If you have ever looked at technology patents, they are pretty vague and most of the time describe something that may not even be possible.  Software patents are no different, there are countless vaguely written patents currently filed and owned by various technology companies. Finland based Nokia is the newest company to go after the Taiwanese phone manufacturer HTC for alleged patent violations.

If this sounds like old news, it’s because it is.  This is a tactic used by most all phone companies to make little jabs at the competitors and play a little dirty business.  Apple did the same thing against HTC last year when it was at war with Samsung.

This particular “violation” is in reference to three different patents for a “terminal, method and computer program product for interacting with a signaling tag.”

Clear as mud, right?  So you may ask yourself, what is Nokia trying to gain by pulling HTC into a long drawn out court battle?  Money.  That’s the long and the short of it, it is far more costly for companies to spend years in court fighting than to throw some settlement money at the petitioner.  Nokia is just attempting to boost its books for its stock holders.  Down side is, as everyone knows in business, expenses get passed to consumers.  So these dirty business tactics are only hurting you and me, the buyers.

There are some obvious flaws in the United States and European patent laws, and until those laws get changed, this kind of cheap trickery is going to continue. What do you think of this latest patent lawsuit? Let us know in the comment section below.

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Hulu is already not as popular as rival Netflix and there will be more competition from Amazon and the Redbox Instant service, and now the future of the service itself has become uncertain due to problems from the inside.

According to available info, News Corp. and Disney, the two companies which each own roughly a third of Hulu, have started discussing the future of the service and their own stakes in the company. The two companies have plans to purchase the other’s stake or sell it to an outside company. Apparently, they have disagreements regarding the direction in which Hulu should go.

Currently, Hulu offers a free version and also a Hulu Plus subscription service and both the offerings include ads. The disagreement between the two companies is that Disney prefers an ad-supported strategy, while News Corp. feels that the focus should be on subscriptions. In the case of subscriptions, Hulu with just 3 million subscribers is nowhere near Netflix’s 27 million.

Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar and CTO Tom Rich earlier announced their plans to step down from the company. So the future of the service might only be decided after its new CEO and CTO are announced, possibly along with new owners as well. Till then uncertainty surrounds Hulu.

Do you use Hulu regularly? Do you subscribe to Hulu Plus?

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When it comes to major corporate positions, the yearly bonus for a job well done is often just as, if not more, important than the actual salary they make. For most CEOs, the large bonus received at the end of the year is theirs and theirs alone, for whatever they want to use it for- yachts, mansions, a new shiny sports car or anything they truly want and desire. In the case of Lenovo’s CEO, Yang Yuanqing, a portion of his bonus went to the folks that truly help make the bonus for a great fiscal quarter possible, in his case the junior-level employees. Traditionally, Yuanqing has a bonus of $5.2 million each year in addition to his normal salary, but Lenovo’s exceptional year gave him an extra $3 million. Inside of pocketing the additional bonus, he gave about $314 USD each to many of the receptionists, production-line workers and assistants within the company.

Yang Yuanqing was set to make about $14 million between the original bonus, the added bonus, incentives and his normal salary, so sacrificing $3 million might not seem like that big of a chunk of change, but the truth is that he didn’t have to do anything at all for the company’s junior-level employees and gave them small bonuses completely on his own accord. Do you think that the gesture was more than enough, or could Yuanqing and other executives sprang more to give the employee’s larger bonuses?

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The post Lenovo’s CEO Is A Modern Day Robin Hood appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Remember in the 1990s and early into 2000s when Nokia was riding high? It was at the top of the mobile phone world, selling more devices than any other company. Then, something changed and somehow we find ourselves here today with Nokia revealing an operating loss of 826 million Euro. That’s right around $1 billion US. What happened?

Well, the good news is that the operating loss is offset by licensing royalties and a regular cheque from Microsoft, getting them to a net cash rise of 102 million Euro (about US$125 million). You have to keep in mind, though, that Nokia enjoyed an operating profit of 344 million Euro just one year earlier. To make matters worse, Nokia announced its Q2 results today and it’s nothing but gloom; only 4 million Lumia’s sold worldwide, and 600,000 handsets sold in the USA.

You know Nokia was once the number one cell phone company in the world? It lost that throne too. Samsung now sells more mobile phones than its Finnish competitor. Nokia is also losing on the low-end from other competitors, mostly in emerging markets. Back in 2007, Nokia had a 40.4% market share. That dropped to 27% last year and 21% in the first quarter of this year. It’s a slow and painful bleed.

It’s not like Nokia isn’t trying to innovate. It has spent $40 billion in R&D–roughly four times what Apple has spent–in the last decade working on new devices, but there’s a problem. Many of these never made it past R&D. Frank Nuovo is a former designer at Nokia and he already envisioned a smartphone with a color touchscreen above a single button seven years before the iPhone. In the late 90s, Nokia also had an iPad-esque tablet in the works that never materialized. As Nuovo put it, “We had it completely nailed.” The company culture encouraged research, “but squandered opportunities to bring the innovations it produced to market.”

Yes, Nokia spent a lot of money on innovation, but it didn’t really produce “winning devices or software.” Instead, it now has at least two abandoned operating systems and a bunch of patents. In fact, the patents, worth about $6 billion, are said to make up the bulk of Nokia’s overall value. Even Stephen Elop agrees that if they had “been landed in products…I think Nokia would have been in a different place.” They spent too much time selling to the low-end and not enough time pushing the higher-end devices to market. And the iPhone arrived and gobbled it all up.

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The post Understanding How Nokia Lost Over $1 Billion in Q1 2012 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

While Motorola builds solid devices that most likely will be at the center of the Nexus design line in the future, I personally suspect that Google cared more about Motorola’s patent library than its hardware development capabilites, though I could be wrong.

In a move that isn’t surprising, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha is stepping down and Dennis Woodside is taking his place. This makes sense, after all Woodside oversaw the acquisition process and is a former Google president in the US and has been involved in expanding the business internationally in places such as the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia.

Beyond a few changes in the upper-command at Motorola, Google claims that they aren’t planning any layoffs or other massive staff changes.
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Before making the jump to Wall Street, IBM’s Watson has already been busy working for health care organizations, putting its natural language interpretation skills to good use. With the new job at Citigroup, Watson will work primarily with risk management, helping to “analyze customer needs and process financial, economic and client data to advance and personalize digital banking.”

To get Watson ready for the job, Citigroup is training our robot overlord about regulatory practices and financial jargon. Presumably, Watson will be a little more ethical than some of the not-so-nice people on Wall Street, sticking to the facts and minimizing the shady practices. Then again, Watson can only be as ethical as its employers that program it.

There are already plenty of people who use computer programs to pick their stocks, make their trades, and otherwise guide their financial decisions. This is just the next logical step.

The post Citigroup Hires IBM Watson to Work on Wall Street appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The market has recently become rather crowded with all the latest tablet devices from around the world. Recent devices like the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet have really pushed the Android platform further and made it more popular than ever.

Barnes & Noble has released their Q2 earnings report and it appears like their recently launched Nook tablet has had an amazing start.

The company’s Nook business, which includes both the actual devices and content available for them, is now a $220 million business, an increase of 85 percent.

The Nook tablet, which was launched on November 7 with a price tag of $249, has become their fastest selling device to date according to reports.Barnes and Noble has yet to give out any official reports as to the exact number of tablets sold, though.

The fairly low-cost price tag has certainly contributed to the success of the Nook. The company’s strategy to lower the price of their Nook Color and Nook Simple Touch e-readers to $199 and $99, respectively, has also helped.

Sales on the company’s B&N.com website increased by 17 percent (from $177 million to $206 million) from the same quarter last year.

Although the Nook is doing well on the market, the company faced a net loss of $6.6 million (a slight improvement over the $12.6 million net loss in the previous year) in Q2 and the total sales decreased from $1.90 billion to $1.89 billion.

Despite its struggles with its non-Nook businesses, the company has high hopes for Q3. According to William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble, “We expect to sell millions of devices during our third quarter, adding to the millions of current NOOK customers”.

Although the Nook tablet is an impressive piece of hardware, it is still too early to see whether or not it will be a major saving grace for the company or not. Additionally, Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire means some pretty stiff competition for Nook as well.

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It’s been a while since HP has erased every single thing related to Palm. Now, the whole world has come to know that all this costed HP nothing less than $3.3 Billion American Dollars. To this amount, we have to add $1.2 Billion, which was the amount that HP spent while buying Palm. As a total, you can see that HP has come up to $5 Billion in losses; this related to their mobile industry.

WebOS was, in my opinion, the new OS with the most potential of becoming the next generation “top selling” Mobile OS. However, this will no longer occur thanks to HP’s desicion. The reasons can be divided into two big areas. For one side, we can find a small ammount of mobile designs created. Probably, if HP would have invested more in this area, the opportunities for the company would have been much better. Now, the second reason is that HP, in order to create WebOS mobile devices, would have had to create expensive hardware for Scanners and Printers.

As HP’s new CEO, Meg Whitman, said: “HP wil make from now on “prudent investments”. Unfortunately, she didn’t give further details. Now, what do you think that HP will create in the future for it’s mobile devices? Will they create a new OS? or will they adopt platforms such as Windows Phone 7 or Android?

The post Wiping-Out WebOS Will Cost HP $3.3 Billion More appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Updates have been made to Google Wallet which include a “Featured Offers” section with discounts exclusive only to Google Wallet users. Aside from the discounts from partner shops, loyalty cards are also easier to organize. Collect reward points automatically when you shop from places like The Container Store, Foot Locker, Guess, American Eagle Outfitters, Jamba Juice, OfficeMax, Macy’s and Toys’R'Us.

Google Wallet is still in its early stages but it has made a great step in expanding its network of merchants to make shopping easier and faster in many places. Now, if you are a business persona and you want to take part in this business endeavor, you can sign up on the Google Wallet site and get involved in this new way of accepting money.

The post Google Wallet Adds Incentives appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Google Wallet is a free mobile app that stores virtual versions of your credit cards, debit cards and coupons, eliminating the need for plastic and replacing your wallet with your phone. It will be compatible with none other than the Nexus S 4G, on Sprint. The app will launch “soon” but we’ve learned a great deal about it in the meantime.

How it works is you would simply turn your phone on, tap the phone at a terminal and the Google Wallet would transmit payment details wirelessly using near field communication technology (NFC). NFC is a wireless technology that enables data transmission between two objects when they are brought within a few inches of each other. Smartphones enabled with NFC technology can exchange data with other NFC enabled devices or read information from smart tags embedded in posters, stickers, and other products.

Google Wallet would require a PIN that would access any card to make a purchase, contradicting advice from major bank companies that you should never use the same pin for more than one card. And if your phone is stolen and someone knows your PIN, you would have to cancel all your cards. So just how secure is the app? According to Google, payment credentials are stored in a chip called the secure element, which is contained within the Nexus S 4G and isolated from the phone’s main operating system and hardware. Only authorized programs like Google Wallet can access the chip to initiate a transaction.

If you want to use the app, you will need a Citi MasterCard credit card that is eligible for PayPass, or a Google Prepaid Card. After adding the Citi MasterCard card to Google Wallet, you can spend up to $100 USD. To access your full credit line, Citi will send you an activation code that you will have to enter into Google Wallet. As for the Google Prepaid Card, it can be funded with any existing plastic credit cards.

Google Wallet records the time of an initiated transaction and which credential was used, and this information is stored on the phone. Google claims they do not currently receive data about what products you purchase with it. They hope to eventually expand to other mobile devices and platforms.

Check out the official press release and blog post about Google Wallet, also the official video below.

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