Open Web Developer News Desk

EC Clears Googlorola Merger But Antitrust Probe Could Follow

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

The European Commission late Monday cleared Google’s proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility but it also issued a simultaneous warning that the companies could be charged with antitrust violations for abusing the fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms of MMI’s standard-essential 3G patents. Google is buying MMI for its huge patent portfolio. Antitrust czar Joaquín Almunia issued an unusual statement separate from the merger go-ahead saying, “Today’s decision does not mean that the merger clearance blesses all actions by Motorola in the past or all future action by Google with regard to the use of these standard essential patents. Our decision today is without prejudice to the legality under EU antitrust law of Motorola’s past and Google’s future actions. However, the question whether Motorola’s or Google’s conduct is compliant with EU antitrust law cannot be dealt with in the context of the merger procedure.”

Eolas Patents Found Invalid

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

After hearing testimony from World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, Netscape co-founder Eroc Bina, HTML embedded tag inventor David Raggetr and prior art inventor Pei-Yuan Wei, who wrote the Viola browser back in 1991, two years before Eolas, and demo’d it to Sun in ’93, a Texas federal jury Thursday – in a district notorious for looking kindly on patent holders – found the patents held by Eolas Technologies, which once nailed Microsoft for a $565 million infringement decision, invalid. The patents claim that Eolas invented the idea of a web browser that supports plug-ins and AJAX development techniques. Eolas was suing YouTube, Adobe, Amazon, JC Penney’s, Staples, CDW and Yahoo before moving on to almost anybody with a web site. Oracle, eBay, Apple, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Playboy and TI previously settled. Eolas could appeal. It’s “evaluating its options.” The University of California co-owns the Eolas patents.

Google Loses Appeal to Suppress Evidence in Java Suit

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington Monday punctured Google’s hopes of hiding the telltale Lindholm e-mail from the jury when Oracle finally drags Google and Android before the bar to answer charges of infringing its Java copyrights and patents. The appeals court sided with the district court that has already told Google six times that the highly compromising e-mail couldn’t be suppressed. Neither court bought Google’s story that it was an artifact protected by attorney-client privilege that was turned over in discovery to Oracle by mistake. The appeal court found that Google engineer Tim Lindholm “was responding to a request from Google’s management, not Google’s attorneys.” It said the message concerned a negotiation strategy, not a legal strategy and “does not evidence any sort of infringement or invalidity analysis.”

Birst Lowers Hadoop Adoption Barrier

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:15:00 EST

So you’ve wrestled that Hadoop elephant into a cluster. Now what? How do you get the beast’s huge flat files to make sense? The precious hard-won data in Hadoop isn’t exactly suited to business intelligence and making it actionable is a lot of work. Enter Birst, the analytics house, which says it’s taken some of the pain out of accessing Hadoop data for mid-sized companies that may not have many priests on staff steeped in Hadoop’s secrets by front-ending the thing with its own multi-dimensional database and analytics, saving the user from having to supply the nasty ETL code needed to pry the data out of Hadoop and knock it into workable shape. Basically Birst has lowered the Hadoop adoption barrier by letting users treat Big Data like an ordinary data set and ask it a broad set of questions. A company now only needs a half-a-developer to do the work, it says, not a handful. At some point later this year Birst hopes to take the widgetry into its cloud so people won’t have to deal with the stress of setting up a cluster, but CEO Brad Peters says it’s not ready for that feat yet. Meanwhile, with Birst automatically creating an analytical database on top of Hadoop, users will be able to aggregate and visualize Big Data such as web site interactions, social media and cloud traffic quickly and easily. Birst creates multi-dimensional models from subsets of Hadoop data and lets users browse, query or visualize the Big Data. They can also integrate Hadoop data with other data sources such as SAP, Salesforce, and operational and financial information into automatically created multi-dimensional datasets. Insights gathered from the data can be communicated via dashboards, reports, ad hoc queries and mobile gismos. Birst’s support for Hadoop will be available next month in its business analytics platform as a free add-on.

Red Hat Sets Up GlusterFS Advisory Board

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:00:00 EST

Red Hat Storage (née Gluster) has recruited open source experts at Facebook, OpenStack and Eucalyptus for an independent GlusterFS advisory board meant to push the open source GlusterFS project and foster contributions and participation from third-party sys admins, developers and ISVs. Board members include chairman John Mark Walker, GlusterFS Community Manager at Red Hat; GlusterFS project co-founder Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy; Facebook storage engineer Richard Wareing; Citrix Xen engineer and OpenStack core contributor Ewan Mellor; Citrix CloudStack community manager and Fedora advisory board member David Nalley; Picture Marketing senior system administrator Louis Zuckerman; Ed Wyse Beauty Products senior system administrator Joe Julian; Red Hat Filesystem engineer and HekaFS project founder Jeff Darcy, and Eucalyptus community VP Greg DeKoenigsberg. Walker said, “We have established this advisory board to help ensure the future success of GlusterFS and facilitate communication between community members and the project. Each of these board members was selected based on their past contributions to GlusterFS or their standing in related communities.” Examples of items that will be voted on soon include approval or modifications of the board charter, approval of new initiatives for GlusterFS and approval of release schedules and roadmaps.

Oracle v Google Java Trial Up in the Air

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:15:00 EST

Last week Oracle’s long-simmering Java infringement suit against Google, already postponed from Halloween, was scheduled to go to trial “on or after March 19.” On Thursday the court entered another order saying it won’t set a trial date any time soon and suggesting that given the demands on its calendar it could be 2013 before the case gets heard. Presiding Judge William Alsup, who figures, speaking “from experience,” that the trial will take two months, also said in his order that “The court will not set a trial date until Oracle adopts a proper damages methodology, even assuming a third try is allowed (or unless Oracle waives damages beyond those already allowed to go to the jury). For this ‘delay,’ Oracle has no one to blame but itself, given that twice now it has advanced improper methodologies obviously calculated to reach stratospheric numbers.”

Schmidt Hints Google’s Own Tablet Coming

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:00:00 EST

After lauding Steve Jobs as the “Michelangelo of our time,” combining visionary genius with extraordinary engineering smarts, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera that Google means to bring its own tablet to market in the next six months as good if not better than the iPad. “Noi nei prossimi sei mesi contiamo di mettere sul mercato un tablet di altissima qualità.” Now if that’s true, do you suppose such a thing will come from Google as the failed Nexus One did or from Motorola Mobility or from Android OEMs generally? He also said competition between the iPhone and Android will be “brutal” because that’s capitalism.

ITC Says Motorola’s Android Widgets Infringe Microsoft IP

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EST

Maybe Android won’t be vaporized in the thermonuclear war that Steve Jobs promised to fund before he died; maybe it’s doomed to suffer a thousand cuts. After the International Trade Commission decided Monday that HTC’s Android phones definitely infringe an Apple patent, it said Tuesday that Motorola’s Android widgets infringe a Microsoft patent and that US sales could be blocked. Like HTC, Motorola is playing the verdict as a victory since it’s not as bad as it might have been. It’s a preliminary decision by an administrative law judge that the ITC’s commissioners could overturn by April 20 and Microsoft originally went after MMI with nine patents but only wound up nailing MMI on four claims of one patent called ActiveSync that lets users schedule group meetings across mobile devices. Microsoft dropped two patents and the judge threw out six. Motorola is in a better position than HTC. At least Microsoft is willing to license its IP for a price. The same cannot be said for Apple.

WordPerfect Jury Deadlocks

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 07:32:00 EST

The jury that sat through eight weeks of complicated testimony and 600 exhibits over whether or not Microsoft broke the antitrust laws and tied a can to WordPerfect’s tail to maintain its monopoly after Novell bought the software 17 years ago couldn’t come to a unanimous decision Friday after three days of deliberation. The jury’s foreman reportedly sent out a note to the judge late Friday afternoon saying, “I’m sorry, very sorry we cannot come to one accord. I’ve done the best I know how.” Novell asked for one more day. District Court Judge Frederick Motz – who didn’t think the case should be heard in the first place – reportedly asked the five men and seven women on the jury to keep on trying, and take the weekend to think about it, but when they insisted that resolution was hopeless, he dismissed them and declared a mistrial. They were split 11 to one in Novell’s favor, according to Novell lawyers, who indicated the naysayer had strong technical views. Reports say the jurors, some of them in tears, were “emotional” over their deadlock, and otherwise fatigued and stressed. PC World says shortly before the jury threw in the towel one juror asked to withdraw, but the judge refused. Whether that was the holdout is unclear. Novell was hoping to collect a billion dollars in damages, which under antitrust law could have been trebled. After spending millions on the case since it filed suit in 2004 Novell will now have to go back to square one unless Microsoft, having narrowly skirted a loss, is suddenly willing to settle. The Dow Jones reported Friday night that Novell will seek a retrial. Novell maintains that in 1994 Microsoft purposely removed extensions from Windows 95 to delay WordPerfect and Novell’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet in reaching market, giving its own word processor and Excel spreadsheet an unfair advantage. Bill Gates testified at the trial that the interfaces were removed because they made the operating system unstable. However, a Gates e-mail from October of 1994 submitted in evidence read, “We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for [the] likes of Notes, WordPerfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage.” With WordPerfect’s market share burning through the floor, down 40% in six years, Novell sold the thing to Corel in 1996 at a $1.2 billion loss. It only bought the stuff two years before when WordPerfect was already on a slippery slope. Novell reportedly couldn’t figure out whether to back Windows 95 or OS/2. Several times during its deliberations the jury asked for clarifications, including the meaning the term middleware. PC World says it later asked whether Windows 95 was considered an operating system or middleware.

Boies Swings Both Ways on Android

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:00:00 EST

David Boies, the lawyer who got Microsoft convicted of antitrust for the US government, persuaded a jury to award Oracle $1.3 billion in damages against SAP last year and is currently prosecuting Oracle’s suit against Google and Android, has joined the Barnes & Noble defense team against the patent infringement complaint Microsoft filed with the International Trade Commission. FOSS Patents found his notice of appearance. The bookstore-turned-Android tablet maker is also represented by Cravath, Swaine (IBM’s usual mouthpiece) and Kenyon & Kenyon, an IP specialist that does a lot of ITC work.

Cloudera Receives $40 Million in D-Round Funding

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:46:00 EST

Apache Hadoop start-up Cloudera, which just signed an alliance with NetApp like rival MapR’s got with storage big shot EMC, turned up Tuesday at Hadoop World in New York with $40 million stuffed in its pockets. The D round led by Ignition Partners ups its total funding to a serious $76 million. Existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel also kicked in. Accel means to make a habit of Big Data investments, believing Big Data “will drive the next-generation of multibillion-dollar software companies.” It just launched a $100 million Big Data Fund and is looking for “category-defining companies at every layer of the Big Data stack.” It ticked off storage, data management platforms, applications and services, including data analytics, vertical applications and mobile. The fund is described as being “aligned” with Cloudera, which will be brought in for advice on developing applications on the Apache Hadoop platform. Accel is already invested in Counchbase and its NoSQL database technology. Cloudera has earmarked its new money for expanding sales and marketing and supporting “key strategic initiatives.” Cloudera was the first company to make Hadoop an enterprise-ready solution, and has collected a reported hundred customers including eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Its Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), which is pure open source Apache Hadoop bundled with other Apache projects in the Hadoop stack, is recognized as the most widely deployed Hadoop distribution in both commercial and non-commercial environments. The Big Data outfit also sells Cloudera Enterprise, subscription-based software that includes its Management Suite for operating Hadoop clusters at scale in demanding production deployments.

NetApp Teams with Cloudera on Turnkey Storage Device

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:23:00 EST

NetApp will be coming out with a preconfigured, ready-to-deploy cluster solution called NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop based on Cloudera’s open source distribution of Hadoop. It’s supposed to offer much needed flexibility, rapid deployment, simple scalability, better performance, self-healing technology and improved TCO. It’s supposed to address some of Hadoop’s pricey and persnickety problems with having to scale both compute and storage together. The RAID device should let them scale independently and hot-swap failed drives. NetApp will resell Cloudera support and device-specific Hadoop management software. It said the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop includes both its E-Series Storage platform and FAS platform to deliver the performance and data management capabilities customers require for their enterprise Hadoop implementations. The device is expected to be available in December. Cloudera customers include eBay, Groupon and AOL. NetApp can get Cloudera into government, defense and financial accounts.

CFEngine Moves Sales from Norway to US

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:43:00 EDT

CFEngine AS, the Norwegian outfit with the popular eponymous open source configuration and compliance management widgetry for automating distributed infrastructure, has moved its sales operation to the Palo Alto in hopes of turning its freeloading Fortune 1000 accounts into paying customers. Its first job will be to identify the big companies using its free software that haven’t taken a subscription yet. Its cross-platform commercial stuff, just upgraded to CFEngine 3 Nova, costs $250 per server. The new rev is supposed to give system administrators more control over constantly changing, increasingly complex IT infrastructure. CFEngine, a decentralized autonomous agent technology¸ can reportedly continuously monitor, self-repair and update the IT infrastructure of a global multi-site enterprise in minutes, with negligible impact on system resources or performance. Facebook, AT&T, Cisco, eBay, LinkedIn, AMD, the US Navy and five of the 10 largest banks on Wall Street use it to manage servers, desktops and other heterogeneous computing devices. The biggest difference in 3 Nova is a new report-producing GUI built with large organizations in mind. It’s supposed to turn out custom IT metrics weighted specifically to an organization’s business goals. It has also added native support for Windows and mission-critical high availability and improved its Xen and KVM hypervisor integration. CFEngine 3 Nova runs on Linux, Unix, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh. The company, which recently took in $4.5 million in venture capital so it can stop bootstrapping, competes against BMC and HP. It was profitable in the first half.

Android Phones & Tablets Get Common OS

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:45:00 EDT

After waiting a brief interval for tears shed over Steve Jobs to dry, Google and Samsung, the biggest seller of Android phones, met in Hong Kong and unveiled Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphones powered by the brand new Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Apple-loathed Android operating system. Sales of the “co-developed” dingus are set for next month; pricing was not disclosed. The move came a few days after Apple sold a reported four million of its new iPhone 4S in 72 hours, a personal best.

The Great Oracle v Google Android Trial Postponed Indefinitely

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EDT

District Court Judge William Alsup Wednesday postponed Google’s billion-dollar-plus trial for allegedly infringing Oracle’s Java patents and copyrights in Android that was tentatively set to start October 31. No new date has been scheduled. Judge Alsup previously warned that he might have to vacate the date reportedly to hear a murder trial that starts October 24 and could run until January or February but now he’s told Oracle and Google’s lawyers that he might shift their case to another judge. Complaining that he’s never been so overworked in the 37 years of his professional life, he told them, “Your case is huge and needs the attention of somebody who can give it more time than I can.”

Google Tries Making App Engine More Appealing to the Enterprise

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:30:00 EDT

With its eye on Amazon Web Services and Amazon’s attractions for business, Google has set up App Engine Premier Accounts, an enterprise service for its restrictions-beset PaaS that abandons per-user, per-app pricing. For $500 a month, it’s promising premier support, a 99.95% uptime SLA and the ability to create an unlimited number of apps. Interested parties, however, are advised to read its terms of service and definitions of downtime before rushing in. Google is demanding that users try hard to fix any problems before bothering Google in writing and don’t expect any help on weekends or late at night.

Quanta to Pay Microsoft’s Android Tax

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 06:00:00 EDT

Quanta has agreed to pay Microsoft royalties on its Android- and Chrome-based tablets, smartphones and other consumer devices. What it’s for exactly remains unclear but raises suspicions Google’s biggest OEMs don’t believe Google’s buying Motorola Mobility and its patents is going to save their bacon. Samsung, HTC and Acer, among other, lesser lights, have also agreed to pay Microsoft Android royalties.

Oracle v Google Trial Date May Slip

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EDT

Seems we will probably be deprived of the spectacle of Oracle going after Google and Google doing a lot of whimpering because it looks like the Oracle v Google trial over Google’s use of Java, which is set to start on Halloween, will probably be postponed to give precedence to a big unrelated criminal trial. The FOSS Patents blog says that the trial judge, William Alsup, is making postponement noises. It says he “just put in a new ‘notice re pretrial conference,’ which says that the Oracle-Google trial ‘will likely be postponed’ and that the Halloween trial date ‘will not yet be vacated’ though it ‘now seems unlikely’ to work out.”

10gen Releases MongoDB Monitoring System

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:44:00 EDT

10gen, the company behind the open source MongoDB, has put out the first free NoSQL monitoring and alerting solution, which facilitates proactive alerts and support, often before a trouble ticket is filed. The cloud-based SaaS widgetry has been in beta since March with the company’s 200 commercial customers and now 10gen has released the stuff to the community. MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) makes monitoring MongoDB clusters easier. It auto-discovers MongoDB nodes and transmits metrics on memory use, database connections, index misses, read and write operations, memory consumption and CPU usage, sending alerts if failures are detected. The SaaS delivery mechanism removes time-consuming processes such as server setup or configurations management. 10gen originally built the widgetry for its own sanity. 10gen recently announced a $20 million financing round from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital and Union Square Ventures. That makes $31.4 million altogether. The start-up claims Disney, Ericsson, Viacom, Telefonica and SAP as customers.

Samsung to Pay Microsoft for Using Android

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Samsung has signed up to pay Microsoft royalties for using Android in its tablets and mobile phones under a patent portfolio cross-license the pair has executed. It’s a clear acknowledgement of Android’s patent pickle and Samsung’s lack of faith that Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility is going to prove to be an adequate heat shield at least for Android OEMs. And FOSS Patents points out that Samsung has 28,000 patents in the US and 100,000 worldwide, way more than Motorola Mobility. Guess it doesn’t say much about Google’s chances in court against Oracle either. Nobody said how big a tax Samsung will be paying but Samsung is supposed to sell more Android smartphones than anybody and to have the worthiest iPad rival or it did before Amazon announced its $199 Android tablet Wednesday.

Court Orders Oracle and Google into Third Day of Settlement Talks

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

After two days of apparently futile settlement talks, Oracle and Google have been ordered to give up their Saturday and on October 1 take one more stab at resolving Oracle’s claims that Google’s Android operating system treads on Oracle’s Java patents. Meanwhile, Oracle has been told to review its patents claims by September 29. The judge is hoping against hope it’ll abandon some of its 21 claims (seven patents, three claims per patent) simply to make the case more manageable. Therefore, it’s still not clear whether the trial, set to start October 31, will actually come off or be stayed in whole or in part pending re-examination of Oracle’s patents by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Patent blogger Florian Mueller thinks Oracle will accept a stay rather than abandon too many of its claims since, as the judge has decreed, it would have to give up whatever it abandons for all time against Google. And a stay could run a year or two.

Red Hat Beats Its Own Forecast

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Despite a rotten economy, Red Hat delivered a healthy 28% revenue hike when in reported its second fiscal quarter Wednesday and an even better 53% boost in earnings. Total revenues came in at $281.3 million against a consensus of $271.2 million and its own predictions of seeing $270 million-$272 million. It put 29 cents a share on the table when the Street was figuring 25 cents. That kinda income translates into $40 million compared to $23.7 million a year ago. The company said deferred revenue stood at $813 million, up 25% year-over-year. Subscription revenue in the quarter was worth $238.3 million, up 28%. The company attributed its above-guidance performance to execution and demand and pointed out that revenue growth has been accelerating for the last four quarters. It figures it’ll close its fiscal year at the end of February as the “first billion-dollar open source software vendor.” Guess it’s ignoring MySQL. Red Hat’s got a comfortable $1.3 billion in the bank.

Google’s Paying Classic Protection Money for MMI: Florian Mueller

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:30:00 EDT

After Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin reached out to Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha in early July about the Nortel patents Google had just lost to a dangerous rival, Google wound up bidding $30 a share for the whole company on August 1. MMI was supposedly afraid it would be defenseless without its 17,000 patents. Advised by Frank Quattrone’s indomitable Qatalst Partners, it wanted $43.50 a share. Google went to $37. MMI dropped to $40.50, according to an SEC filing, and settled for 40 bucks a share, a tidy $12.5 billion and a 63% premium, $10 to maybe $15 more than MMI’s board originally thought it could get. Google shelled out $3 billion or 33% more than its initial offer in the absence of any rivals.

Google Buys Some Java Patents Off IBM

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 07:15:00 EDT

Google has bought what appears to be another 1,023 patents from IBM, a transfer recorded by the US Patent and Trademark Office Wednesday and noticed by Bloomberg, which said Google bought them on August 17. The PTO also transferred 1,030 patents from IBM to Google in July after Google lost the auction for 6,000-odd Nortel patents to the combined might of Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson, Sony and EMC and their $4.5 billion. The blog SEO by the Sea flipped through the latest IBM haul and says the batch includes a bunch of Java and scripting-based patents. Whether any of them can defuse Oracle’s massive Java infringement suit against Google and its Android operating system is unclear.

Google Arms HTC with Patents to Fight Apple

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 07:00:00 EDT

HTC has added five patents it just bought from Google to an infringement suit it brought against Apple in Delaware. It also added them to a complaint it had filed with the International Trade Commission and is using four other patents obtained from Google to launch a separate complaint in Delaware charging Macs, iPhone, iPad, iPad, iCloud and iTunes with infringement. According to Bloomberg, which broke the news, three of the patents originated with Openwave Systems, two with Palm and four with Motorola. The amended complaints are using the Openwave and Palm IP and new one the Moto patents.

Court Orders Ellison and Page to Talk

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal last Friday ordered Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page to sit down next Monday and Tuesday and seek a financial settlement to Oracle’s Java infringement suit against Google. If they get nowhere next week they’ll have to show up for one more try on Friday, September 30. It’s still unclear whether the Java jury trial will start as scheduled on October 31. It all depends on whether an unrelated criminal case gets precedence. The Java case was recently divided in two: a liability part and a damages part. Judge Grewal, who will try to mediate, issued his Larrys order after Oracle railed against Google’s idea of sending Android chief Andy Rubin to a sit-down. Oracle sees Rubin as the author of the infringement and it’s got internal Google e-mail –one of the e-mails Google has been trying to suppress – supporting its position. He’s also not perceived to have the clout to settle.

Android Phones Capture European Market

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 15:00:00 EDT

According to latest report from research firm IDC, Apple's iPhone and Android phones from a variety of manufacturers were instrumental in lifting second-quarter smartphone sales in Western Europe by 48 percent year on year to nearly 22 million but the boost came at the expense of the Finnish handset maker Nokia. The company's Western European smartphone market halved from the previous three months to just 11 percent behind Apple, Samsung, BlackBerry developer Research In Motion and Taiwan's HTC. In the first quarter, it had dropped to No. 2 with Apple grabbing the top spot in smartphones and Samsung Electronics in overall cellphone sales. The reason behind the hard decline has been the increasing popularity of Google Android powered devices made by Samsung, HTC and Sony Ericsson. Nokia on the other hand has been concentrating on making the transition from its Symbian platform to the Windows mobile platform. Globally, IDC predicts that the Android OS will account for 39% of the market this year, which will be a sharp increase from 23% share of a year ago. This prediction seems to be in alignment with that of telecoms analyst Ovum which says that the total Android app downloads will surpass Apple's iOS installs this year by a ratio of 8.1 billion to 6 billion. Ovum expects mobile application downloads worldwide to grow 144 percent this year though Apple's iOS platform will continue to lead in paid app revenues.

The Great Oracle v Google Java Suit Splits into Two Trials

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:15:00 EDT

Oracle and Google may not get to go at each come Halloween depriving onlookers of a real treat. District Court Judge William Alsup told the pair Monday that the trial may have to be postponed. It all depends on whether a “large criminal” trial starts, as scheduled, on October 17. If it doesn’t then Oracle v Google will pick a jury on October 19 and the trial will start October 31. Then on Tuesday the judge said there were going to be two Java trials: one on liability, one on damages and that he’s appointed Brigham Young University professor of economics James R. Kearl as an independent damages expert.

SCO Loses Expected Final Appeal

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:42:00 EDT

SCO has lost its second and what is expected to be its final appeal to the 10th Circuit in Denver or anywhere else. Novell owns the Unix copyrights just like a Salt Lake City jury decided last year after a two-week trial. The appeals court found that the Novell’s board “adopted a resolution approving the sale” of Unix licensing rights to SCO in 1995, but “specifically mentioned the copyrights were to be retained by Novell.” SCO won its first appeal to Denver but lost the jury trial Denver ordered which is why it appealed again. SCO’s original case against IBM for poaching Unix to improve Linux, which is still pending, is therefore presumably quashed. SCO, such as it is, which isn’t much of anything, only owns the Novell and IBM lawsuits. The company, such as it is, was sold for a song to an outfit that styles itself UnXis.

Eucalyptus One-Ups the Other Clouds

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:00:00 EDT

Eucalyptus, the butt of some impudent sass since OpenStack got started last year, says it’s got something other cloud peddlers, open source and otherwise, don’t have, and that’s high availability. So there. The breakthrough makes it the first on-premise IaaS cloud software to deliver enterprise-grade high availability, which should bring in more users since it promises that their applications and data won’t be affected by any underlying hardware or network failure. And Eucalyptus is already supposed to be the most widely deployed private and hybrid cloud platform, used by outfits like Puma, USDA, Plinga, Aerospace Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Wetpaint and USASpending.gov. It says at least 21 of the Fortune 100 have started a Eucalyptus cloud to get the service levels, security and compliance they can’t get with public clouds. Anyway, the company’s been working on the new widgetry for the last 18 months and it doubles its lines of code. High availability will appear in the company’s third-generation Eucalyptus 3, which should be out for trials, proofs-of-concept, and production deployments in 30 days after an obsessive Eucalyptus quits testing it. It’s been in test mode for six months. Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos says, “High availability is one of the most sought-after and difficult features to implement in a private cloud platform.” It will be offered as a built-in standard feature in both the company’s supported and open source versions. Eucalyptus 3 is architected to allow no single point of failure. If a system crashes for any reason – a failure in the disk drives, memory corruption or a network or power outage – Eucalyptus 3 will immediately trigger a failover to a “hot spare” service that’s running concurrently on a different physical machine. The failover will be transparent to the outside world. Nobody’s slip will show even if hardware or network components fail. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will be preserved. Eucalyptus 3 also includes enhanced resource access controls (RAC) so cloud administrators can finely tune user group management, run in-depth cost tracking, and see details of cloud use throughout an enterprise. The admin can control which operations can run what and put limits on who’s eating up specific resources. The upgrade supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Identity and Access Management (IAM) API. Eucalyptus 3 can also automatically map definitions from enterprise LDAP and Active Directory (AD) servers to Eucalyptus accounts, groups and users and includes expanded account and resource reporting interfaces for integration with existing data center chargeback and billing systems. It’ll support an AWS boot from its own EBS SAN devices along with NetAPP and JBOD EBS SAN drivers, integrates with Active Directory (AD) and standard LDAP servers, and runs Windows, VMware 4.1, RHEL 6.0 and KVM images. By the way, Gartner figures OpenStack is 18 months away from being production-ready.

Google Gets Patent on Electronic Shipping Notifications

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 13:00:00 EDT

Google last week got a patent on estimated shipping time that it applied for on January 25, 2007. It’s titled “Electronic shipping notifications” and the abstract of US No 7,996,328 reads: “A broker facilitates customer purchases from merchants. Shippers ship shipments containing the purchases from merchants to the customers. A shipper identifies a shipment using a shipment identifier. The broker uses the shipment identifier to obtain the status information for the shipment from the shipper. The broker analyzes the status information in combination with other information to calculate an estimate of the time that the shipment will arrive at the customer’s address. The broker sends an electronic message, such as an e-mail or text message, to the customer prior to the estimated shipment arrival time to inform the customer of the impending arrival. The customer can thus arrange for someone to be at the shipping address to receive the shipment at the estimated arrival time.”

Google to Buy Motorola Mobility

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:15:00 EDT

Adding a new wrinkle to the mobile wars, Google said early Monday morning that it’s buying Motorola Mobility for $40 a share in cash, or about $12.5 billion, a 63% premium, giving Google its own Android hardware maker. The move is expected to be greeted with consternation by rival Android licensees despite Google saying Android will remain open and despite how they might have politely greeted the news when Google CEO Larry Page told them Sunday. Google shrugged off the distress factor – which could be advantageous to Microsoft – by claiming the acquisition would “supercharge the Android ecosystem” and “enhance competition in mobile computing.”

FTC Antitrust Probe of Google Includes Android: WSJ

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 06:00:00 EDT

The Federal Trade Commission is apparently plowing down the same avenue as the European Commission in its antitrust investigation of Google but has added Android to its inquiries. The Wall Street Journal talked to “people familiar with the probe” and said the FTC is asking about whether Google “grants preferential placement on its web site to its own products,” which sounds like what the EC is doing investigating the complaints it’s gotten about Google.

Google’s Attempt to ‘Sandbag’ Oracle Fails

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 07:00:00 EDT

District Court Judge William Alsup told Google Monday that it can’t come in at this late date – after facts discovery has pretty much closed – with what he called an “entire fleet” of additional claims that Oracle’s Java patents are invalid. Oracle was ordered to winnow its beloved 132 claims down to 50 by June 1. Google was supposed to take its best shot at them by June 15. The judge didn’t much care how long Google dithered around saying it “suggests a lack of diligence.” “It is possible,” he wrote, “that Google simply did not have that many good invalidity theories and is now trying to fill in with whatever it can belatedly cobble together.”

Google’s WebM Codec Allegedly Treads on 12 Pairs of Toes

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:00 EDT

MPEG LA, the royalty-collecting agency for AVC/H.264 and other multimedia codecs, told Streaming Media that 12 patent holders have responded to its call for submissions from folks who think the VP8 video codec, a key element in Google’s “royalty-free” WebM codec widgetry, infringes on their IP. MPEG LA has yet to name names. Patent watcher Florian Mueller calls 12 a “high number” that could increase in the future and figures there’s an “overlap between those 12 companies and the ones that contributed to MPEG LA’s AVC/H.264 pool.” MPEG LA’s next step would be to form a VP8 license pool, fix a rate and work out how to divvy up the money. Apparently negotiations are underway. It’s unclear what happened to that open source-leaning Justice Department look at whether MPEG LA was, as the Wall Street Journal described it, “trying to smother a free rival technology for delivering online video that is backed by Google.”

Replacing Excel with a Web-Based Project Time Solution

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:11:00 EDT

Herrmann is an innovative company that offers intelligent, economic and future-oriented solutions. The pillars on which the company was founded 30 years ago and still cherish are intensive consultation, cooperation and consistent orientation to the needs of customers. The company used to manage its projects by collecting information from each employee into excel sheets. About two years ago it decided to build a centralized application to manage and monitor this data and also add functionalities in order to be able to analyze and export the working time data of projects.

Oracle Gets to Depose Larry Page

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:30:00 EDT

Oracle is going to get the face time with Google CEO Larry Page that it wanted. Page has been ordered to sit still and answer Oracle’s questions about those Java licensing talks Google had with Sun during a two-hour deposition. Oracle is supposed to limit its questions to “topics relevant to the willfulness of defendant’s alleged patent infringement, and the value of Android” to Google. Google said last week that it rejected Sun’s proposal that Google pay $100 million in royalties to use Java in Android. A Google lawyer described the offer as a co-development deal, rather than a patent license despite an internal e-mail written by Android founder Andy Rubin saying Google needed a Java license.

Judge Tells Oracle to Move the Decimal Point on Java Claims

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:45:00 EDT

Google last week lost its shot at getting the Android trial delayed while the Patent and Trademark Office re-examines Oracle’s Java patents. Presiding judge William Alsup said the trial is still on for Halloween. Google did get its Daubert hearing. The judge told Oracle to find a new theory and bring its claims of $2.6 billion or $6 billion or whatever it is within the realm of reality. The judge outlined a possible alternative approach that starts at $100 million, chump change by Oracle standards even with trebling, leaving Florian Mueller – who’s been following the case wall-to-wall and making some pretty mind reading-style guesses about what comes next – to conclude that Oracle’s best big money bet lies in getting Android enjoined so it can negotiate a big fat per-unit royalty from Google.

Google Seeks Nortel Replacement

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 08:00:00 EDT

Having blanched at spending more than $4.5 billion for the 6,000 Nortel patents that were supposed to help it build a fortress against infringement claims – even if some of the money was Intel’s – patent-short Google is reportedly talking acquisition with InterDigital, whose wireless IP could reportedly help protect its litigation-attracting Android franchise. InterDigital reportedly holds and licenses 8,800 mostly handset-style patents on things like transmitting wireless data and canceling noise interference.

Google Waves Small White Flag

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 06:00:00 EDT

Google told the court considering whether the Oracle-Google Android suit should be stayed that it’s willing to settle. That’s like the next best thing to admitting that it’s guilty of infringing the Java patents that now belong to Oracle and could lose the case, something the judge has already sussed out. Google made the suggestion in a joint filing despite the Patent and Trademark Office’s preliminary finding against a couple of the Oracle patents. Google’s trying to get the trial stayed pending a re-examination of all the patents, but is arguing for at least a narrowing of the case “for the sake of efficiency,” it said: “Such a narrowed case will also eliminate the need for those efforts specifically directed at the claims rejected through re-examination, including motion practice, expert reports, and other trial preparation, as well as make it more likely that the parties could reach an informal resolution of the matter.” (Emphasis added.)