Touch-screen smartphones, once an expensive rarity, now generate tens of billions of dollars of revenue every year. And Apple, a pioneer in this market, is bent on ensuring its rivals don’t profit from its original ideas. Apple’s first big case has just born
I remember the moment I realised that music streaming services were the future. I was at the Trans Musicale music festival in Rennes, France, in 2009 and was invited back to some French youngster’s apartment to carry on the party after the day’s
A year ago, the tech press was all aflutter about the possibility of a new bubble in the internet industry. The blogosphere hummed with dire predictions of “dot-bomb 2.0” and equally passionate rebuttals. It’s amazing how much can change in a year. The most
To understand the importance — and irony — of last week’s court victory by Apple, it’s necessary to go back to 1979. It was 33 years ago that a young Steve Jobs paid a visit to the Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), a research and development facility in Silicon Valley owned by Xerox. Xerox Parc is renowned for having
Last week a US court ruled that Samsung Electronics had to pay US$1bn to Apple for patent infringement. Samsung made a cool $6bn profit in the second quarter of 2012 on revenue of nearly $50bn, so $1bn, in the final analysis, is pretty manageable. But that’s not the point. The Apple-Samsung patent war
A California court has ruled in Apple’s favour in its patent-infringement case against Samsung. Slapped with a fine of US$1bn, and facing the possibility of having some of its products banned in the US, Samsung will almost certainly appeal against the decision. But with Apple’s own history of pilfering ideas, is an iron-fisted
The Apple-Samsung trial had been running in the San Jose, California, federal court for four weeks, although the saga has been brewing for a lot longer with the two companies going at each other hammer and tongs for years now. The verdict, handed down on Friday, is by far the
The move to digital terrestrial television isn’t simply a chance for set-top box manufacturers to make a quick buck. It presents a unique opportunity to introduce new competition in the broadcasting market where, until now, consumers have had precious little choice. In terrestrial broadcasting
It’s not often I find myself cheering when reading through government documents, but I did just that last week as I took in the plan’s revised proposals for the information and communications technology sector. Here, in black and white, a government commission has laid out many
It sounds trite, but in the growing litany of lawsuits between the world’s major consumer electronics manufacturers, the only real winners are the lawyers. Although patents have a place, particularly in the early days of any new technology, they’re ill-equipped to deal with one of the inevitable consequences of innovation: the best
