Apple’s recently open-sourced programming language, Swift, may be seeing itself get adopted into Google’s Android platform in the future. Sources have told The Next Web that Google is “considering making Swift a ‘first class’ language for Android”.
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Fresh off their landmark deal with Apple, IBM reports that around 60% of the leading Android dating apps include vulnerabilities that risk both personal and corporate data.
The report, which didn’t examine the iOS counterparts of any dating apps, found that 60% of the apps it examined included vulnerabilities that allow for either malware, the ability to track a user via GPS or the device’s microphone or camera, or steal credit card information.
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The latest enterprise market share data from Good Technology shows that Android gained five points from iOS, hitting almost a third of the market at 32 percent while iOS fell from 72 to 67 percent. Windows Phone remains flat (and irrelevant) at just 1 percent. (BlackBerry data is not included as the company uses its own servers and activations are invisible to Good Technology.)
What’s particularly impressive about the numbers is that Good’s technology mostly connects mobile devices to Exchange servers and organizations that use Google services for enterprise, which are more likely to Android, aren’t being counted here…
Photo: reuters.com
Google’s Open Source Blog advises that Google has moved from an associate to a full board member of the Open Invention Network, an organisation designed to cross-licence Linux patents to reduce the risk of being sued by patent trolls.
Open-source software like Linux has spurred huge innovation in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet in general. Linux now powers nearly all the world’s supercomputers, runs the International Space Station, and forms the core of Android. But as open source has proliferated, so have the threats against it, particularly using patents. That’s why we’re expanding our participation in Open Invention Network (OIN), becoming the organization’s first new full board member since 2007.
Companies that join the network are guaranteed protection from being sued by other members, provided that they make the same promise. Google will now sit alongside IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony on the board.
Google’s former head of patents, Michelle Lee, was recently named as the new interim head of the US Patent & Trademark Office, promising faster processing of applications and ‘higher quality’ patents – diplomatic language for greater barriers to patent trolls.
Google acquired 217 patents from IBM, according to SEO by the Sea. Google’s most recent acquisition of patents from IBM, completed in the last week of December, comes after acquiring patents last summer. SEO by the Sea discovered the acquisition from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and we do not know the exact details currently. Google will most likely send out a letter giving exact figures soon.
Of the 217 patents, 188 were granted. Twenty-nine of them are patents pending that have been published. The patents Google acquired range from video conferencing to instant messaging. Some of the noteworthy patents include modifying web pages for mobile devices, collecting data from NFC, rendering a section of a webpage, transferring webpages between mobile devices, voice based keyboard search, and a “computer phone.”
Last summer, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for its 17,000 published patents and almost 7,500 pending patents. The acquisition is still going through, but Google put up $12.5 billion for the company. Google continues to strengthen its patent portfolio to protect itself from lawsuits.
In January of 2010, Kodak sued Apple and RIM for infringing on their patent to preview photographs. The lawsuit is still going on, but today Wall Street Journal is reporting that Kodak is currently looking to sell 10% of their patent portfolio, which includes the patent Apple and RIM are bring sued for.
The 1,100 patents include patents covering capturing, storing, organizing and sharing digital image. WSJ credits the sale to Kodak’s loss in profit over the last two quarters.
Chief Executive Antonio Perez has been using Kodak’s intellectual property as a means of funding the company’s long and expensive transformation. In 2008, Mr. Perez put forth a goal to generate between $250 million and $350 million a year from Kodak’s patent portfolio.
Google is fresh off acquiring 1,000 patents from IBM and is likely still in a buying mood as it battles everyone from Oracle to Microsoft to Apple-by-proxy in the courts. Apple, who outbid Google for the Nortel patent portfolio is obviously on the offensive.
Corss-posted from 9to5Mac.
Anticipating Android backers will face legal hurdles as Apple now has the upper hand in its case against HTC (here and here), Google has stepped up and bought more than a thousand IBM patents for an undisclosed sum. The news was first reported by the blog SEO by the Sea and picked up by The Wall Street Journal. The search company might use IBM inventions as a leverage against pending lawsuits that indirectly involve its Android software.
Google failed to outbid the Apple-led consortium which paid $4.5 billion for Nortel’s treasure chest of more than 6,000 patents covering wireless technologies, among them crucial inventions related to fourth-generation cellular networks. The new patent deal is in line with Google’s focus on snapping up patent portfolios left and right in creating a “disincentive for others to sue Google”, as noted on their official blog back in April. The 1,030 granted patents Google bought from IBM cover varied technologies, including…
Oracle purchased Sun for $7.4B in 2009. The deal closed at the outset of 2010 and some wondered why Oracle had outbid IBM for the hardware/software giant. Today we finally hear how much Oracle is after in its suit against Google over Android’s use of Java: $1.5 – $6 Billion. That means that Oracle could recover more than half of the purchase price. Perhaps most? Just from one intellectual property suit.
Java pioneer and recent Google hire James Gosling gave a hint to what was to come when he resigned from Oracle right after the purchase
During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code.
So, it seems that Oracle always had some Google Java money baked into its purchase price. That’s why it could outbid IBM so spectacularly.
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