When Apple hired former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch — yes, the same guy who watched and lamely whined while Apple basically killed Flash by declaring it a wholly unnecessary and archaic web technology that had no place in the mobile age of computing — there was a lot of head scratching. What would Kevin Lynch be doing at Apple?
Well, here’s one theory: he’s heading a team made up largely of former iPod employees, and he’s working on the iWatch.
U.S. District Judge Robert Scola believes Apple and Google-owned Motorola are more interested in using litigation as a business strategy than they are in resolving patent disputes. Both companies accused each other of infringing patents related to wireless technologies back in 2010, and today the case is still on going.
“The parties have no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute; they instead are using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end,” said Judge Scola in an order dated yesterday. “That is not a proper use of this court.”
We’ve seen a lot of nutty fake iPhone prototype mockups. Most of them are based off the whims of some artsy designer, but this lastest concept is a even whackier because it’s a Photoshop rendering based off an actual Apple patent.
In the future, smartphones might look like this. I sure hope not. What’s the benefit of having a slightly curved display rather than a flat surface? Won’t videos look weird and distorted on a curved display? Plus, what’s up with the volume rocker on the edge of the display? If anything, Apple’s latest patent shows us that while some ideas might look cool on paper, the actual product would be a joke.
Source: NoWhereElse
Apple has been forced to change the way in which its VPN On Demand feature works on iOS devices following a patent lawsuit it lost last November. The Cupertino company has published a new knowledge base article to explain to users how the change will affect their devices.
After Judge Lucy Koh decided to invalidate $450.5 million of the original damages owed to Apple in its trial against Samsung, most of the press believed this meant Apple wasn’t going to get anywhere near the original $1.05 billion owed to it by Samsung. Turns out everyone was probably wrong.
Even though Judge Koh ordered a new trial to determine the proper damages to award Apple for 14 of the 28 infringing Samsung devices, Apple could actually get more than the original $1.05 billion figure.
The iPad mini is one of Apple’s biggest successes to date, but that doesn’t matter to the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has turned down Apple’s request for a trademark on the iPad mini because it is “merely descriptive.”
Facebook invited the media to “Come See Our New Home On Android” on April 4.
The most likely prediction for Facebook’s project, code-named “Buffy,” is that it’s a modified, Facebook-centric version of Android on an HTC handset with a promise of other handsets — some insiders call it an “application layer.”
The dark horse contender is a Facebook-branded phone.
That’s great, right? Facebook has now friended Google and will join the growing family of Android-loving companies. Uh, right?
Wrong. Facebook is joining the club of Google’s enemies who are using Android to take business away from Google.
The worst thing that could possibly happen to Apple has now happened: The company has run afoul of the authoritarian government of China.
Gatekeepers of the world’s largest and one of the fastest growing markets for every product Apple makes, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled government has decided to stop and reverse Apple’s growth in the country.
Here’s what’s going on.
Apple can’t catch a break in China lately. The Chinese state run press has been targeting Apple in a series of increasingly vicious attack pieces, while Apple simultaneously defends itself in court against allegations of patent violation. Now, China’s oldest animation studio is accusing Apple of stealing their movies and selling them on the iTunes store, without paying a cent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ku0H10_G1X4
One of the curses of being an innovator is every time you innovate, someone comes along and says they had a patent on it first. Apple knows this dilemma well, and the latest patent infringement claim Cupertino has to defend itself against is in China over Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.