Google Inc. (GOOG), the largest Web search provider, didn’t infringe Oracle Corp. (ORCL)’s patents in developing Android software, a federal jury found in the second phase of an intellectual property trial in San Francisco. The 10-person jury ruled unanimously today that neither of the two patents at issue was infringed. Immediately after the verdict was announced, the judge dismissed the jury from the case and canceled the third phase of the trial over damages.
Oracle had alleged that Google violated two key Java patents. Oracle had sought $1 billion in damages. This may not be over – Oracle may still sue Google for copyright damages, according to the report.
The LogYourRun iPhone app was launched in the summer of 2009. It is coming up on 3 years now and I thought it might be interesting to do a short historic review of the evolution of the app to show some of the design and UI changes that the app has undergone during it’s life time. It has truly been an evolutionary process and I don’t think people with the current app would recognize the original incarnation of the app nor would they probably be too happy with the original version.
Seagate this morning announced plans to acquire LaCie, a Paris-based producer of consumer data storage devices, for at least $186 million.
Seagate has already agreed to buy a controlling stake in the company. Once that transaction has been completed, Seagate said it plans to buy the rest of LaCie’s shares in cash.
LaCie has long been front and center for Mac users as a supplier of storage peripherals. The company has featured hard drive enclosures designed by Porsche and Phillipe Starck, and supports Thunderbolt, the high-speed I/O interface Apple introduced in 2011 with the redesigned MacBook Pro.
The investors said the members of a proposed class action, or group lawsuit, have lost more than $2.5 billion since the initial public offering last week, in a complaint filed today in Manhattan federal court. They claimed Facebook and the banks didn’t disclose lower revenue estimates.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and others have been named in the lawsuit. The suit claims that Facebook isn’t selling as much advertising shown to mobile users, who make up the company’s greatest growth. The great majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. A lawyer for the plaintiffs says that underwriters lowered earnings estimates but failed to reveal this except to “a select group of investors.”
In related news, federal regulators are looking into the issue, and Massachusetts officials wasted no time in issuing a subpoena.
Blizzard’s latest release, Diablo III, sold 3.5 million in the first 24 hours on sale, setting a new record for the fastest selling PC game, and boasted 6.3 million players after a single week.
In retrospect, maybe it’s a bit more understandable now, when Blizzard had trouble scaling up the Battle.net servers to manage connections to this huge avalanche of new players.
Weber notes that when you factor in all the World of Warcraft players who bought an Annual Pass to get Diablo III for free, the number jumps from 3.5 to 4.7 million. 6.3 million gamers had jumped on board by the end of the first week. Just staggering.
“It’s a really tough one. A lot does seem to come back to the fact that what we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done, and so it would be what we’re working on right now, which of course I can’t tell you about.”
Reverse Engineering Rock and Roll: Capo is a revolutionary tool that helps you learn the music in your iTunes library. Available for your Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
Download the free trial for the Mac, and check out the new mastering-quality slowing engine that retains the detail in your music all the way down to quarter-speed!
Facebook’s Wall Street investment banks warned top clients of new doubts about the social network’s financial prospects just days before the company’s IPO, according to a series of reports that emerged Tuesday. After receiving briefings from Facebook executives, analysts at the banks lowered their financial forecasts for big institutional clients, some of whom scaled back plans to buy Facebook stock, even as the banks raised the IPO price and number of shares amid a frenzy of hype.
Creating great sounding tracks all starts before you hit Record for the first downbeat. Does your DAW rise above latency distractions and deliver the best sound quality possible? Avid’s Tom Graham, Brian Carter, and Gil Gowing share their tips and insight into tracking and mixing a full rock trio—during the actual recording session—using a host-based Pro Tools|HD Native system and ICON D-Control.
Steve Jobs may have built Apple into the world’s most valuable technology company in part by betting against the web. But global celebrities and some of the Internet’s brightest stars joined together to create a heartfelt tribute video honoring the legendary entrepreneur during Monday night’s Webby Awards in New York City.Barack Obama, Bono and Sarah Silverman were among roughly a dozen celebrities and political figures to appear in the video thanking Jobs for his company’s role in changing the technology world and everyday life for millions upon millions of digitally savvy consumers.
Dell posted first quarter sales, earnings, second quarter revenue guidance — you name it — well short of expectations Tuesday, sending shares of the Round Rock, Texas technology company were down more than 12% in after-hours trading.
If you like to hum along to your favorite tunes, you might want to pop by the iTunes App Store and download Let’s Sing, a new iPhone game that’s the creation of Lex Friedman and Marco Tabini. It’s available for free with an ad-supported version, or $4.99 if you prefer your gaming ad-free.
The game “combines the fun of karaoke or singing in the shower with Name That Tune.” OMGPOP’s Draw Something is another obvious inspiration. You’re given the choice between three different songs to whistle, hum, or “la-la-la” your way through (you can’t use the actual lyrics, though). The player on the receiving end has to guess the name of that song; if you’re both successful, you’re rewarded with gold coins which you can spend to reveal hints when you get stuck.
Let’s Sing works with the iPhone 3GS and later; it runs on the iPad as well, of course, but not as a universal app. An iPad-native version is coming and will be a free upgrade, according to the developers.
CCP Games announced Tuesday the launch of EVE Online: Inferno, the latest major expansion to the long running massively multiplayer online game for OS X and Windows. The update will be automatically applied the next time players log in.
EVE Online is an MMO set in future, on the other side of the universe where mankind has established a thriving network of star systems replete with interstellar trade, factional fighting and full-scale war. A “sandbox” MMO, EVE lets you pilot ships into battle, act as a mercenary, selling your fighting skills to the highest bidder, a miner, trader, manufacturer and other professions, creating incredibly detailed in-game characters complete with backstories.
The new Inferno expansion introduces features designed to encourage players towards more ship-to-ship combat. New missile launchers and effects have been created; war declarations have been reworked to help you wage war and keep track of your legacy; a Mercenary Marketplace has been created; factional warfare offers deeper gameplay for new players; visual updates have been made to ship models and character generation; and much more.
Both of these phones sport a new, larger display that is 3.95 inches diagonally. Apple will not just increase the size of the display and leave the current resolution, but will actually be adding pixels to the display. The new iPhone display resolution will be 640 x 1136. That’s an extra 176 pixels longer of a display. The screen will be the same 1.94 inches wide, but will grow to 3.45 inches tall. This new resolution is very close to a 16:9 screen ratio, so this means that 16:9 videos can play full screen at their native aspect ratio.
So, how hard it is for developers does not factor in Apple’s decision here. Rather, decisions are based on the resulting product; and then Apple works on making the transition as smooth as possible within that constraint. “Do I want this to happen?” is a different question to “Will it happen?”
I don’t agree with everything in this post, but the middle section is a good read.
The new media world has its pros and cons. The pros are that I’ve got a blog to set the record straight and that everybody is recording everything. The negatives are that bloggers don’t feel compelled to write accurate headlines and twitter can amplify the inaccuracies when those headlines get tweeted and retweeted.
TiVo Stream seamlessly delivers the content available on a consumer’s TiVo Premiere or Premiere Q DVR to alternative screens such as iPads and iPhones. Unlike similar offerings in the market, this is the first product to enable streaming or download of shows simultaneously to multiple portable devices without interrupting what’s playing on the television. The power of TiVo Stream enables users to quickly transfer shows to their mobile device for viewing outside the home.
When I see Kickstarter I don’t see a company. Instead, I see a social movement. I see people doing things for people. I think of Kickstarter as a reflection of me, which is why I engage with it.
That’s what so interesting about Kickstarter — the projects succeed or fail based on public support.
Panic, makers of Transmit, Unison and other products, announced Monday the forthcoming release of Coda 2, a new version of their Web editor for Mac OS X. They also introduced Diet Coda, a companion software app for the iPad. Both are coming Thursday, May 24th.
Coda 2 – a paid upgrade for users who purchased Coda more than a month or so ago – adds new features, an overhauled UI and more. The list of new features is too long to reproduce in its entirety here, so make sure to visit the Web site for details. But standout features include code folding support in the editor; new visual tabs in the interface; a new customizable sidebar; better file management, with support for Git; the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts; visual CSS editing with GUI pop-ups; a brand-new MySQL editor; better validation and more. Panic counts more than 100 new features all told.
A feature called AirPreview helps Coda for Mac tie into the companion Diet Coda app for iPad. You can use your iPad as a preview device.
Diet Coda is a Web code editor aimed specifically at iPad users. Features include fast syntax highlighting, remote-only editing using FTP or SFTP, Transmit-style file management, the Air Preview feature when used with Coda for Mac, “clip” support (for snippets of code) and more. It’s priced at $9.99.
Both will be on sale for 50 percent off during the first 24 hours of release, on Thursday, May 24.
We all know Ping is kind of shit. Well, not kind of. It is shit. But I’ve been thinking recently (dangerous, I know) and I reckon there are a few ways that it can be rescued. Apple’s failed attempt at “social” is not dead yet.
I don’t think Apple knows what to do with Ping. That seems clear because users don’t know what to do with it either. I don’t know that a separate app is the way to go because social networking and sharing is such an impulsive decision — it almost has to be done on the spot.
Elgato on Monday unveiled their Game Capture, a new device intended for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 users who want to record game footage onto a Mac or PC. It costs $199.95 and will be available starting June 1st.
The USB 2.0 interface is about the size of a deck of cards, and requires no power supply to connect. It tethers to your Xbox 360 using HDMI, or your PS3 using an AV input. It can capture 480i, 576p, 720p and 1080i resolution video, encoding them on-the-fly using H.264 video compression. (The reason Game Capture HD doesn’t capture video from a PS3 using HDMI is because Sony HDCP protection; Microsoft doesn’t.)
Included software lets you timeshift the video you’re saving, edit and share; either by creating a local movie file you can do what you will with, or through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or e-mail. You can send the video to your iTunes library, stream it to an Apple TV, or share it with other video editing applications like iMovie.
System requirements call for a OS X 10.7 or later, a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster, 4 GB RAM and an available USB 2.0 port.
Lemkesoft has released GraphicConverter 8.0, a major new release for the graphic conversion and editing utility. This latest version adds support for 64-bit Intel-based Macs and new batch processing capabilities among many other additions.
GraphicConverter 8.0 is a free update for owners of GraphicConverter 7, but is a paid upgrade of $29.95 for users with versions 1 through 6. If you’ve never bought it before – and you should – it’s $39.95.
While you’ve been working hard and paying attention to the songs, the parts, the sounds, and all the other big-picture stuff, maybe something’s just ever so slightly out of tune. I’m not talking about the really obvious slightly sharp high E string on the rhythm guitar; sometimes it’s the subtle stuff that makes all the difference.
Nothing like an out of tune instrument to kill recording.
The Supreme Court has refused to hear a Boston University student’s constitutional challenge to a $675,000 penalty for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet, but his lawyer says there’s still a chance the amount could be reduced.
