Blackberry maker loses patent suit over software

A federal jury in San Francisco has found beleaguered Blackberry maker Research in Motion Ltd. liable for $147.2 million in damages for infringing on patents held by Mformation Technologies Inc.

Amar Thakur, a lawyer for Mformation, said Saturday that the verdict late Friday followed a three-week trial and a week of deliberations by an eight-person jury.

Mformation, of Edison, N.J., sued Research in Motion in October 2008, alleging that Canada-based RIM infringed on its 1999 invention for remotely managing wireless devices. Mformation's software allows companies to remotely access employee cell phones to do software upgrades, change passwords or to wipe data from phones that have been stolen.

Officials at RIM, which has been struggling with plummeting sales, a declining stock and other problems, did not provide a comment Saturday.

Thakur said the jury ruled that Research in Motion should pay his client $8 for each of the 18.4 million Blackberrys that were connected to the Blackberry Enterprise Server, from the day the lawsuit was filed until the time of the trial. That's a total of $147.2 million.

He said the software at issue is the heart of the business of Mformation, a privately held company with several hundred employees.

"We believe it's been fundamental to the success of Research in Motion," Thakur told The Associated Press.

The patent at issue was filed in 2001 and issued in 2005, he said.

RIM, of Waterloo, Ontario, has previously denied it did anything wrong.

RIM has seen its business crumble as it increasingly loses market share. Today's consumers want smartphones that go far beyond handling e-mail and phone calls, with built-in cameras and other cool functions.

Particularly telling is the plunge in the Blackberry's U.S. market share. It's dropped from 41 percent in 2007, the year the first iPhone came out, to below 4 percent in the first three months of this year, according to research firm IDC.

Meanwhile, RIM will miss a chance to bounce back because of repeated delays on its BlackBerry 10 operating software, which is intended to help Blackberrys catch up to rivals such as the iPhone and smartphones running Google's Android software. Not only will devices with the new Blackberry software miss the crucial holiday shopping season, they'll have even more competition when they do go on sale, including a new iPhone expected from Apple this fall.

Last month, RIM reported weaker than expected results. For the quarter that ended on June 2, it lost $518 million, or 99 cents a share. Even after excluding impairment charges, the loss was 37 cents per share. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting a 3-cent per share loss. Revenue fell 43 percent to $2.8 billion, and RIM said it will be cutting 5,000 jobs, or 30 percent of its workforce.

Yahoo, Facebook strike patent truce, ad alliance

Facebook and Yahoo have agreed to settle a months-long patent dispute, averting a potentially expensive battle over the technology running two of the Internet's most popular destinations.

In dropping the lawsuits, the companies agreed to license their patents to each other and form an advertising and content-sharing alliance that expands their existing partnership. Friday's settlement involves no exchange of money.

Now that the antagonism is dissolving into an accord that could benefit both companies, the hundreds of millions of Web surfers who use both Yahoo and Facebook should find even more common ground on the two services..

The advertising alliance could help Yahoo recover some of the revenue that it has been losing as marketers shift more of their spending to a larger and more engaged audience on Facebook's online social network. Facebook, in turn, gains the opportunity to show the ads tailored to fit the individual interests of its 900 million users in other heavily trafficked areas besides its own website.

The truce ends a conflict provoked by Yahoo's short-lived CEO, Scott Thompson, who was dumped from the job two months ago after misinformation on his official biography raised questions about his integrity.

Under Thompson, Yahoo filed the patent lawsuit in March, wielding it as a weapon against a company that Thompson believed had been prospering from the ideas of its older rival. The complaint alleged that Facebook infringed on 10 Yahoo patents covering Internet advertising, privacy controls and social networks. Yahoo Inc. later added two more patents to the lawsuit.

But Thompson's attack on Facebook Inc. quickly turned into a public-relations disaster. Much of the technology industry railed against Yahoo's tactics. Critics viewed the lawsuit as a financial shakedown by a desperate company whose well of innovation had run dry.

New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson summed up the enmity toward Yahoo in an acerbic blog post that ended with this denouement: "I am writing this in outrage at Yahoo. I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now."

When Yahoo replaced Thompson in May with interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, it opened the door for the company to settle the dispute under a reshuffled board of directors. Six of Yahoo's 11 directors joined the board after the patent suit was filed.

Yahoo's legal assault had exposed Facebook's vulnerability to patent claims as it prepared to complete the biggest initial public offering of stock by an Internet company. Facebook insulated itself by buying 750 patents from IBM Corp. for an undisclosed amount and spending $550 million to acquire another 650 patents that one of its biggest shareholders, Microsoft Corp., had purchased from AOL Inc. Armed with its own arsenal of intellectual property, Facebook signaled that it wasn't backing down and filed its own patent infringement lawsuit against Yahoo in April.

With Thompson out, Levinsohn quickly began working on a deal with Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The two issued statements Friday praising each other for working toward an agreement.

Yahoo already had been tying many of its services and content to Facebook before the lawsuit was filed. Now the two companies plan to display ads on each other's sites, while Yahoo plans to feed even more of its coverage of major events to the social network.

Although it has been growing at a robust clip, Facebook is still trying to win over skeptical investors. Doubts about the company's revenue potential have weighed on Facebook's stock, which has remained well below its IPO price of $38. The stock gained 26 cents, or nearly 1 percent, to close Friday at $31.73.

Yahoo is trying to snap out of a long-running financial funk brought up by Facebook's success and Google Inc.'s dominance of Internet search and advertising.

Yahoo has gone through four fulltime CEOs in five years in the hopes of engineering a turnaround and sparking revenue growth. The foibles have depressed Yahoo's stock, frustrating shareholders still angry about a squandered opportunity to sell the entire company to Microsoft in May 2008 for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share.

The stock dipped 7 cents to close at $15.78 Friday.

The Facebook pact may have pushed Levinsohn closer to being anointed as Yahoo's permanent CEO. Jason Kilar, CEO of online TV service Hulu, had been under serious consideration for the top job at Yahoo, but Hulu said Friday that he had decided not to pursue the position. The statement was issued in response to several published reports citing unnamed people who described Kilar as Levinsohn's primary competition for the Yahoo post.

Ice Cream Sandwich is the third favorite flavor of Android

Although Google continues to make improvements to its Android mobile operating system, users of devices designed to run it are still a few steps behind. According to the latest stats released by the search engine giant, only 10% of Android device owners are running version 4.0 of the software, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.

The most-used variant, Gingerbread (Android 2.3), was released in December 2010 and has an install base of 64%. After that is Froyo (Android 2.2) at 17.3% and Eclair (Android 2.1) at 4.7%. Ice Cream Sandwich debuted in October 2011 on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and, according to Google, is compatible with any device that's able to run Gingerbread.

That said, there's a good reason why all those devices that should be able to run it aren't: fragmentation. Hardware manufacturers actually need to tweak Android releases in order to make them work with each individual device, which means that older handsets and tablets are pretty low on their priority lists. What's more, cellular carriers have to agree to roll out each version of Android to each device individually. Time will tell if Android 4.1, aka Jelly Bean — which made its debut on the new Nexus 7 tablet from Google — fares better in this regard than its frozen-snack-themed predecessor.

Microsoft debuts Windows Phone 8

Microsoft took the wraps off its next-generation mobile operating system Windows Phone 8 (codenamed Apollo) and revealed it would be arriving on brand new Nokia, Huawei Samsung and HTC phones soon.

Google unveils first tablet

Google Inc unveiled its first tablet PC on June 27, as the Internet company looks to replicate its smartphone success in a tablet market where it faces stiff competition from Apple Inc, Microsoft and Amazon.

Hugo Barra, Director of Google Product Management, holds up the new Google Nexus7 tablet at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Wednesday, June 27, 2012.