As part of the $1.5 billion dollar settlement between Intel and NVIDIA, Ars Technica reports that Intel is planning on integrating NVIDIA GPUs into their future chips.
“The cross-licensing agreement allows Intel to integrate NVIDIA technologies and those that are covered by our patents into their CPUs, such as Sandy Bridge, for example,” said Jen-Hsuan. “And a cross-license allows us to build processors and take advantage of Intel patents for the types of processor we’re building–Project Denver, Tegra, and the types of processors we’re going to build in the future.”
While NVIDIA CEO reconfirmed they have no intention of reentering the chipset market, the use of NVIDIA GPUs as Intel’s integrated graphics chip could accomplish the same basic result for end users. Apple has been slow to adopt the latest Intel chips for their low end machines, possibly due to the poor GPU performance of Intel’s existing integrated graphics chips.
Powered By iWebRSS.com
Reuters reports that Nortel Networks, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and is selling off all of its assets, is soliciting bidders for its extensive patent portfolio, and Apple is rumored to be one of the major players looking to acquire the rights as it seeks to beef up its arsenal in the increasingly-litigious mobile space.
Sources expect the sale to draw wireless telecom newcomers Apple and Google, which want to build up patent war chests as they fight incumbents such as Nokia, which want to protect their patent positions, in the courts.
“There has been one round of bidding on those patents, this has been completed,” said one source, who declined to be identified because the process is private. “And what Nortel has done is divide the patents up into different lots covering different kinds of technologies.”
According to the report, Nortel owns over 4,000 patents estimated to be worth over $1 billion, although Apple would almost certainly not be interested in acquiring all of Nortel’s intellectual property assets and would instead focus on only the “buckets” of patents that most directly apply to its mobile products and technologies.
The patents likely to draw the most attention relate to third- and fourth-generation wireless technology such as Long Term Evolution, with device-makers such as Research In Motion, Motorola, and Apple seen as likely bidders.
“It is certainly a very significant stockpile of potent weaponry, and whoever lays their hands on it is going to gain significant advantage,” said Alexander Poltorak, chief executive of General Patent Corp, which advises companies on intellectual property strategy and valuation but is not advising anyone involved in the Nortel patent auction.
One research firm has estimated that there are 105 patent families deemed essential to deployment of LTE (4G) technology, with Nokia controlling 57 of those families. Ericsson is said to control 14 families, while Nortel, Qualcomm, and Sony are each reported to control about seven families.
The mobile space currently involves a convoluted network of patent lawsuits in which companies are seeking to gain the upper hand over their rivals in the competitive market. Apple, which has been the most-sued technology company over the past several years, is currently suing or being sued by a number of companies, including Nokia, Motorola, HTC, and Kodak.
Powered By iWebRSS.com
As noted by InformationWeek, Apple has expressed interest in using somewhat similar technologies, as well as its own multi-touch gesture control, for interacting with such devices as kitchen appliances and vehicles. The revelation comes from a patent assignment in which inventor Timothy Pryor transferred his interest in three patents and ten pending patent applications to Apple, an assignment that was made in March of this year.
The various patents and patent applications have to do with the control of machines, specifically through a combination of touch screens and video sensing. They include titles like “Man Machine Interfaces For Entering Data Into A Computer” and “Programmable Tactile Touch Screen Displays And Man-Machine Interfaces For Improved Vehicle Instrumentation And Telematics.”
While the oldest of the patents included in the transfer was filed over fifteen years, ago, the ten patent applications have all been filed since August 2007.
One patent application in particular, entitled “Control of Appliances, Kitchen and Home”, describes how a rear-projection display and sensing array could be used on a kitchen countertop or directly on appliances or other surfaces to detect the user’s motions and assist with food preparation while also providing access to other home automation and Internet-related functionality directly from the countertop.
“Machine vision sensing, coupled with suitable computer software, can also, as disclosed in my referenced applications, determine gesture commands in space made by a person, and can determine various features of the person or objects they are working with, or in some cases their movements and action,” the patent application says.
Pryor’s patent application proposes touch-enabled appliance surfaces that can control a multitude of appliances and “can ease kitchen and house work, while allowing the user to share time for home functions with Internet shopping, social networking and the like.”
Obviously, it is unclear exactly what, if anything, Apple plans to do with the intellectual property it acquired from Pryor. It seems possible that Apple may simply have been moving to lock in ownership of some aspects of the inventions that relate in some way to the company’s vision of implementations for multi-touch functionality in general, but clearly Apple has a significant interest in Pryor’s work given its acquisition of a significant number of patents and patent applications.
Powered By iWebRSS.com
The Wall Street Journal reports that Interval Licensing, a patent licensing firm run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed to protect the intellectual property of Allen’s former technology incubator company Interval Research Corporation, has filed suit against Apple and ten other companies over several patents related to e-commerce and Web search technologies.
Mr. Allen, 57, Friday through his firm Interval Licensing LLC filed suit in federal court in Seattle asserting the companies are using technology from his laboratory. Named in the suit, along with Apple and Google, are AOL Inc., eBay Inc., Facebook Inc., Netflix Inc., Office Depot Inc., OfficeMax Inc., Staples Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Google’s YouTube subsidiary.
The suit doesn’t name Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. or other technology firms in Seattle where Mr. Allen is based. The suit doesn’t estimate a damage amount.
According to a press release issued by Interval Licensing, four patents are at stake in the lawsuit:
- United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
- United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
- United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
- United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”
The press release claims that the technologies are “fundamental” to the operation of leading e-commerce and search companies and the firm is merely looking to protect its own investments in innovation. According to The Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit marks a major shift for Allen in his increasingly aggressive efforts to protect the intellectual property developed at Interval Research during the 1990s.
Powered By iWebRSS.com
MPEG LA, the group that oversees licensing for a number of Internet media standards, today announced that Internet broadcast content using the H.264 video coding standard will remain royalty-free for the entire life of the license, quashing fears that the standard could suddenly become subject to royalty payments in 2016 after the current licensing term expires and is required to be renewed.
MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as “Internet Broadcast AVC Video”) during the entire life of this License. MPEG LA previously announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015, and today’s announcement makes clear that royalties will continue not to be charged for such video beyond that time.
H.264 is the video content standard that has been embraced by a broad array of content providers including Apple, which owns several of the patents included in the technology’s portfolio. Today’s announcement also paves the way for H.264 to become the standard video format for HTML5, which had seen some contributors, such as Mozilla and Opera, supporting Ogg Theora as a royalty-free video standard.
Earlier this year, Google announced its own video standard, WebM, claiming that it would be a royalty-free alternative to H.264. Questions were raised, however, about whether WebM truly could be royalty-free, with MPEG LA even going as far as to suggest that it was looking into putting together a patent pool to assert the rights of intellectual property holders associated with the WebM/VP8 standard.
Powered By iWebRSS.com
Nokia Sues Apple On IPhone, IPad Patents
Go here to read the rest:
Nokia Sues Apple On IPhone, IPad Patents