Up Front: Patent scuffles, psychos with iPod Shuffles, and earnings kerfuffles

Microsoft-Yahoo: Carl Icahn weighs in

Morning of July 20, 2009 • Still no official word on that rumored deal between Microsoft and Yahoo on the advertising front, but Reuters phoned up one of the heavy hitters and asked him for his thoughts last week. It's probably no surprise that principal Yahoo investor Carl Icahn, though not willing to discuss anything current, still seems inclined to make a deal -- even if it wasn't the deal he tried to broker for the two companies in 2008.

"I've been a strong advocate of getting a search deal done with Microsoft," Icahn told Alexei Oreskovic and Bill Rigby. "It would enhance value if a deal got done, because of the synergies involved," he added. Mr. Icahn has been a powerful force on the Yahoo board of directors, launching a ferocious proxy fight last year after the board rejected buyout overtures by Microsoft. That battle put him in the driver's seat and led, eventually, to the Carol Bartz era.

(And in case you've wondered where Carol Bartz was during all this hoopla? According to Reuters, she's off recovering from knee-replacement surgery. We wish Ms. Bartz a speedy and complete recovery and look forward to her participation on Tuesday's call, though we can't honestly say whether we think it would be more exciting if she held off on the pain meds for the event or not.)

Alleged touchpad patent holder takes 20 tech giants to court

July 15, 2009 • Once again, a company you've never heard of thinks it's got a patent case to make before a jury in the Eastern District of Texas. This time it's Texas-based Tsera LLC, which claims to have a patent on touchpad-type interfaces. The company has named everyone from LG to Microsoft to Bang + Olufsen, and it wants damages plus royalties from all of them, but it's got a special interest in Apple, from which it's requesting treble damages since the company allegedly knew about the patent since September 2004. The alleged inventor, one Chuang Li, appears to have filed the patent application in 1999. The patent was granted in 2003.

Man sues Apple for Mafia threats delivered via iPod

July 15, 2009 • A California man is suing Apple, the FBI, the St. Louis Police Department, a private investigator and an auto mechanic for a conspiracy that allowed the Mafia to send him threatening messages through an iPod Shuffle and an iPod mini. Mr. Gregory McKenna, who filed his suit in Eastern Missouri, says he was forced to become a model at a mob-run New York agency, and... you know, you should either wait for the movie to come out or read Ars Technica's recap. And please, dear readers, take your meds; you don't want to live your life in such a way that a Betanews reporter spends a quarter of an hour pointing at your online petition and laughing at you and reading portions of the filing to the house cat. (Your reporter is apparently a quart low on compassion this week.)

All-Star tech roster preps for earnings reports

Week of July 20, 2009 > Last week we had some earnings news that made us all feel good about the economy (IBM, Intel), some that made us feel edgy (Dell), and some that required extensive applications of aspirin (Google). This week's even bigger, with Texas Instruments, Yahoo, Apple, eBay, Amazon, AMD, Netflix... plenty of tea leaves to go around, in other words.

What should we expect? There's always buzzing, especially about Microsoft this time around; some observers expect a poor showing from Redmond on Thursday (perhaps offset by a certain major product milestone, also anticipated this week). But Texas Instruments could kick off the week in an interesting fashion; it revised its estimates upward last month, and as a chip company it could possible be regarded as a bellwether of how things look in the medium-to-long term for the tech sector. Maybe.

Can Apple's earnings ability revive the US stock market?

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 > You used to hear the phrase, "bellwether GM," referring to the relative stability of investing in General Motors through every manner of economic situation imaginable, certainly through a recession. There hasn't been a bellwether stock since the downturn in the US auto industry began (years earlier than history presently shows), so investors are now wondering whether Apple may be a decent candidate.

The reason Apple is being considered, as Fortune magazine's Philip Elmer-DeWitt demonstrates this morning, is its continually impressive gross margins -- a testament to some underlying strength and stability in its business model. While some analysts expect Apple to report a decline in its gross margins tomorrow afternoon, if the final number is only about 33%, that's still enough to impress investors. It means Apple only works half as hard as Dell to earn the same amount of profit.

But one of the underlying tenets of those superb margins is Apple's iPhone exclusivity deals, including with AT&T in the US. Here, those deals are being threatened on two fronts: first by Congress and federal regulators, who are investigating the fairness of exclusivity deals to smaller telecom operators; second by AT&T's standing as a reliable carrier, which continues to come under fire. Over the weekend, TechCrunch's M.G. Siegler unloaded on the carrier's continuing customer service failures, including a recent two-week voicemail outage that it has never actually publicly acknowledged or apologized for.

Toshiba bows to Blu-Ray?

Holiday season 2009 > The fork we stuck in HD DVD has been through the dishwasher and returned to the silverware drawer; maybe, just maybe, Toshiba's ready to let it go. Rumors over the weekend claim that 18 months after what was commonly held to be the end of that particular format war, Toshiba's planning to offer a Blu-ray / DVD deck later this year. Engadget has been leading the chase on this story (among the Anglophone publications, anyway), but so far there's nothing to see on the Toshiba site.

Monday's tech headlines

The Register

• And still more patent-suit fun, though for a change of pace this one has been filed in Delaware: Canadian-based IP firm Mosaid is suing IBM over patents it says it holds concerning embedded DRAM. Of course, IBM keeps a world-class team of intellectual-property attorneys on tap, so this could be entertaining.

• Linux kernels, even patched Linux kernels, appear to be susceptible to a null-pointer dereference bug -- an entire class of vulnerabilities.

Ars Technica

• Librarians have joined forces with the EFF and other organizations to demand that the government open up the ratification process for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement -- paring away unnecessary secrecy and giving public-interest groups a seat at a table currently surrounded mainly by governments and business concerns such as the MPAA and RIAA.

• The wise person learns from failure no less than success. On the other hand, some researchers only learn how to take their failure to a new level, as John Timmer noted when looking at the Rejecta Mathematica project. No mathematical acumen required to appreciate this examination how the open-access research ideal works in practice.

New York Times

• The flip side of those wildly punitive laws against music downloading: Record companies in Europe are trying hard to get people using legal sites such as Spotify and We7. Eric Pfanner has details.

• You're not supposed to xerox, but they'd like you to google or bing: Noam Cohen has a look at why companies are suddenly much more receptive to being "verbed."

San Jose Mercury-News

• Chris O'Brien looks at Google and sees a growing identity crisis.

• John Boudreau details the technology that lets baseball fans at AT&T Park stare at their iPhone screens instead of the game. Your reporter is living for the day when some idiot at the ballpark is so busy pawing at his gadgetry -- iPhone, DS, whatever -- he takes a foul ball to the cranium. (Make that two quarts low on compassion today.)

San Francisco Chronicle

• The Wii Fit was a runaway hit for Nintendo; now it's breaking open entire new categories of videogame win. And yes, there's a new version of the game on tap -- along with lots of competition. Not that working out should be about competition, of course. That's how you hurt yourself.

• Ignore some of the comments-thread jackassery, but Benny Evangelista has a nice short item on how the folks who bring you Sesame Street have been working on a new site for kids whose parents are on military deployments. Good stuff.