Plus the illicit torrent business, Microsoft PR on iWork, RM exits PCs, Apple's missing story and more
A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Apple fends off $248m demand by Wi-Lan in patent suit >> San Jose Mercury News
Apple won a patent-infringement trial in which Wi-Lan was seeking $248m from the iPhone maker over an invention for wireless technology used in mobile devices.
Apple didn't infringe a patent for technology used in wireless networking, a federal jury in Marshall, Texas, said Wednesday. The jury, which deliberated for just over an hour, also said the two patent claims were invalid.
Wi-Lan said it was reviewing its options, and that it "does not believe previous license agreements signed related to the patents are negatively impacted by this decision."
Wouldn't be sure about that; earlier licencees include Samsung and Ericsson. Wi-Lan's only revenues are from its patents: $19.9m in the second quarter. Nice business if you can get it.
Mail in Mavericks changes the Gmail equation >> Tidbits
Joe Kissell:
Apple Mail and Gmail were never a fantastic combination out of the box, because Gmail has a wacky, highly nonstandard way of using IMAP, and Mail always wanted to treat Gmail as though it were a conventional IMAP server. But, after much trial and error, I eventually found a combination of Mail settings and Gmail settings that, prior to Mavericks, resulted in a stable — and indeed largely pleasant — experience…
Well, forget about that under Mavericks. In fact, following those old directions now will lead you far from bliss. And if you followed them before upgrading to Mavericks, you'll need to take some steps to undo some of the problems.
Very poorly documented by Apple. If you rely on Gmail in Mail, the advice seems to be: don't upgrade.
Might Google have a sly motive behind Motorola? >> WSJ.com
Farhad Majoo argues that because Google wants to get everyone online all the time, it wants to use Motorola to drive down the average price of Apple's and Samsung's smartphones:
Today there are lots of companies making cheap Android phones, but many of those phones are junk—underpowered, clogged with adware, and hobbled as Web surfing devices. That's why customers are still willing to pay Apple and Samsung premium prices for smartphones.
Hence Google's emerging vision for its smartphone division. Think of Motorola as the hardware version of the Android strategy—not a profit-seeking entity, but instead one whose only eventual economic motive is to create pretty good phones at reasonable prices. In doing so, it hopes to force Apple and Samsung to slash their hardware prices—and thus earnings—accelerating the smartphone's path toward becoming a commodity device.
The only wrinkle in this theory: So far, there's no evidence that the Motorola is pushing down prices.
It's a great theory apart from the fact that there's absolutely no way that Motorola could ever get the scale necessary to have the slightest impact on Apple. And as for affecting Samsung - forget it. The $13bn mystery of what Motorola is "for" continues.
Apple aims to ship 10 million plus 9.7-inch iPads in 4Q13 >> Digitimes
The company's supply chains started gearing up for the release of a new 9.7-inch iPad in the third quarter and expect to see strong orders from the company as Apple anticipates a surge in shipments exceeding 10m units during the fourth quarter largely due to the year-end holidays.
The next-generation 9.7in iPad is expected to come with IPS panels supplied by LG Display, Samsung Display and Sharp, with LG responsible for 70% of shipments, Samsung 20% and Sharp 10%.
Interesting ratios of screen makers there. No word on how many iPad minis (of both hues) it expects to make.
Apple and oranges >> Microsoft TechNet blogs
Frank X Shaw, head of Microsoft PR:
Perhaps attendees at Apple's event were required to work on iOS devices that don't allow them to have two windows open for side-by-side comparisons, so let me help them out by highlighting the following facts:
• The Surface and Surface 2 are less expensive than the iPad 2 and iPad Air respectively, and yet offer more storage, both onboard and in the cloud.
• … come with full versions of Office 2013, including Outlook, not non-standard, non-cross-platform, imitation apps that can't share docs with the rest of the world.
• … offer additional native productivity enhancing capabilities like kickstands, USB ports, SD card slots and multiple keyboard options.
• … include interfaces for opening multiple windows, either side by side or layered to fit the way most people actually work.
So, when I see Apple drop the price of their struggling, lightweight productivity apps, I don't see a shot across our bow, I see an attempt to play catch up.
Making money from movie streaming sites: an insider's story >> TorrentFreak
TorrentFreak has been speaking to an individual with a wealth of experience in this field [of uploading torrents of pirated films]. To protect his identity we'll have to be vague about where he operates, but suffice to say he's one of the most prolific uploaders and linkers online today with a hundreds of thousands of links spread and 30,000 movies and TV shows uploaded…
"I had just moved to Puerto Vallarta [Mexico] and went to a network's website to watch a TV Show I had missed and I was blocked because I was outside the US. Grrrrr. Then a friend told me about [Richard O'Dwyer's former site] TVShack and a whole new world opened up to me. The site itself was ugly and clunky but it provided the market with what it needed and me with 100's of hours of entertainment," John explains.
While the site was clearly fulfilling unmet demand, not even TVShack had all the answers. This caused John to start contributing to the piracy ecosystem himself.
It's the affiliate schemes which make it work for people like 'John'.
Google experiments with giant banner ads on top of search results >> The Verge
Google is experimenting with enormous banner advertisements for queries that are associated with brands. Digital marketing company Synrgy first spotted the test after running a search for Southwest Airlines. The search returned a large banner ad similar to a cover photo on Facebook, followed by some top links on Southwest's website. "This is a very limited test in the US; one of many we run," a Google spokesperson told The Verge.
Banner ads on Google results? Danny Sullivan points out that Google "promised" in 2005 that it would never do this: "There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever." It's now doing precisely that with as many as 30 advertisers.
PC addict RM finally quits its building habit, plans to axe 300 jobs >> The Channel
"The division will exit the declining and low margin sale of personal computing devices. A significant reduction will also be made in the scale of the division's associated sales and marketing activities and in central services functions," RM said.
Existing projects will be fulfilled and RM will continue to resell third-party infrastructure hardware – for that read servers, storage, etc – as part of the continuing services business.
RM will begin a consultation with affected staffers regarding proposed redundancies. "The proposal is to reduce UK headcount, including temporary staff, by around 300 over the next 12 months".
With BSF activity being "rundown" and the exit from the PC business, RM warned revenues at the ET division all decline by about 50%t (£90m) over the next two years.
The closure of the PC business will result in one-off costs of £10m that will be reflected in the fiscal '13 results for the year ended 30 November, provisions for property and redundancies.
Brutal.
Whither Liberal Arts? The missing iPad story >> Stratechery
Ben Thompson (who has worked at Apple) tries to put his finger on the essence that's missing from Apple's presentation - and, he wonders, perhaps its internal thinking:
Jobs's second speech [in 2011] – like the second iPad, and like the entire presentation that preceded it – was fuller, more filled out. Apple had launched the iPad in 2010 not quite sure of its place in the universe, but a year later, the vision was clear: it was not that the iPad needed to be better at jobs done by a laptop or smartphone, as Jobs promised in 2010; rather, the iPad was capable of previously unimagined applications that were truly life-changing. To put it another way, the iPad 1 launch featured Pages, a pale imitation of a PC word processor; the iPad 2 launch featured GarageBand, an application that was immensely better on the iPad by virtue of it not being a PC.
Yesterday's opening, however, gave the opposite impression: of staleness, and ossification. Words and illustrations on a canvas, literally replayed, without life, without originality. Perhaps it's because it was a video instead of the spoken word, but the rest of the presentation was in the same vein.
As he points out, the human stories were missing from the iPad presentations in favour of many speeds and feeds. He thinks Scott Forstall embodied Jobs's thinking better. That may be true. When Jobs wasn't the chief executive, he got fired from Apple too.
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