thing?) I can’t see it being revealed anytime soon. But we’ll keep you posted if and when more information becomes available.
“Millions of people now own Kindles,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com yesterday. That surprised analysts, who thought that Amazon would sell 2.5 million or so of the devices by the end of 2010, nearly a year from now. We’ve checked with our sources, who have been amazingly accurate on the number of Kindle’s sold over the last couple of years. The total number of all types of Kindles out there in users hands hit 3 million sometime in December, says a source close to Amazon. And that was before the new model with worldwide data hit. And before Amazon started offering free Kindles to select long-time customers.
“Millions of people now own Kindles,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com yesterday. That surprised analysts, who thought that Amazon would sell 2.5 million or so of the devices by the end of 2010, nearly a year from now.
We’ve checked with our sources, who have been amazingly accurate on the number of Kindle’s sold over the last couple of years. The total number of all types of Kindles out there in users hands hit 3 million sometime in December, says a source close to Amazon. And that was before the new model with worldwide data hit. And before Amazon started offering free Kindles to select long-time customers.
The Kindle now has real competition from the Barnes & Noble Nook and, more so, from the Apple iPad. But so far at least Amazon has had amazing success with their device. Which is even more extraordinary since the only place you can buy the Kindle is Amazon.
Social networking company Tagged.com has been awarded more than $200,000 in a default judgment against Erik Vogeler, who spammed thousands of Tagged members by sending them unsolicited messages with links to an adult dating website. In a ruling issued earlier this week, a U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California found Vogeler guilty of sending messages to 6,079 Tagged users and assessed damages of $25 per violation for a total of $151,975. Court also ordered Vogeler to pay Tagged $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and to cease sending commercial emails through Tagged.com.
Social networking company Tagged.com has been awarded more than $200,000 in a default judgment against Erik Vogeler, who spammed thousands of Tagged members by sending them unsolicited messages with links to an adult dating website.
In a ruling issued earlier this week, a U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California found Vogeler guilty of sending messages to 6,079 Tagged users and assessed damages of $25 per violation for a total of $151,975. Court also ordered Vogeler to pay Tagged $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and to cease sending commercial emails through Tagged.com.
Tagged, which has raised close to $14 million in venture capital to date, claims over 80 million registered users worldwide.
Ironically, the social networking company has itself been the subject of numerous customer complaints for sending deceptive bulk mail since its inception in 2004, and is regarded as a phishing and spamming site by some consumer anti-fraud advocates.
In November 2009, Tagged settled a court case with Texas and the New York Attorney General over its practices, coughing up $750,000 in penalties. As part of the settlement, Tagged has adopted privacy reforms and altered its invitation processes.
Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng was previously co-founder and CEO of Internet startup incubator Jumpstart Technologies, which in March 2006 was fined $900,000 for alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, then the largest ever penalty for illegal spam.
The holidays were good to Amazon, which just announced fourth quarter 2009 earnings. Sales were up 42 percent to $9.5 billion in the quarter, and net income shot up 71 percent to $384 million (or 85 cents a share, well above the analyst consensus of 72 cents). Free cash flow was up 113 percent to $2.9 billion. For the full year, sales were $24.5 billion, and net income was $902 million. Amazon highlighted the success of its Kindle in its earning release, which is not surprising given all the comparison to the iPad which Apple announced yesterday. The one quote from CEO Jeff Bezos in the release is about the Kindle: “Millions of people now own Kindles. And Kindle owners read, a lot. When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books. This is year-to-date and includes only paid books — free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It’s been an exciting 27 months.” Beyond being vague about how many “millions” of people own a Kindle (is it two million or 20 million?), Amazon also mentions that there are now 410,000 books available on the Kindle. The depth and breadth of that catalog is the Kindle’s greatest strength.
The holidays were good to Amazon, which just announced fourth quarter 2009 earnings. Sales were up 42 percent to $9.5 billion in the quarter, and net income shot up 71 percent to $384 million (or 85 cents a share, well above the analyst consensus of 72 cents). Free cash flow was up 113 percent to $2.9 billion. For the full year, sales were $24.5 billion, and net income was $902 million.
Amazon highlighted the success of its Kindle in its earning release, which is not surprising given all the comparison to the iPad which Apple announced yesterday. The one quote from CEO Jeff Bezos in the release is about the Kindle: “Millions of people now own Kindles. And Kindle owners read, a lot. When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books. This is year-to-date and includes only paid books — free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It’s been an exciting 27 months.”
Beyond being vague about how many “millions” of people own a Kindle (is it two million or 20 million?), Amazon also mentions that there are now 410,000 books available on the Kindle. The depth and breadth of that catalog is the Kindle’s greatest strength. Amazon also emphasized that its digital books can by synched between its own family of Kindles as well as PCs, “iPhone, iPod touch and soon, Blackberry, Mac and iPad.”
The accounting recognition for the Kindle changed this quarter, with more of the total device price being recognized immediately instead of being deferred. During the conference call there was a mention of $500 million of deferred revenues from shipments from last year which will be apportioned in future quarters. Also asked whether its competitive position has now changed, Amazon emphasized that it will continue to focus on the strength of its existing relationship with publishers and on devices “purpose-built for reading. We believe readers deserve to have a dedicated device with great selection, at a great price.” But other than that would not discuss any competing devices (cough, iPad) or how they might impact the price of the Kindle. Amazon reconfirmed, however, that its Kindle app for the iPhone would be available on the iPad as well
By Andrew Liszewski The name ‘Short Circuit Shelf’ conjured up images of my handful of DVDs and books being held up by a wise-cracking, sentient robot, but this is cool too. Created by Alexandra DiCairano, the Short Circuit Shelf is actually designed to look like a circuit board when mounted on your wall, which, according to [...]
By Andrew Liszewski
The name ‘Short Circuit Shelf’ conjured up images of my handful of DVDs and books being held up by a wise-cracking, sentient robot, but this is cool too. Created by Alexandra DiCairano, the Short Circuit Shelf is actually designed to look like a circuit board when mounted on your wall, which, according to Alexandra, “have a beautiful and efficient pattern that perfectly serve their function…” The shelves aren’t available for sale though, which is a shame since they’d probably be more popular in comp sci and electrical engineering students’ dorm rooms than that picture of Einstein sticking his tongue out.
Intellect Wireless, a tiny company based in Reston, VA has filed suit against Apple over mobile picture/video messaging technology it claims to have successfully patented years ago. The patent infringement suit was filed on 28 January in Illinois Northern District Court. The complaint states that Apple infringed on the company’s patents when it provided wireless portable communication devices (you know, like the iPhone) that “receive and display caller ID information, non-facsimile pictures, video messages and/or Multimedia Messaging Services.”
This speaks for itself. Thanks to 
Popular location-based social network 
Popular location-based social network 
A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as 
A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as 
“Millions of people now own Kindles,” 
“Millions of people now own Kindles,” 
Social networking company 
Social networking company 
The holidays were good to Amazon, which just announced 
Entries (RSS)