HTC boss: College kids don’t want an iPhone ‘because their dad has one’

Martin Fichter, the acting president of HTC America, has a daughter down at Steve Jobs’ alma mater, Reed College, where he conducted the very scientific focus group:

On the iPhone 5 hype: “Apple is innovating. Samsung is innovating. We are innovating. Everybody is innovating. And everybody is doing different things for the end consumers. I brought my daughter back to college — she’s down in Portland at Reed — and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.”

They also have no interest in dad’s Porsche.

*thanks 9to5mac*

I don't know what college students he talked to but all I see are iPhones, iPod touch, and iPads all over. iPod touch for those who use prepaid phones such as Metro pcs, Virgin mobile and others. iPads for textbooks and iPhones for everything else.
On the MacBook Air front, I have seen more airs than pros recently, however I have seen more iPads than any Mac.

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- Posted using my iPhone 4

HTC sues Apple with Google’s patents

In a report from Bloomberg, HTC has apparently filed claims of patent infringement against Apple after acquiring patents from Google last week.

The patents were apparently snatched up by Google sometime over the last year from the original owners including Motorola Inc., Palm Inc., and Openwave Systems Inc. According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, they were then transferred by Google to HTC on September 1st.

Six days after acquiring the nine patents, HTC today filed a suit in Delaware against Apple claiming patent infringement on four of the patents (originally issued to Motorola) that they acquired from Google. However, they aren’t letting the remaining patents go to waste either, they also filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission for five of the others (two originally owned by Palm and three by Openwave).



While there aren’t many more details regarding Google’s specific motivation, Apple’s ongoing infringement claims against Android vendors (notably HTC and Samsung) certainly doesn’t help. Perhaps Google is really serious about protecting Android and its partners. This isn’t HTC’s first time entering litigation with Apple. As of July, HTC’s general counsel made the company’s stance on Apple’s “constant attempts at litigations” clear after Apple attempted to block imports of HTC devices with the International Trade Commission:

HTC is disappointed at Apple’s constant attempts at litigations instead of competing fairly in the market. HTC strongly denies all infringement claims raised by Apple in the past and present and reiterates our determination and commitment to protect our intellectual property rights.

*thanks 9to5mac*

This is a fine line google is drawing. Apple has stayed away from google for now and gone after the handset manufacturers, I guess Apple will have to go directly after android!

Cross posted on 24/7Droid.com

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Forbes: Apple is fifth most innovative company, Google is #7 Don’t even ask about Microsoft.

Forbes has put together (via setteB.IT) a list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies and Apple ranked fifth. Salesforce.com leads the pack, followed by Amazon (#2), Intuitive Surgical (#3) and Tencent Holdings (#4). Interestingly, Google is seventh most-innovative company in the world on the publication’s list. Other worthy mentions: Nintendo (#20), Activision Blizzard (#22), Starbucks (#19), PepsiCo (#50). The usual suspects don’t fare well, however. Adobe is ranked 54th (little wonder, with their confused CEO) and Apple’s court friend HTC is 56th. Steve Jobs best friend’s company Oracle is 77th and Microsoft is far down on the list, ranked 86th. The full list is available here. But wait, how do you measure innovation? Read on…




Forbes calls it the five skills of disruptive innovators and here they are:

Questioning allows innovators to challenge the status quo and consider new possibilities; Observing helps innovators detect small details—in the activities of customers, suppliers and other companies—that suggest new ways of doing things Networking permits innovators to gain radically different perspectives from individuals with diverse backgrounds; Experimenting prompts innovators to relentlessly try out new experiences, take things apart and test new ideas; Associational thinking—drawing connections among questions, problems or ideas from unrelated fields—is triggered by questioning, observing, networking and experimenting and is the catalyst for creative ideas.
That, and the usual stuff to consider such as sales, profitability, growth, market share, hype and other tangibles and intangibles.

*thanks 9to5mac*

Cross posted on 24/7Droid.com
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- Posted using my iPhone 4

comScore: iPhone continues to gain ground even without a refresh

While Google passed the 40% smartphone share (Microsoft must be happy!) in the US threshold, Apple continues to outpace the industry as a whole posting modest 1 point gains in the US smartphone category according to comScore. Apple moved up from 25.5% in March to 26.6% in June on the year old iPhone 4 model which also saw its US debut on Verizon.

Apple also moved up in the hardware category, below:

Apple outpaces Samsung and LG for the quarter at the expense of Motorola and RIM. No shocker there.


*thanks 9to5mac*

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- Posted using my iPhone 4

Kodak considering sale of patent involved in Apple lawsuit

In January of 2010, Kodak sued Apple and RIM for infringing on their patent to preview photographs. The lawsuit is still going on, but today Wall Street Journal is reporting that Kodak is currently looking to sell 10% of their patent portfolio, which includes the patent Apple and RIM are bring sued for.

The 1,100 patents include patents covering capturing, storing, organizing and sharing digital image. WSJ credits the sale to Kodak’s loss in profit over the last two quarters.

Chief Executive Antonio Perez has been using Kodak’s intellectual property as a means of funding the company’s long and expensive transformation. In 2008, Mr. Perez put forth a goal to generate between $250 million and $350 million a year from Kodak’s patent portfolio.
Google is fresh off acquiring 1,000 patents from IBM and is likely still in a buying mood as it battles everyone from Oracle to Microsoft to Apple-by-proxy in the courts. Apple, who outbid Google for the Nortel patent portfolio at $4.5B is obviously on the offensive.

Kodak’s decision to sell its patents follows a $4.5 billion patent sale by Nortel Networks Corp. Kodak has retained Lazard as an adviser for the sale. Lazard also advised Nortel on its sale.

*thanks 9to5mac*

We are about to see the biggest patent auction ever, rivaling nortel patent sale. With at least one of the patents holding Apple and RIMM at the edge the prospects are: Google to better station itself against more patent litigation, Apple to stop one lawsuit against itself and to give it more leverage over others, RIMM to stop a lawsuit against itself and maybe use it against Apple.

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- Posted using my iPhone 4

Google purchased A thousand IBM inventions to protect Android from Apple threat

Image from gizmodo

Anticipating Android backers will face legal hurdles as Apple now has the upper hand in its case against HTC (here and here), Google has stepped up and bought more than a thousand IBM patents for an undisclosed sum. The news was first reported by the blog SEO by the Sea and picked up by The Wall Street Journal. The search company might use IBM inventions as a leverage against pending lawsuits that indirectly involve its Android software.

Google failed to outbid the Apple-led consortium which paid $4.5 billion for Nortel’s treasure chest of more than 6,000 patents covering wireless technologies, among them crucial inventions related to fourth-generation cellular networks. The new patent deal is in line with Google’s focus on snapping up patent portfolios left and right in creating a “disincentive for others to sue Google”, as noted on their official blog back in April. The 1,030 granted patents Google bought from IBM cover varied technologies, including…




“the fabrication and architecture of memory and microprocessing chips” plus other areas of computer architecture which “include servers and routers”, in addition to “relational databases, object oriented programming, and a wide array of business processes”. It is not immediately clear how the acquired patents relate to Android, but a Google spokesperson took this jab at Apple, telling CNET:

Like many tech companies, at times we’ll acquire patents that are relevant to our business needs. Bad software patent litigation is a wasteful war that no one will win.
Florian Mueller of the FOSS Patents blog explains how Google could use some of the patents to defend Android from litigation:

Google could sell some of those patents to embattled Android device makers such as HTC. HTC could then, for example, use them in countersuits or counterclaims against Apple, possibly with an obligation to sell the patents back to Google after the dispute.
Cross-posted on 9to5Google.com

And if Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi is right, then Apple is going to “push its legal claims hard and unrelentingly”, he tells Fortune. He foresees huge, positive financial implications for Apple should the company prevail in its anti-Android legal crusade. The analyst wrote in a note to clients: “We note that a 10 percentage point shift in smartphone market share from Android to Apple (the current run-rate smartphone market share is 46% for Android vs. 18% for Apple) in 2013 is worth an estimated $30B+ in annual revenue and $10+ in annual EPS to Apple”. He also noted Apple ships a much higher value of smartphones than any other player, as seen in the below chart accompanying his note.


*thanks 9to5mac*

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iPhone captured two-thirds of mobile phone profits in the second quarter

Global operating profit from the sale of mobile phones among eight major players, by Asymco



In case you missed it, the big news today is that Apple is king of the hill in smartphones and is now chasing LG for the third place in global cell phone sales. Samsung, which reported its second-quarter earnings today, ranks as the world’s second-largest smartphone maker in units, but the company said it will cease reporting phone and tablet sales citing competition from Apple. If that didn’t impress you, this data point will blow your mind: More than six out of ten dollars of profit in the mobile phone business go to Apple’s pockets, or 66.3 percent. This is interesting because it shows Apple steadily improving its profitability in the cell phone space at the expense of its rivals, Asmyco’s Horace Dediu explains:



This share is up from 57% in Q1 and 50% in Q3 and Q4. Samsung’s share went to 15%, though that’s not a peak level historically. In Q1 2008 the company was at 21%. RIM was at 11%, a level in a range that has been unchanged for three years. Finally, HTC captured 7.4%, a new high and an increase from 6% since last quarter.
And guess who controlled the industry’s profits four years ago, when the iPhone debuted? That’s right, Nokia, which in the second quarter of 2007 enjoyed 55 percent of global operating profit from the sale of mobile phones. Back then, Apple, Research In Motion and HTC collectively captured 11 percent of the profits and now they together control 84 percent of the profits. And another somewhat related tidbit: Apple now has more cash than the world’s largest sovereign government.

*thanks 9to5mac*

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- Posted using my iPhone 4

Ruling Whittles Down HTC’s Patent Case Against Apple

If HTC thought its acquisition of S3 would be a handy club with which to beat down Apple’s patent infringement attacks, it best think again.
A U.S. International Trade Commission judge has ruled that some of Apple’s Mac computers do infringe two of the four patents S3 asserted against the company. But it also ruled that Apple’s iOS devices do not and that Macs running Nvidia GPUs have an implied license to use them.


In other words, the iPhone and iPad are no longer at risk for an importation ban if things go sideways for Apple in this case. And neither are any Macs protected by that implied license I mentioned earlier. Really the only infringing products at issue in the case are Macs with Intel GPUs. So worst case scenario, if the ITC’s initial ruling should be upheld, Apple could presumably switch its Mac line over to Nvdia GPUs and dodge an ITC ban. Which significantly blunts S3′s helpfulness to HTC in its ongoing IP war with Apple, as Litigating Apple’s Matt Macari suggested last week.
“As S3 goes, so goes HTC — at least when it comes to using the S3 acquisition as leverage against Apple,” Macari, an IP attorney, wrote. “Such a turn in events would effectively put HTC back where it was before it purchased S3, forcing HTC to face Apple’s initial ITC win head on.”




*thanks All things Digital*

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HTC Says They Need to 'Sit Down' With Apple and 'Figure It Out'

HTC says that it is open to negotiations with Apple to resolve the patent dispute between the companies, according to Bloomberg.

Recently, an ITC judge found HTC in violation of two Apple patents which appear to be at the core of Android and are likely infringed by all Android devices. Only July 6th, HTC announced a $300 million deal to S3 Graphics after the company won a ruling against Apple over two patents.

"We have to sit down and figure it out," Winston Yung, chief financial officer of the Taoyuan, Taiwan-based company, said by phone today. "We're open to having discussions."

"We are open to all sorts of solutions, as long as the solution and the terms are fair and reasonable," Yung said. "On and off we've had discussions with Apple, even before the initial determination came out."

Both the rulings for and against Apple are subject to review by the full six-member ITC commission before they are finalized.




*thanks iclarified*

Looks like Someone is getting a little worried Apple my get it's way and have HTC banned from importing into the USA.

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- Posted using my iPhone 4

Apple Asks ITC to Block Sales of HTC Devices for the Second Time

Apple has filed a second complaint against HTC with the ITC, asking them to order an import ban on HTC devices, according to FOSS Patents.

It seems like Apple may be concerned that their initial complaint may not go in their favor and has determined that the patents in the new complaint are potentially stronger.

In April, the ITC staff expressed its opinion that HTC did not infringe any valid Apple patents within the scope of that investigation. The target date for a final initial determination by the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) hearing the case is August 5, 201. The ALJ could still rule in Apple's favor: the staff recommendation is, after all, just an opinion. However, a negative ITC staff recommendation does not bode well to say the least. I'm sure Apple will fight hard to make the original complaint succeed but doesn't want to depend on the outcome of that case.

The title of the complaint is "Portable Electronic Devices and Related Software", which suggests that Apple may be targeting both HTC smartphones and tablets.




*thanks iclarified*

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- Posted using my iPhone 4