Google, the largest Web search provider, didn’t infringe Oracle’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. Jurors found May 7 that Google infringed Oracle’s copyrights and deadlocked on whether it was “fair use,” denying Oracle the ability to seek as much as $1 billion in damages from the search engine company. Last year Oracle said copyright damages could amount to $6 billion.

The patent phase of the trial was less important than the copyright issues because the patents were worth much less, said Brian Love, an intellectual-property attorney and teaching fellow at Stanford Law School. Still, the jury finding today underscored how the trial went against Oracle, he said.

“This case is maybe something like a near disaster for Oracle,” Love said in a phone interview.
The company may be limited to seeking about $150,000, the most allowed by law, for copyright infringement, the presiding judge in the case has said.

‘Couple of days’ “That potentially is not enough to cover what they are spending over a couple of days” in legal fees during the trial, Love said.

US District Judge William Alsup said he may issue a ruling next week on whether Oracle’s Java application programming interfaces, software tools at the heart of the case, can be copyrighted. A ruling that they can’t would be another blow to Oracle, while a ruling for Oracle would revive the company’s ability to seek large damages.

Alsup also must rule on Oracle’s request for a patent judgment in its favor based on his reading of the evidence, and Google’s request for a new trial on copyright infringement.

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, the largest maker of database software, alleged Google stole two patents for the Java programming language when it developed Android, which now runs on more than 300 million smartphones. In the first phase of the trial, the same jury found the search engine company infringed Oracle’s Java copyrights while it couldn’t agree on whether the copying was “fair use.”

‘A victory’
“Today’s jury verdict that Android does not infringe Oracle’s patents was a victory not just for Google but the entire Android ecosystem,” Catherine Lacavera, Google’s director of litigation, said in an e-mailed statement.

Google and Oracle’s experts had estimated damages for both patents at $3 million to $4 million if the jury found infringement.

“Oracle presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java,” Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle, said in an e-mail after the verdict. “We plan to continue to defend and uphold Java’s core write-once run-anywhere principle and ensure it is protected for the nine million Java developers and the community that depend on Java compatibility.”

Jury foreman Greg Thompson, 52, said today that during deliberations he alone among the 10 jurors thought that Google infringed Java patents. After almost six days of discussions, said he was persuaded by other panel members to change his vote.

Jury foreman
The jury lost two members over the course of the six-week trial. Thompson said he alone voted that Google’s use of Java copyrights didn’t constitute fair use early in deliberations in the copyright phase. Eventually he convinced two other jurors and the jury deadlocked after nine members voted that Google made fair use of the copyrights, he said.

“The more tech-savvy a person is, the more difficult it is to persuade them about what limitations should be placed on technology,” Thompson said in an interview after the trial.

Handing patent cases to juries is “always a mixed bag,” Love said.

Google rose $8.66 to $609.46 at 4:02 p.m. in New York trading after spiking as much as 0.7 per cent when the verdict was announced. Oracle climbed 32 cents to $26.68.

Source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/software-services/Google-didnt-infringe-Oracle-patents-Judge/articleshow/13436731.cms

Are you confused by the odd drama that has been playing out in a San Francisco courtroom between two of the titans of the technology industry, Oracle and Google? If not, then you should be.

It is a case that turns on abstruse arguments to do with the interaction of software code and copyright laws that were not written with such digital forms of expression in mind.

Even the companies’ own chief executives, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Google’s Larry Page, have had trouble from the witness stand answering questions on technical concepts that can only have befuddled a non-expert jury.

Also, depending on whom you listen to, the case is about everything or nothing. Either the future of Google’s Android operating system — and possibly much of the open-source software world — is at stake, or the eventual costs of this trial will be counted only in bruised corporate egos, along with minimal damages and licensing fees.

At the heart of the dispute is a clash of the “open” and “closed” software worlds. These have become notoriously slippery terms: any tech company trying to put itself on the side of the angels likes to describe its approach as open while denouncing its rivals as closed.

So it is ironic that Oracle, famous for its aggressive business tactics, should be the one defending the open — in this case, the Java programming language it acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. The code was designed to make it possible for software applications to run on many different operating systems without the need for modification.

It is Google, the self-professed “do not be evil” company, that is being forced to explain why — after failing to reach a deal with Sun to license Java — it felt it could just use the technology anyway.

The main issue the rival armies of lawyers have been lining up around concerns 37 of the application programming interfaces, or APIs, that act as the software “hooks” for other developers to write applications that run on Android. Google followed the Java formats but wrote its own code. In effect, its APIs feel like Java, yet they don’t copy it exactly. Hence the confusion over whether copyright should apply.

There is certainly an important issue of principle at stake. Java dates from the days when Sun was trying to prevent Microsoft’s Windows from completely dominating the software world. It needed a technology that would let applications travel widely, giving hope to software ecosystems beyond Windows. So if Google’s own “flavour” of Java threatens to Balkanise the technology — and, thanks to its growth, Android could eventually become the dominant form of mobile Java — then it makes sense to drag it back into the fold. But is that enough reason for Oracle to turn this into an expensive legal circus? Most technology pundits view it as a side issue that has little bearing on the wider health of the Java ecosystem. If so, then something less obvious is at stake.

Longer-term goal

One possible hint of Oracle’s longer-term goal may have come early in the trial, with the revelation that it considered entering the mobile software business itself after buying Sun. It looked at acquiring Research In Motion or Palm and considered creating its own software from scratch. Taking up the next best tool it has to hand — Java — could be one way for it to extend its reach further into mobile software. Were Oracle to win its case, Google would have to seek a licence for Java or face the unpalatable option of rewriting its APIs, making them incompatible with existing Android apps.

Besides the fees, such an outcome would leave Oracle with a bigger say over how Android operates. Future versions would have to reflect any changes made to Java — a potentially cumbersome process.

Exactly how Oracle would exert that influence and what it might hope to get out of it are two of the murky questions this would raise, but it can’t be a prospect relished by Google. So far the jury has delivered a mixed verdict and the court has yet to rule on whether APIs are even copyrightable.

Meanwhile, by taking potshots at Google, Oracle has threatened to open a much bigger can of worms in the software world. Were the court to find that software APIs are subject to copyright, it would raise a host of thorny questions for an industry that relies on many different techniques to make its products work together effectively.

Ripples

There have already been dark warnings that it could become harder for companies to reverse-engineer their rival’s technologies to create compatible products. The interaction of open-source and commercial software, which exist in different legal spheres, could also become tangled up in copyright disputes.

It is impossible to tell how far the ripples might travel. But most in the software world would rather not find out.

Source:http://gulfnews.com/business/opinion/google-oracle-fight-could-affect-all-software-world-1.1022430

“With more than 100 million smartphone users in the US and about 19% owning tablets, customers are demanding more efficient ways to use their mobile devices for business transactions,” said Haque Shaheen Haque, Territory Manager, Middle East & Turkey at Interactive Intelligence. “We developed Interaction Mobiliser to do just that: empower companies to more quickly deploy transactional mobile apps that give customers a unified customer service experience.”

The solution is designed to enable organisations to offer self-service applications to customers using iPhones, Android phones, Windows phones and the organisation’s Facebook site.

Interaction Mobiliser is also designed to make development and deployment of mobile applications easier by specifying them in a device-independent, high-level language that can be pushed out to all supported mobile devices and social media sites.

The solution also allows the customer to request a call-back from a service representative and be updated periodically as to when the call-back will occur. Future versions will support chat, text messaging, and video.

Interaction Mobiliser helps to enable organisations to brand their own mobile applications then publish them on the appropriate app store (e.g. Android, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.), or offer them from their corporate website for users to download.

Customers can log on using their Facebook ID, or using company-supplied credentials.

The software also allows customers to transition from a mobile self-service interaction to a web callback, click-to-call, or text chat. Contextual information — such as the customer’s name, what device they were using, the forms or products they were reviewing and even GPS coordinates — are transferred to the agent. These interactions can be queued and routed based on agent skill, and information is popped onto the agent’s computer screen when the customer is connected.

“Driven by the opportunity to lower costs and expand customer choice, an increasing number of companies are offering self-service applications via mobile devices,” said Richard Snow, vice president and research director at Ventana Research. “However, we estimate that nearly two-thirds of customers engaging in self-service end up requiring interaction with a contact center agent. As a result, successful mobile customer service solutions must seamlessly link the self-service experience with live assistance.”

It also is designed to provide integration to back-end corporate systems, as well the ability to access hosted data in the cloud from vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle/RightNow, salesforce.com, and others.

Source:http://www.itp.net/588966-interactive-intelligence-debuts-new-software

Jurors in a high-profile court battle between Google and Oracle struggled Thursday to agree on whether the Internet giant infringed software copyrights in Android software.

US District Court Judge William Alsup summoned the 12-member jury to the courtroom after getting a note from a juror who wanted to know what the panel should do if “we can’t reach a unanimous decision and people are not budging.”

“If you were to tell me you were deadlocked, there are admonitions that I could give you,” Alsup told jurors.

If it turns out jurors can’t reach consensus as required by law for a verdict, the judge planned to move on to a patent infringement phase of the trial and leave the undecided counts in the case to be retried in the future.

“We would just have some unfinished business if that were to occur,” Alsup told the jury before giving the panel a pep talk and sending the jurors home before renewing deliberations early Friday.

“Maybe in the middle of the night you will wake up and say ‘I have it…’see things in a different light.”

With the jury out of the courtroom, Alsup told the rival teams of attorneys to be ready to argue first thing on Friday how, if at all, to proceed if the jury deadlocks.

“My view would be to take what we can get and move on to the patent phase,” Alsup said, suggesting that the court accept a partial verdict if jurors have agreed on any of the four counts at issue in the copyright case.

A mistrial that derails the entire trial would be in Google’s interest, since Oracle wants big money damages for the use of Java code and “application programming interfaces” in Android software for mobile gadgets.

Alsup ordered Google to clarify how much money has been made or lost on the mobile gadget software.

While jurors deliberated, Oracle lawyers challenged a Google document indicating that Android expenses more than wiped out the “product contribution” to revenue through 2010 and well into 2011.

“We are talking about huge numbers here,” Alsup said while considering whether jurors should be able to rely on the document in the event of a damages phase in the trial.

“If the jury finds liability, $600 million could turn on whether the jury believes these numbers are good.”

Alsup gave Google until Monday to provide reliable accounting paperwork itemizing how Android profit-and-loss figures were calculated and wanted the person handling the numbers deposed.

“If that was the way it was done in the actual course of business, fine, that can go before the jury,” the judge said of the financial figures.

If Android is shown to have been a money loser for Google, there would be no profits to “disgorge” as demanded by Oracle, he noted.

The trial is being conducted in separate phases to address copyright and then patent infringement accusations by Oracle. The patent portion is set to begin on Monday, unless the jury has not finished deliberations on copyright.

Oracle accuses Google of infringing on Java computer programming language patents and copyrights Oracle obtained when it bought Java inventor Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion deal brokered in 2009.

Google has denied the claims and said it believes mobile phone makers and other users of its open-source Android operating system are entitled to use the Java technology in dispute.

The Internet titan unveiled the free Android operating system two years before Oracle bought Sun.

Protecting and profiting from Java software technology were prime reasons for Oracle’s decision in 2009 to buy Sun, according to evidence presented at trial.

Part of the Google defense is that Oracle couldn’t figure out a way into the smartphone market and is thus trying to leech off of Android’s success by pressing claims regarding Java software that Sun made publicly available.

Source:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/jurors-at-odds-in-high-stakes-oracle-vs-google-case/articleshow/12989412.cms

Jurors in a high-profile court battle between Google and Oracle struggled Thursday to agree on whether the Internet giant infringed software copyrights in Android software.

US District Court Judge William Alsup summoned the 12-member jury to the courtroom after getting a note from a juror who wanted to know what the panel should do if “we can’t reach a unanimous decision and people are not budging.”

“If you were to tell me you were deadlocked, there are admonitions that I could give you,” Alsup told jurors.

If it turns out jurors can’t reach consensus as required by law for a verdict, the judge planned to move on to a patent infringement phase of the trial and leave the undecided counts in the case to be retried in the future.

“We would just have some unfinished business if that were to occur,” Alsup told the jury before giving the panel a pep talk and sending the jurors home before renewing deliberations early Friday.

“Maybe in the middle of the night you will wake up and say ‘I have it…’see things in a different light.”

With the jury out of the courtroom, Alsup told the rival teams of attorneys to be ready to argue first thing on Friday how, if at all, to proceed if the jury deadlocks.

“My view would be to take what we can get and move on to the patent phase,” Alsup said, suggesting that the court accept a partial verdict if jurors have agreed on any of the four counts at issue in the copyright case.

A mistrial that derails the entire trial would be in Google’s interest, since Oracle wants big money damages for the use of Java code and “application programming interfaces” in Android software for mobile gadgets.

Alsup ordered Google to clarify how much money has been made or lost on the mobile gadget software.

While jurors deliberated, Oracle lawyers challenged a Google document indicating that Android expenses more than wiped out the “product contribution” to revenue through 2010 and well into 2011.

“We are talking about huge numbers here,” Alsup said while considering whether jurors should be able to rely on the document in the event of a damages phase in the trial.

“If the jury finds liability, $600 million could turn on whether the jury believes these numbers are good.”

Alsup gave Google until Monday to provide reliable accounting paperwork itemizing how Android profit-and-loss figures were calculated and wanted the person handling the numbers deposed.

“If that was the way it was done in the actual course of business, fine, that can go before the jury,” the judge said of the financial figures.

If Android is shown to have been a money loser for Google, there would be no profits to “disgorge” as demanded by Oracle, he noted.

The trial is being conducted in separate phases to address copyright and then patent infringement accusations by Oracle. The patent portion is set to begin on Monday, unless the jury has not finished deliberations on copyright.

Oracle accuses Google of infringing on Java computer programming language patents and copyrights Oracle obtained when it bought Java inventor Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion deal brokered in 2009.

Google has denied the claims and said it believes mobile phone makers and other users of its open-source Android operating system are entitled to use the Java technology in dispute.

The Internet titan unveiled the free Android operating system two years before Oracle bought Sun.

Protecting and profiting from Java software technology were prime reasons for Oracle’s decision in 2009 to buy Sun, according to evidence presented at trial.

Part of the Google defense is that Oracle couldn’t figure out a way into the smartphone market and is thus trying to leech off of Android’s success by pressing claims regarding Java software that Sun made publicly available.

Source:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/jurors-at-odds-in-high-stakes-oracle-vs-google-case/articleshow/12989412.cms

The Hartford Financial Services Group’s individual life insurance unit used reporting software a sales worker discovered on Google to visualize several new leads on a digital map—and a big increase in sales followed, said the group’s CIO.

After the insurance unit’s sales dropped 35% in 2009, John Glooch, CIO for the company’s individual life technology business, consolidated data from several sources into a single data warehouse. Glooch also decided to replace an old sales reporting system that aggregated data from several sources, because he determined that sales workers couldn’t effectively leverage the information stored in the data warehouse.

Glooch learned of another reporting system called Tableau from a sales desk manager who Googled “best of breed reporting software.” The software included more user intuitive interfaces for non-tech savvy people, he said. Tapping into his $50 million budget, Glooch licensed both Tableau desktop and server software and connected them to his data warehouse. Then he got out of the way. Sales workers have created hundreds of reports, but “every one of them has been produced by the business without any IT involvement,” said Glooch.

The implementation went live in August 2011. Tableau’s visualization tools use digital maps that depict sales by region, the number of sales targets within specific geographies, and the premiums produced by specific field offices. The reports cross-reference this information against average salaries and the number of high net worth individuals in specific regions, thereby helping the company target prospective customers.

With Tableau, the unit’s 200 sales workers were able to identify leads and clients they hadn’t previously targeted for life insurance policies, Glooch said. The unit recorded 20% sales growth for 2011 vs. the industry’s average of 4% growth, according to researcher LIMRA.

Glooch is urging the company’s other business units to use Tableau. But he may not be able to fulfill those goals. The Hartford in March put Glooch’s group, along with insurance and retirement services, up for sale.

Source:http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/05/02/hartford-insurance-googles-better-sales-reporting-software/?mod=google_news_blog

Google’s main challenges with networking derive from its need to maintain two major backbones: one to handle external Internet user traffic and another for that between Google’s internal data centers. The latter, which also happens to be the larger network, has been fully supporting OpenFlow for about the past six months, and is the result of an ongoing project launched in the spring of 2010, says Holzle, a Google fellow and senior vice president for technical infrastructure.

Holzle says Google’s top priorities when it first started its SDN project were intensive pre-deployment and testing. By mid-2011, Holzle says Google had activated a simple SDN, and by early 2012 the company was running a full production SDN in one of its data centers. In January, Google was able to deploy centralized traffic engineering of its new SDN, which Holzle cites as a main objective of the project because it gives the company the ability to target network failures more quickly and gain concentrated control over the network.

Google can also now simulate its entire backbone network in software for isolated testing, Holzle says. Other benefits of the project include the ability to separate hardware from software so upgrades and new products can be chosen based on specific criteria, as well as cost benefits that Holzle says cannot be quantified yet.

While Holzle says Google has been “happy with the stability” of this new network, he acknowledges that there have been outages. None were out of the ordinary, though, and Holzle says he considers the configuration issues that caused those crashes “just a maturity thing.”

Similarly, a few lingering challenges continue to drive Google’s push for further standardization, including the amount of time it takes to program for a large network and determining how to configure the hardware that remains needed.

While Google continues to tinker with SDN technology on its data center network, it may not be long until the everyday Internet user reaps SDN benefits, too, Holzle says. Google will naturally have to wait for network equipment vendors to develop SDN-compatible offerings, but Holzle says he “would be disappointed if two years from now we didn’t have some OpenFlow control in [the external network].”

Source:http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226325/Google_shares_lessons_learned_as_early_software_defined_network_adopter?taxonomyId=12

A federal judge in the heart of Silicon Valley said that Google and Oracle have failed to settle a patent dispute out of court and that the case will head to civil trial.

The suit is on track to start on April 16.

“We are referred to as trial courts because, in the end, some cases just need to be tried,” US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal in the Northern California city of San Jose wrote in an order.

“Despite their diligent efforts and those of their able counsel, the parties have reached an irreconcilable impasse in their settlement discussions.”

Oracle last week spurned a proposal that Google pay about $3 million in damages and potentially cut the company in for less than a percent of Android revenue. Northern California-based business software titan Oracle rejected the offer as too low.

Oracle is accusing Google’s Android software of infringing on Java computer programming language patents held by Oracle stemming from its recent purchase of Java inventor Sun Microsystems.

Google has denied the patent infringement claims and said it believes mobile phone makers and other users of its open-source Android operating system are entitled to use the Java technology in dispute.

Google has maintained that Sun, before it was acquired by Oracle, had declared that Java would be open-source, allowing any software developer to use it, and released some of its source code in 2006 and 2007.

Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun, a one-time Silicon Valley star, in January of 2010 and subsequently filed suit against Google. Google-backed Android software is used in an array of devices that have been gaining ground in the hotly competitive global smartphone and tablet markets.

Source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/software-services/Google-Oracle-fail-to-settle-patent-dispute-out-of-court/articleshow/12518023.cms

Last year, despite Apple’s high-profile launch of the new iPhone 4S, only 5 per cent of the smartphones sold in Greece and 9 per cent of those sold in Portugal were iPhones, according to research firm IDC. Most of the rest were phones running Google’s Android operating system, which the company is promoting heavily as it seeks a firmer foothold in the wireless industry.

The results point to a rare weak spot for Apple – its heavy reliance on subsidies from wireless carriers to make its iPhones affordable to a wider range of consumers. The practice has proved to be a big advantage for Apple, which posted a 73 per cent jump in revenue in its latest quarter, at the expense of carriers such as Sprint Nextel, which started carrying the iPhone last northern autumn but doesn’t expect to make a profit on the device until 2015.

In countries like the US and the UK, carrier subsidies helped the iPhone win more than 20 per cent of the smartphone market last year. But its performance in parts of southern Europe, where most consumers don’t sign contracts and have to pay full freight for phones, suggests Apple’s position could suffer if carriers tire of underwriting most of the cost of the devices, as some are in countries such as Denmark and Spain.

“Smartphone penetration and adoption is being helped by the entry of lower-price devices, which basically are Android devices,” said Carlos Alberto Silva, a spokesman for Portuguese carrier Optimus.

Android phones that cost less than $US200 ($187) without a contract are widely available in Europe, helping Google undercut the much more expensive iPhone. In Portugal, at wireless carrier Vodafone Group, the cheapest Apple phone – an eight-gigabyte version of the older-model iPhone 4 – sells for $US680, according to the carrier’s website. Phones running Android can be had for as little as $US106, and even Samsung Electronics’s high-end Galaxy S II is cheaper than the cheapest iPhone.

In markets like the US, where consumers generally pay $US200 or $US300 for smartphones regardless of the brand, price isn’t as much of a factor. The reverse is true in Greece, Portugal, and elsewhere, where carriers don’t subsidise most smartphones.

At Greece’s largest wireless carrier, Cosmote Mobile Telecommunications SA, the most popular smartphone sold last year was Samsung’s Galaxy Mini, said Dimitris Koutsonas, head of mobile data and services. The price: $US188 without a contract. “In this economic situation, we had to push the low-end smartphone,” Mr Koutsonas said.

As a result, more than 60 per cent of the smartphones sold by Cosmote last year were Android phones, Mr Koutsonas said.

The success of Android helps Google to ensure that its search engine – its most important source of revenue – as well as mapping and other services, are preloaded on mobile devices, through which consumers are spending more time online.

Google licenses Android to hardware manufacturers essentially free, doesn’t get a cut of device sales and takes only a small share of revenue generated from app sales for Android devices.

The software company hopes the wider range of prices for Android phones boosts their adoption, and helps the operating system gain traction with carriers wary of subsidies and customers leery of contracts.

“Our competitors are much more dependent on such subsidies,” said John Lagerling, Google’s director of Android partnerships. “From a sustainability standpoint, if you have very expensive devices as the only ones available to access your ecosystem, then that can come with a pretty severe hangover in the long run.”

In the US, carriers pay Apple an estimated $US400 every time a customer buys an iPhone with a two-year contract, analysts say. Sprint has acknowledged that iPhone subsidies run 40 per cent higher than they do for other smartphones on average. The goal is to make it easy to buy the phone, then make the money back and a profit over time on service contracts. Contract-free “pre-paid” carriers, on the other hand, leave consumers to pay the full price of a phone.

Wall Street has grilled Apple on its strategy for pre-paid carriers, even as the company sold a record 37m iPhones in its most recent quarter, more than double the year-earlier tally. The company has kept a nearly three-year-old model, the iPhone 3GS, on the market to appeal to budget-minded buyers, including pre-paid users. But the 3GS still sells for $US535 without a contract at Greece’s Cosmote.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook told analysts in January that it “was too early to tell” how the lower-priced versions would perform in the pre-paid market over time, but that the company was “thrilled” with iPhones sales as a whole.

At an investor conference this month, Mr Cook added that emerging markets, which often use the pre-paid model, are “critical” for the company, but that each country is different and some may evolve over time. “I don’t really subscribe to the premise that a pre-paid market is a pre-paid market is a pre-paid market,” he said. Apple, he said, had persuaded China Unicom to try a contract-and-subsidies approach in addition to its pre-paid one, and that it had performed well.

“You can bet that we are into details in every single country in the world trying to learn what we can to adjust, maybe to do better into the future,” Mr Cook said.

The debate over device subsidies is part of a tug of war between mobile operators, internet companies and phone-makers seeking control and profits in the wireless industry. All three camps are gathering in Barcelona this week for an annual industry conference.

Carriers around the world are having second thoughts about subsidising phones, presenting a risk for all phone makers – not just Apple. That became clear in Denmark last year after several leading wireless carriers stopped subsidising phones and lowered their monthly rates to keep up with lower-priced competitors. “We saw that the customers valued lower prices on calling plans, and simpler calling plans, higher than the subsidy on the phone,” said Jon Erik Haug, CEO of the Denmark unit of Oslo-based wireless operator Telenor ASA.

In the second half of last year, after Danish carriers stopped offering subsidies, phone sales declined about 10 per cent from the second half of 2010, according to IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo. Smartphone sales continued to grow, but at a much lower rate than in 2010.

In Spain, telecom giant Telefonica SA also is having doubts. Jose Miguel Gilperez, CEO of Telefonica Spain, recently told Spanish newspaper El Pais: “We can’t keep subsidies at these levels.

“When you buy a TV or any other consumer good, you pay for it. It is healthier that users pay for their devices and operators invest in networks and services.”

For phone makers, any change by carriers could have an impact on the sales of high-end devices.

In the US, where contract plans and phone subsidies dominate, IDC says that around 90 per cent of smartphone shipments over the past four years were for devices that cost more than $US300 – despite the recession and uncertain recovery. In Italy, where pre-paid plans dominate, that proportion was 67 per cent last year, and in crisis-hit Greece and Portugal, only about 40 per cent of the smartphones shipped in 2011 cost more than $US300.

Source:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/googles-android-software-helps-smartphones-trump-apple-iphone-in-europe/story-fnay3ubk-1226282983524

Google Inc., seeking to get more of its desktop-computer software onto mobile devices, introduced a test version of its Chrome Web browser for the latest Android operating system.

The browser, first unveiled in 2008, will be available on tablets and mobile phones using the company’s “Ice Cream Sandwich” Android software, Sundar Pichai, a senior vice president in charge of Chrome and applications, said in a blog posting. The company aims to improve the speed of mobile browsing by preloading top search results and enabling users to get the same tabs and bookmarks they have on their desktops.

“Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices,” Pichai said. The software is “focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized Web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.”

Google’s Android software has taken the lead in the market for smartphone operating system, topping Apple Inc.’s iPhone and Microsoft Corp.’s mobile software. Android handsets accounted for 48 percent of the U.S. smartphone market in the fourth quarter, while the iPhone had 43 percent, according to NPD Group Inc. Almost three in five first-time smartphone buyers chose Android, NPD said.

Shares of Mountain View, California-based Google fell less than 1 percent to $606.77 today. The shares have declined 6.1 percent this year.

Source:http://news.businessweek.com/article.asp?documentKey=1376-LZ1AVV6K50XW01-7QOKAI2JVVKUUKTB73IE8AOHV3

Google has launched a new service that the company hopes to help fight the malware in the Android Market. The new tool is called “Bouncer” and it automatically scans the Android Market for any suspicious software that could be harmful to your device if downloaded. Malware has been on the rise for mobile devices in the last year as criminals make their way into the mobile world, following the scores of users that upgrade from feature phones. Malware is a billion dollar business and the criminals have been floating around the Android Market since it launched in 2008.

The Bouncer scans through new apps, as well as older apps already in the Market and also takes a peek at developer accounts to make sure malicious content will not make it onto your smartphone. Once your app has been submitted, the Bouncer software will check it over for known malware information that could cause a smartphone to react to being remotely activated by a hacker. Google said that Bouncer actually takes new apps, downloads them and runs them to test and make sure they do not contain malware.

Google said the software is not really new and that it has been around “for awhile now”. According to reports, the between the first half and second halves of 2011, there was a 40 percent increase in malware content on the Android Market. Google claims that malware numbers were already dropping as more security companies were reporting the amount of malware on the Android Market. The company also claimed that a rise might be from Android apps being downloaded from other sites and that in the Android Market the malware “is declining significantly”. As of October of 2011, the Android Market had over 400,000 mobile apps and that is prime hunting grounds for new malware to be released.

Right now, Google says that almost 70 percent of the mobile apps that are available for download can be done so for free. When the market launched Google actually had a 24-48 hour refund window, but changes that have been made put that window at a much smaller 15 minutes. In 2011, Google also added a PC client for the Android Market making it easier to browse, read about and select apps for your mobile device. Google has also added various categories to sort apps like “Top Developers” and “Top Grossing” apps.

Source:http://www.technobloom.com/google-updates-the-android-software-with-bouncer-to-help-fight-malware/225134/

Saving time and staying current

As a small business owner or a freelance or contract worker, you know that your time and money are valuable commodities in your day-to-day life. If you use software to run your business, you’ve undoubtedly had to deal with incessant updates, installations, and licensing. These complications can cause additional errors and lost data. And as someone who doesn’t have the necessary time or resources, keeping on top of up-to-date software and other technology can cause more problems than it’s worth. But there is a solution.

Palo Software is a startup based out of Austin, Texas that provides that much-need solution. The company specializes in creating easy-to-use web-based apps that make running your business simple. One of the team’s apps, TidyContact, is specifically designed for managing your business contacts. You can import your contacts from LinkedIn, Google, and several other sources and accounts.

While TidyContact is currently in beta mode, Palo Software is continually working on “providing worry-free apps to help you organize, communicate, and share information with your customers and your peers.” So, keep an eye out for new apps in the near future. All apps are hosted on secure servers that are monitored twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Palo Software is safe, fast, and installation of the software is never required.
Unique: no contract

Another benefit that Palo Software offers its users is there are no contracts. You simply pay as you go. So, if you decide it isn’t the right solution for your needs, you won’t have to worry about getting out of a contract. Palo Software understands your basic needs as a small business owner, which is essential software that is easy to use, convenient, effective, and affordable.

Palo Software has a small and strong team of three. Headed by its founder, Ricardo Sanchez, Palo is also run by two advisors with ample experience with technology, software, and startups. While it has started out small, it has the potential to provide realistic answers to difficult questions that many, if not all, small business owners face in today’s economy.

Source:http://agbeat.com/cities/austin/palo-software-simplifies-business-with-easy-web-based-apps/

What began as a side project has gone global after a New Zealand student’s software was picked up by Google and NASA.

“I never expected it to take off like this,” said University of Waikato student Paul Hunkin.

“It started off as little afternoon project and it’s gotten reasonably popular.”

Hunkin might downplay his success, but NASA called the software an “innovative solution”.

The computer science doctoral student created ClusterGL to connect multiple screens to form one huge image for the university’s display wall in 2008.

“The problem that you have when you want to make a really big wall of screens is that you need to use lots of computers, but computer programmes are usually written on one computer, so it’s quite difficult to spread them over a multiple of computers,” said Hunkin.

“My system lets you take any normal program and split it up to run across as many screens as you want.”

Hunkin was talking to Google about another project while applying for their Summer of Code internship, but when he mentioned ClusterGL they jumped on the idea.

“It turns out this problem is something a lot of people have.”

Google offered Hunkin the internship and paid him to further develop the software for their own curved display walls called Liquid Galaxy.

The Liquid Galaxy consists of several screens in a circular arrangement which run Google Earth in parallel for an immersive virtual experience.

After catching the eye of Google, the program is now being used globally, including at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre.

Hunkin hit headlines around the world in 2010 after he created a programme called “Bid Bot” which trawled through auction site Trade Me looking for rare items to bid on for just $NZ1.

While the Tauranga-local brushes aside his unexpected success calling it “nice points on my CV”, the future looks bright.

“I’m in the final bit of finishing a PhD and then I’ll look for a real job. Google would be an interesting place to work for, but the industry is evolving so rapidly. I’ve spent a bit of time in Silicon Valley, there’s some very interesting work happening out there.”

Source:http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/kiwis-software-wows-google-nasa-20120111-1pump.html

Software written by a University of Waikato computer science student has found its way to Google and NASA and is being used at the Johnson Space Center.

Computer science doctoral student Paul Hunkin’s software ClusterGL was created for the university’s display wall in 2008 and joins multiple computers together to make one huge display screen.

After catching the eye of Google earlier this year, the program is now is being used around the world.

Hunkin says there are five computers behind the Waikato display wall, with each computer controlling four screens. ClusterGL turns a display wall into one giant screen, by letting a single program on one computer control all monitors.

While the Waikato display wall is relatively small, ClusterGL can scale to let you have a display wall made from a handful to hundreds of monitors.

“I was talking to Google about another project I was working on and happened to mention ClusterGL. They have these curved display walls and thought ‘this will be brilliant for what we want’.”

Google offered Hunkin a Summer of Code internship where they paid him to further develop the software for their own curved display walls.

“ClusterGL was designed to work on a flat wall like the one we have at the university. Google’s involvement was to make ClusterGL better and work on a curved geometry.”

After releasing the software to the public, NASA saw the program and are now using it in the Johnson Space Center.

“NASA saw one of Google’s curved display walls and bought one of them. I was pretty surprised to hear they were using it considering it started out as something that I put together one a rainy Sunday afternoon,” says Hunkin.

Bid Bot, another program created by Hunkin which drew global media attention last year, works by scouring TradeMe every evening looking to bid on and buy newly-listed items for $1. After scouring TradeMe, Bid Bot would pick the rarest item and after a successful auction, tweet what it had bought.

Source:http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/ED1201/S00002/waikato-students-software-picked-up-by-google-and-nasa.htm

Software patent wars have always existed: companies fought them (or paid up), sometimes quietly, sometimes making a big fuss. However, something has changed over the last year or so: people started getting directly affected by software patents (ask anybody wanting a Samsung Galaxy Tab in Australia for Christmas 2011…). Lately, two things came to my attention: Google acquired 200 patents from IBM. But, more interestingly: Google hasn’t filed any patents over the last several months.
This can be confirmed by looking at Google’s own patent search.

Why not? This is certainly a very fair question. A slowdown could have been something understandable — a complete halt, however, is definitely more interesting.

Really, how many “processes” can you really patent? Getting a patent through is a long, drawn process which requires tons of paperwork and money. Maybe they just got stuck — it happens to people, and it can happen to companies too. Maybe it just so happened that they reached a point where they just couldn’t make up new ways of implementing auto-completion, or suggesting translations to words.

Reading through Google’s own filed patents, you end up reading a lot of obviousness, a few really obscure things, and not much more. This is something that software patents simply cannot help: with software, what you are really “inventing” is processes, and you cannot really go very far.

The (non-existent) list of patents filed by Google over the last 7 months
So, maybe — and I say maybe — Google is going a different direction: maybe it’s acquiring existing, half-meaningful patents from existing vendors, and the transfer of patents from IBM is only the beginning.

This second hypothesis is the one I like the best: with Microsoft actually making money from Androoid (!), maybe Google is preparing a new strategy in terms of patents — a strategy where filing patents is not the priority.

This is supported by the fact that acquiring existing, granted patents gives Google an immediate weapon to defend themselves from Microsoft — and anybody going after Android for that matter.

Maybe Google is preparing a patent alliance that will effectively defend them — and Android — from the competition’s attacks.

So, why has Google not filed a single patent application to the USPTO for 7 months now? We shall see.

Source:http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/google_stopped_submitting_patents_USPTO_why

GRC-Pirk Management has disclosed the measures used for green performance reporting to insurance companies. Computer-modeling techniques are used to simulate the Key Performance Indicator “KPI”scoring schemes established by insurers.

The computational software was developed in association with the U.S. EPA apps-for-the-environment www.findgreengarage.com program to promote state and local green businesses. The Google software locates eco-friendly shops and displays their greenhouse gas reduction rating.

Shop owners and managers are now able to use greenhouse gas reduction rate scores to predict the KPI score used by an insurance company. By utilizing non-intrusive data acquisition from utility suppliers, performance scores can be computed without intervention. An insurer’s performance score can pack a big wallop and knowing what indicators make up the score is essential, according to GRC-Pirk.

Green metrics computer-modeling is now capable of coming within 5 percent of an insurer’s KPI scoring system without the use of proprietary and confidential information, such as how long it takes to repair a car, how many cars can be repaired within a specific time frame, or how much it costs to undertake specific repairs.

Source:http://www.bodyshopbusiness.com/Article/95361/new_software_simulates_insurance_green_scoring_systems.aspx

Google has apparently pulled an application which represented itself as Siri, Apple’s revolutionary voice command software, from the Android Marketplace.

Siri imitators have swarmed the Android marketplace since Apple launched their latest handset, the iPhone 4S. This particular app was taken down, however, because it represented itself as Siri, in violation of an Apple copyright.

The app, which went live in the Android Market on December 28, was produced by Official Software. Google removed the application from the Android Market just hours after appearing, according to The Next Web. More than one thousand people downloaded the app before it was removed.

Google does not filter its app store, so software producers can upload just about any application to the Marketplace. Though Google was quick to act in this situation, such a system raises the risk of copyright breaches.

Source:http://www.tapscape.com/google-pulls-fake-siri-app-from-android-market/

WANdisco, the Silicon Valley and Sheffield-based software developer, is aiming to go one better than IT giants Apple and Google.

While Apple uses the names of big cats like Snow Leopard as codenames for new releases of its OS X operating system, Google has gone for desserts, calling the most recent versions of its Android operating system Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich.

But WANdisco – whose chief executive, David Richards, was born in Sheffield – has decied to use the names of Sheffield pubs.

So, the latest versions of its award-winning uberSVN software, developed at its offices in Electric Works, on Sheffield’s Digital Campus, will be known as “Blake” – after the Blake Hotel in Blake Street, Walkley.

WANdisco holds the Made in Sheffield Mark, which can only be used by companies committed to producing high quality products, developed in an area covered by the Sheffield postcode district.

The software was developed in the city to add additional functions to WANdisco’s Subversion software, which dominates the software development market and is used by blue chip corporates around the world, including most, if not all the Fortune 1,000 companies, Goldman Sachs, Barclays Bank and BT.

Subversion allows software engineers in offices around the world to collaborate on projects, by ensuring they are all working on the latest version of the software products they are developing.

By adding uberSVN, WANdisco also allows software engineers to use of a range of commercial development, debugging, testing, quality assurance and distribution tools.

UberSVN also incorporates a social networking facility and allows them to communicate with the system using Smartphones and tablet computers.

Source:http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/business/city_software_firm_goes_one_better_than_apple_and_google_1_4073427

gShift Labs, the creator of a patent-pending Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software system announced today a solution for marketers struggling to interpret organic search results in the wake of recent Google security changes. While making search more secure for end users, the Google SSL search encryption prevents 8-20% of organic keyword phrases from showing up in analytics reports that marketers depend on for managing SEO strategy.

In its update release today, gShift’s industry leading software, Web Presence Optimizer™ now equips users with automated filtering tools and page rank reports which, combined with Google Analytics, will provide insights into keywords currently “Not Provided.”

Users of Google Analytics have limited options to filter the (Not Provided) keywords. It is possible to see the “entry” or landing page from the (Not Provided) keyword, as well as the organic keyword phrases that are currently driving organic traffic to the page, from which some insight can be gained.

“This procedure is okay if you know how to use Google Analytics as you would need to add filters and advanced segments. This is not something that is completely at your finger tips-it also has some gaps,” says Krista LaRiviere, Cofounder and CEO, gShift Labs. “Our Google Not Provided Keyword Insight Report will provide marketers with the confidence that organic search is still the major way people discover your product or service.”

LaRiviere explains that certain keywords have not “dropped”-they are merely hidden inside the (Not Provided) category. Only using gShift’s SEO software can you understand the exact page that is ranking and for which keyword phrases. Based on the known keywords for which a web page ranks, gShift correlates keyword ranking data and goal conversions to provide deeper insight into a marketer’s (Not Provided) keywords.

“Many gShift users are agencies that love to use our SEO software to produce very clean and data-rich end of the month SEO reports,” says Chris Adams, Cofounder and CTO, gShift Labs. “As we learn from this initial insight report, gShift web presence experts will be looking at newer and better ways to crunch the statistical data so that we can uncover more insight and build that into our software.”

Source:http://www.promotionworld.com/news/press/111216-gshift-labs-seo-software-offers-marketers-not-provided-google-analytics-insight-report

On Wednesday, Logitech announced to launch the latest Google TV software, and the software is mainly used for Google TV set-top box (Revue). “The main update includes more entertainment options, such as access to Android Market, faster and more comprehensive search and browse the performance, simplify user interface, as well as to the logitech media player improvement”, logitech company household digital vice President and general manager, Ashish Arora explained.

In December 2010, logitech and Google roll out together to carry Google TV operating system of streaming media Revue set-top box, this kind of equipment was going to use the amount of video content on the Internet, and especially for television screen made optimization. But because of the lack of Google software support, and most mainstream television network and its kaput, cause Revue in market performance of very bleak.

Many people think that the logitech set-top box is a faulty stroke in calligraphy or painting, even the logitech company CEO Guerrino De Luca before also says, this product is a mistake, make the logitech pay a high price, and clearly his company temporarily not going to launch follow-up equipments, unless Google make clear the sticking point of the product.

But this time, logitech is poised to release updated, I wonder if it has found a solution.

Source:http://www.batterycentury.com/news/2011/12/08/logitech-will-release-the-new-google-tv-software/