How Facebook built its legal defence against Yahoo
Two researchers from Dutch electronics group Philips, a professor at New York University, an independent inventor in San Jose – and a certain Mark Zuckerberg.
These are some of the people whose assembled brainpower Facebook has drawn on to defend itself against Yahoo’s patent infringement case. If successful, it will count as one of the most effective legal defences mounted by a young internet concern that until recently had little in the way of patent reserves to draw on.
Could Google become one of the beneficiaries of improving ties between Taiwan and China?
The US internet company on Tuesday began construction of its own data center in central Taiwan, one of three that it is building in Asia, after Hong Kong and Singapore. The groundbreaking comes just a week after the Taiwan government approved the construction of the first-ever undersea cable directly linking China and Taiwan.
Google opens East London Campus
London’s Tech City project got a big boost on Thursday when Google officially opened Campus, its first hub offering start-up technology companies desk space and mentoring.
Opened to great fanfare by George Osborne, chancellor, the seven-storey building will house 100 start-up companies and organisations such as Seedcamp, the technology incubator, and TechHub, the original provider of co-working space in the Shoreditch area.
Box OneCloud has silver lining for app developers
While cloud computing promises to simplify our lives by keeping our information in one readily accessible place online, it fails to deliver when clouds are scattered by users relying on too many different apps and services.
You may have photos spread across Picasa, Flickr, Eye-Fi and Facebook and documents held on different services as well. But Box has announced an enterprise-focused solution on Wednesday with its OneCloud, while Quickoffice is tackling the same problem from a different direction with Connect.
I used to think that each new generation of workers was pretty much like the last one, at least in big ways. We all want more money, more praise, more interesting work and colleagues who are pleasant enough to join for a sandwich at lunchtime.
Yet last week I started to wonder if 20-year-olds might be something different altogether. I had a conversation with a young man who, far from sharing sandwiches with his colleagues, has never even met them. He doesn’t talk to them on the phone either. Instead, Jamie Holmes has spent the past two years interacting with his bosses and with the people he recruits and trains entirely by text message and email.
Broadcom a pathfinder on location
Broadcom is set to make indoor navigation easier and our online lives faster with two developments – the networking chipmaker is launching a new location-finding platform and acquiring the Israeli fibre-optics company BroadLink for $195m.
On a visit to San Francisco, Scott McGregor, chief executive (pictured), discussed the new moves and the prospects for a company that claims 99.9 per cent of all internet traffic and 100 per cent of smartphone data goes across at least one Broadcom chip. Highlights after the jump:
Product search firm TheFind joins the anti-Google parade
With the European Union’s competition authorities getting close to a decision on whether to take action against Google, US regulators have also been pushing ahead with their own investigation into complaints against the company. The latest sign: Siva Kumar, chief executive of TheFind, a “shopping search engine”, tells us he is due to meet with the Federal Trade Commission soon to make his case that the search giant has unfairly hurt his company.
The iPad was on everyone’s lips this week, even if there was puzzlement over what exactly to call the third generation tablet. It was not the iPad 3 or iPad HD as expected, but “the new iPad,” according to Apple. Name apart, the latest version’s hardware divided fans into two camps: those who were disappointed by the modest changes and those who claimed the announcement was “truly huge” for Apple.
Joe Green, NationBuilder co-founder
In the summer of 2004, Joe Green, then 21, lived in a trailer with a 70-year old roommate in the 120-degree Arizona desert, while his college friends holed up in a house in Silicon Valley were building a website called TheFacebook.
Green led the grassroots campaign for John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, for four months in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, mobilising local residents to knock on their neighbours’ doors and win votes for Kerry.
Today he’s become the president of NationBuilder, a start-up company that builds software to make jobs like the one he toiled at during that hot summer easier.
Apple’s high-definition iPad unveiled
Apple has launched a third version of its iPad at a special event in San Francisco, with a new high-definition display being the main improvement.
The new iPad has a Retina display – its resolution is so dense the eye cannot discern individual pixels, an A5X chip with four cores or brains for faster graphics, an improved 5Mp rear camera and 4G LTE wireless connectivity. There is also an update to the Apple TV set-top box . Pricing remains the same and the iPad will be available in a number of countries on March 16. Review our live blog from the event after the jump.
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