Business, Financial & Legal - Page 146

Judge Alsup, the judge presiding over the Oracle v Google lawsuit has decided that Google's disclosure, in response to his August 7 mandate, did not comply. As such, he has reissued the mandate with a few clarifications and has given Google until noon on August 24 to comply. He has also instructed Oracle to update its disclosure if the clarified mandate brings to light any new people that should be disclosed.

It will be interesting to see how Google responds to this request. Their previous disclosure made some good points, but at the same time did seem to lack any decisive names. We will be sure to keep you up to date on this legal battle as it continues.

Just as Samsung and Apple's lawsuit comes to a close, Google's recently-acquired Motorola is now taking a swing at the Cupertino-based company. Motorola have claimed that Apple are infringing on seven of its patents, and are seeking to block the iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers from being imported into the United States.

Google acquired the device maker back in February, and until now, Motorola have been tightly lipped on its previous problems with Apple. But, according to a piece from Bloomberg, Google's Motorola division have just filed a new patent lawsuit against the company, opening up some of those old, sore wounds that were leftover from Motorola and Apple's long history of legal disputes. Motorola's complaint over at the US International Trade Commission (ITC) named features such as location reminders, e-mail notifications, along with phone and video players as possible infringements.

These complaints are some of Apple's biggest features in their iOS-based devices, and with Google's lust of blocking US imports of Apple products, it would be a huge win for Google and an even bigger loss for Apple. Motorola Mobility have said in a statement:

It looks as though OnLive has gone through quite the headache over the weekend, where it was first reported that the entire staff of the streaming gaming company had been laid off. But, the official word is that OnLive's assets were acquired by a "newly-formed company" that has "substantial funding".

As the story continued, it looks as though a single investor has come in who was interested in the company and decided they've like to own it. Some of the freshly-unemployed ex-OnLive staffers were re-hired to join the new business that the investor had purchased, OnLive Reloaded, maybe? There would still be some that were cut, but with the remaining employees, they've said that OnLive's IP would be moved over to the new company, but this leaves the ex-staffers' shares to be wondered about.

This then lead to news of their shares in the company, those shares would not be transferred to the new company as the original is closing. CEO of Tiswaz Entertainment who is also an advisor to game developers and publishers, Kevin Dent has had quite a lot to say of the matter, but on the matter of the employees shares:

There's a juicy rumor making the rounds, but it is being reported by the New York Post, and not by some vague blog. But, it looks like KKR and Providence Equity Partners have been in discussions with EA, with the talks at "very early stages".

We've seen EA's share prices drop 37% this year, but the rumors have spiked their stock prices by close to 5.5% ,or 72 cents, seeing them hit $13.81 thanks to the talks. EA's market cap sits at around $4 billion with one source saying they would be willing to cut a deal if it were at $20 per share.

One of the weirder things going on with EA, is that they've been slowly buying back stock from investors, which could be a preemptive move if they were considering putting up a 'for sale' sign. EA hasn't only been watching their share prices tank, they've not been able to make success in the market lately. This comes down to gamers not willing to part their hard-earned cash for a new game at the current $60-or-so pricing, instead, they're jumping on mobile and casual games which can be played for free.

Apple and Google are probably rolling in piles and piles of cash right now, thanks to their ever-so-popular and cash-generating iTunes and Play Stores, respectively. But, portable game console makers (among other things) Sony and Nintendo aren't too happy with Android and iOS devices, as they're more than powerful enough to play high-quality games these days.

Considering that high-end tablets such as Apple's iPad, ASUS' Transformer range, or Samsung's Galaxy range, are more powerful than most of Sony or Nintendo's portable gaming systems, I don't see the complaint. Stay stagnant, and this is what happens. Fortune reports from the latest research of Flurry Analytics, which shows that Android and iOS-based devices accounting for 58% of all mobile gaming revenue in the US.

This left Sony's PlayStation Vita and Nintendo's 3DS for just 36% of the mobile gaming revenue in the US. If we rewind the clock back to 2009, Nintendo were enjoying 70% of that, all to themselves. How times have changed. Are you surprised? I'm not. This is why I've been so heavy-hearted on the next-gen consoles. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have to hit the ball out of the park, hardware-wise, to stay current and on top of things against the onslaught of tablets and mobile devices.

It was only back in April that we reported that Apple were investing heavily into an Oregon-based datacenter, putting up $250 million for the site. Well, now it seems that the Cupertino-based company has filed their plans with the city of Prineville, where its goal has been revealed for the datacenter.

The Oregon datacenter is to take up 500,000 square feet of datacenter space, which is around the same as Apple's Maiden, North Carolina facility. The Associated Press reports:

The report also notes that Apple are partnering up Prineville on expanding the city's water supply by accessing a newly-discovered underground stream. Under the inked deal, Apple will help out converting some existing test wells into production wells in order to meet the company's needs, and beyond, with Prineville reimbursing Apple over time.

The United States government just can't seem to catch a break when it comes to the MegaUpload/Kim Dotcom lawsuit. First, the warrant used to raid his house has been overturned by New Zealand. Then, his extradition hearing was pushed all the way back to March, 2013. Now, a New Zealand court has ruled that the FBI must release all evidence against him for his extradition hearing.

This strikes a major blow to the United States as the FBI has been doing their best to keep their evidence secret. The New Zealand court has made a logical argument in which they state that "severely restrict[ing] the ability of [one party] to file relevant evidence would not easily be characterised as 'fair.'"

The New Zealand court asserts that there is no reason that the evidence cannot be presented in New Zealand and subsequently presented in the United States. Furthermore, the court cites the Bill of Rights Act and it's requirements for a fair hearing. Some interesting sections of the ruling follow:

The Apple vs. Samsung trial is coming to an end, but before we get there, Samsung started their day in court on Monday with some very interesting things to say. Apple have been playing dirty in court from day one, stating that Samsung knowingly stole its technology and designs by very meticulously examining each key element of the iPhone's UI and mimicking it on their own products.

Samsung, rather than deny doing anything wrong, decided to play hard ball - prove that Apple's technology patents aren't valid because they stole them to begin with. Samsung started off by talking about Apple's pinch-to-zoom patent, which Apple claim Samsung infringes upon by using the feature in most of Samsung's smartphones and tablets.

BGR goes into a technology called "Diamond Touch" which was shown to the court by Samsung's legal team on a massive touchscreen table built by Mitsubishi, where they showed the jury that Apple's patent on pinch-to-zoom technology shouldn't be valid because the technology had existed for years before the first iPhone hit the market. Samsung took a stab after, suggesting Apple knowingly stole the technology when its witness, Mitsubishi engineer Adam Bogue, testified that he showed the Cupertino-based company's engineers the Diamond Touch tech back in 2003.

In a scary ruling, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that law enforcement can use GPS data from a cell phone without a warrant. The ruling came down in a 2-1 verdict and liked the GPS data of a cellphone to the scent given off, and subsequently caught by a dog. Furthermore, the fact he obtained it voluntarily seemed to be a deciding factor for the court.

"There is no Fourth Amendment violation because Skinner did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data given off by his voluntarily procured pay-as-you-go cell phone," wrote Judge John Rogers. "If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal."

The ruling is contrary to the Jones v. United States case decided by the Supreme Court in January, 2012. In that case, agents put a physical tracking device on the suspect's vehicle. Since no physical intrusion occurred in this case, that ruling had no effect on the court in making their decision for this case.

Today, Corsair has announced that they have acquired certain assets of Raptor Gaming in order to get a better hold in retail sales. Raptor Gaming has a strong retail presence in Germany, the largest market for video gaming in Europe, and this is what Corsair hopes to be able to do with this acquisition.

Corsair has acquired from Raptor Gaming its full product portfolio of keyboards, mice, headsets, and accessories. These new products will be used in a new line alongside of Corsair's currently existing Vengeance gaming products. Raptor Gaming executives CEO Dirk Schunk and COO Heinz-Dieter Ludwig will work with Corsair to ensure a smooth transition.

"Corsair and Raptor share the same goal, bringing best-in-class PC hardware to gamers around the world," said Andy Paul, President and CEO of Corsair. "Raptor Gaming's strong retail presence will allow us to offer a wider range of PC hardware to gamers across Germany."

The late Steve Jobs' home was broken into recently, where thieves stole more than $60,000 worth of "computers and personal items" from the former CEO of Apple, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Jobs' house is on the 2100 block of Waverley Street in Palo Alto, and was broken into on July 17.

It was on August 2, however, that police arrested Kariem McFarlin, a 35-year-old man from Alameda. Fast forward to August 7, McFarlin was arraigned on one count of residential burglary and selling stolen property. McFarlin's bail has been set at a hefty $500,000, with the man potentially facing a sentence as long as seven years and eight months, this includes an extra year for "excessive taking of property" according to Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Tom Flattery.

Flattery hasn't yet said if the stolen property included some of Jobs' posthumous possessions or if it instead belonged to other members of his family. Police and DA's office have kept the mouth's sealed on details of the case, but Flattery does hint that McFarlin didn't know that the house he was breaking into belonged to Steve Jobs, the attorney says "the best we can tell is it was totally random".

Turns out NVIDIA doesn't think to highly of Intel integrated graphics, who would have figured? They apparently feel that the HD4000 series is the same as HD3000 series in that they are both incapable of playing 40% of games. KitGuru turned to an expert to analyse the slide, and the expert happened to be from Intel.

The slide, seen above, contains quite of bit of information about the testing NVIDIA performed. "If nVidia claims that over 40% of the top games are unplayable on Intel HD4000, then that's simply not true", said Huddy. The idea is that Intel graphics are unable to play top 2011 games at the lowest settings and provide over 30 FPS.

Of course, Intel denies these claims. It's true, if you want the best of the best performance, you'll have to go to a dedicated solution from AMD or NVIDIA, but Intel's integrated solution is better in recent years and will allow playing to occur on laptops and value desktops. Intel, due to the number of CPUs it ships, is the largest GPU provider.

Sorry for the attention-grabbing headline, but it really is necessary because this is quite the bizarro world right now to read, and report on this. But, Apple are licensing some of their iOS design patents to Microsoft.

The news was unveiled during the ongoing patent slapping game between Apple and Samsung, with a Reuters reporter commenting that the information came from Boris Teksler, Apple's director of patent licensing and strategy, who went on to explain that the deal also features an "anticloning" agreement.

Ian Sherr, a reporter for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal has said that the design patents are covered under a cross-licensing agreement that the two heavyweight company's have set up.

Demonoid was taken down by a DDoS attack on July 24, with early reports suggesting that the site's downtime was temporary. But, it has gotten a lot worse: Ukranian authorities have announced they ordered ColoCall, the nation's largest datacenter and host of Demonoid, to disable to site and hand over data.

This would've been a coordinated, international effort, but it wasn't clear if Demonoid was being used as a "gift" from the Ukraine to the US. We've seen how the US wants to play dirty against MegaUpload, and founder Kim Dotcom, but this is crazy. London-based international record label consortium, IFPI, and INTERPOL have since revealed they were involved in organizing the strike, which wasn't limited to Ukraine.

It seems as though Mexican authorities are involved, too, as they have reportedly made more than one arrest as well as seizing assets. IFPI anti-piracy director, Jeremy Banks has said:

Rumors are circling that AMD could be an acquisition target, and these rumors have inflated AMD's share prices by close to 8%, where they hit $4.34 per share. MarketWatch hasn't gone into much length about the rumors themselves, where they've only quoted Evercore Partners analyst Patrick Wang.

Wang has said that Qualcomm and Samsung were both potential buyers with a possible bid on the chipmaker. Wang doesn't believe the rumors have much solidity, where he says "I think it's unlikely they get a take-out offer". But, we've seen what acquisition talks can do to a company's share prices, where rumors of OCZ being scooped up by Seagate saw OCZ's shares blow up by 22%.

EE Times' reporter Syvie Barak wrote a story listing the potential candidates of an AMD acquisition, where she pointed out Qualcomm as the number one suspect. She notes that Qualcomm have already acquired assets from AMD's done-and-dusted handheld business a few years ago. Barak also notes that by acquiring AMD, it would give Qualcomm "increased leverage with manufacturing partners like TSMC and Globalfoundries".

Google: "Don't be evil." However, it would appear that the Federal Trade Commission feels that Google might have overstepped that by a wee bit, okay, a large bit, judging by the size of the fine levied against the company over the Safari tracking incident. The FTC announced today that Google has agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle the claim, the largest fine ever levied by the FTC.

The FTC charges that Google "misrepresented to users of Apple Inc.'s Safari Internet browser that it would not place tracking 'cookies' or serve targeted ads to those users, violating an earlier privacy settlement between the company and the FTC." Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC:

Of course, for its part, Google has a differing opinion on the matter:

The New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has taken the covers off of a new crime-fighting system developed by Microsoft. Bloomberg also revealed that New York City will take a cut of the profits if the system is sold to other administrators.

The new system will give police the ability to quickly gather and visualize massive amounts of data from multiple sources such as cameras, license plate readers, 911 calls, police databases, and more. Once it collates the data, it then displays the information in real-time, both visually and chronologically, giving investigations a central location to look into crimes as they happen, or as they're reported.

The new system has been dubbed "Domain Awareness System", and was developed by Microsoft engineers who worked with New York police officers. DAS for short, has the ability to host a features, such as being capable of spotting a suspicious looking vehicle, and being able to track its recent movements, or use cameras to track back and see who left a suspicious package. DAS sports live video feeds, massive databases of recent crime patterns and can accept input direct from the field in real-time from sources like 911 calls or police radios. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has said "all the information is presented visually and geographically and in chronological context".

According to a piece on Reuters, Amazon is looking to scoop up a bunch of intellectual property (IP) experts to help them enter the patent acquisition and licensing game, after seeing the patent war between Apple, Google, and more.

Amazon have reportedly hired executive recruiting firm Argos Search in order to help Amazon hire an IP "Acquisition and Investment Leader" that can "identify and evaluate strategic IP acquisition and licensing opportunities" according to a job description that Reuters had fall into their hands. The person Amazon hires will work close with all of Amazon's technology team's and leaders on future product development, according to the document. Amazon said in their job posting:

This means that Amazon are looking to grow their patent portfolio, through any means, be it acquisitions of patent-holding companies, outright purchases of patents or licensing, and more. This move shows that Amazon is in the game for the long run, but is it the best method? The way I see it, you have to play dirty against the other players that are playing the game, which is the way it was created.

This is something you don't see or hear everyday, but a few nights ago a Kentucky-based woman was forced to walk into an Apple Store with her kidnapper, who was forcing her to purchase goods on her credit cards. But an alert Apple Store employee came to her rescue, and she is now safe and the kidnapper is in prison.

Police have said that the woman met the man, who called himself "Greg", when he arranged a date with her. When they first met, "Greg" showed up to her house and forced her into his car at gunpoint. While holding a gun to her, he forced her to drive around to a handful of stores to purchase cellphones in her own name, with her own money.

"Greg" and his victim then drove to an Apple Store in Louisville, where they tried to buy some Apple products from one of the in-store Geniuses:

Samsung have been accused by activist group China Labor Watch of a bunch of infractions, with one of them being quite serious: employing workers as young as 14 years old at its supplier's factory in China. Samsung, in response to the allegations, issued a statement where the company said they've re-inspect the factory in question, but have claimed that it had previously passed all inspections. Samsung said:

China Labor Watch didn't just find underage employees, but the factory's management would reportedly abuse workers, and also failed to treat, or compensate those who experienced work-related injuries. It doesn't stop there, with more accusations that the factory forced excessive overtime, sometimes to as much as 11 hours per day with just a single meal break, in 'extremely dangerous conditions'. Also, those who reported product defect were fined severely, rather than rewarded.

The China Labor Watch concluded their report by saying: