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In a move to begin the New Year with a clean slate, Vonage took a major step toward settling another patent suit against it. Vonage and Nortel Networks said they have agreed to end the litigation between them.

The settlement involves cross-licensing three Nortel and three Vonage patents, and does not include any monetary payments. The companies are dismissing claims relating to past damages and other patents not covered by the suit.

The settlement is subject to final documentation, but if it is finalized, it could mark the last of the string of patent suits against Vonage.

Just one week ago, the VoIP provider settled a patent dispute with telecom giant AT&T. AT&T had sued Vonage in October for using packet-based telephony products based on its intellectual property.

Two Vonage Settlements in a Week

Since the company went public in May 2006, Vonage has been the subject of several patent suits from telecoms and other service providers. Both Sprint Nextel and Verizon targeted Vonage for patent infringement, and both companies won judgments against the young VoIP provider.

Before the AT&T settlement, Sprint Nextel took its turn collecting from Vonage for patent infringement. Specifically, a federal court ordered Vonage to pay Sprint Nextel $69.5 million in damages for six counts of patent infringement. The ruling cost Vonage a third of its market value, although the stock has since seen gains.

Sprint Nextel claimed Vonage infringed on seven of its patents for connecting Internet phone calls. Vonage argued that Sprint’s patents should not have been approved in the first place. However, in September, jurors in a Kansas City court decided Vonage deliberately violated Sprint’s intellectual property.

U.S. District Judge John Lungstrum had the option to triple the damages because of the finding of willful infringement. In the final ruling, a federal court ordered the company to pay $69.5 million…

In the weeks leading to Christmas, an online wine retailer gave 15 percent discounts to anyone who sent in a photo of its newspaper ad snapped with a camera phone.

SnapTell Inc., the company helping Wine Enthusiast and other merchants offer such services, uses image-recognition software to determine what offer, video clip or other content to return to the phone. In the coming months, the same technology could deliver movie reviews and discounts to anyone snapping a picture of a movie poster or billboard.

It’s one of a number of emerging approaches to mobile advertising, an industry still in its infancy but showing promise. More than 80 percent of Americans now own cell phones — a statistic Jupiter Research analyst Neil Strother equated with “carrying a potential advertising channel in their pocket.”

Fast-food chains, carmakers and TV reality shows have run contests and other promotions in which consumers participate by sending text messages. Wireless carriers have begun letting companies run banner ads — mini-versions of what you might see on a PC. Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have brought lucrative search ads to phones.

Advertisers have been spending a little money here, a little there trying to gauge what works on mobile phones. The efforts so far are best described as trials and pilots, lacking in comprehensive strategy.

“It’s the Wild, Wild West right now,” said Rick Sizemore, chief strategy officer for the tech consultancy Multimedia Intelligence. “This is an interesting and compelling vehicle, but they don’t necessarily know who to work with. There are so many options out there — a lot of hype with no substance, and then a couple of gems.”

SnapTell is among Sizemore’s favorites.

Gautam Bhargava, SnapTell’s co-founder and chief executive, said the company considered the phone’s unique qualities — its lack of regular keyboards in most cases, and the ubiquity of…

New research is turning traditional thinking about libraries on its head. More than half of U.S. residents visited a library in the past 12 months to use computers instead of search for books, according to a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Specifically, 58 percent of participants in a national phone survey said they used the Internet at home, work, a public library, or some other place to get help in solving problems during the past two years.

“These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside down,” Leigh Estabrook, Dean and Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, and coauthor of a report on the results of the survey, said in a statement.

Library’s New Purpose?

Of the 53 percent of U.S. adults who said they visited a library in 2007, young adults age 18 to 30 — commonly known as Generation Y — were the biggest library computer users, according to the Pew study. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and general patronage.

Overall, more than two-thirds of library patrons of all age groups said they used computers during their library visits. What’s more, Internet users were more than twice as likely to patronize libraries as non-Internet users.

Young adults said they are most likely to use libraries in the future when they encounter problems: 40 percent of Gen Y said they would do that, compared with 20 percent of those above age 30 who say they would go to a library.

“Librarians have been asked whether the Internet makes libraries less relevant. It has not. Internet use seems to create an information hunger and it is information-savvy young people who are the most likely to visit libraries,” Estabrook noted.

Meeting Citizen Needs

According to Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet &…

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, more than 50 percent of U.S. households now own a digital television — a milestone that the industry trade group’s president Gary Shapiro characterized as a “critical threshold” for the nation.

What’s more, an additional 32 million DTVs are now forecast to ship nationally during 2008, “with high definition expected to account for 79 percent of total DTV shipments in the U.S.,” Shapiro explained.

However, the U.S. government’s General Accountability Office (GAO) recently warned that no comprehensive plan is in place for tracking or measuring transition milestones. Having no plan raises concerns about whether consumers will have the information necessary to respond to the transition and to maintain access to TV programming, the GAO said.

“Only the FCC appears to be in a state of denial over what the GAO is telling us,” FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein noted. “Rather than making excuses, we need to come up with solutions,” including the establishment of an interagency task force, Adelstein said.

The Hour Is Late

A comprehensive partnership between the public sector and the private sector should have accountability, clear lines of authority, and daily coordination at the highest levels, noted FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. “I agree with GAO that the FCC is in the best position to get the job done,” Copps said. “But the hour is late — very late.”

Digital-to-analog conversion capabilities are included in all set-top boxes for cable and satellite TV reception — the preferred reception mode used by 87 percent of U.S. households, which will be able to continue to view broadcast programming on analog TVs after the transition to digital. But the remaining 13 percent of U.S. households will not be so lucky.

These over-the-air reception households disproportionately represent low-income workers, the elderly, and minorities — particularly those for whom English is a second…

Vonage Holdings Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp. have settled their patent litigation, allowing for cross-licensing of the telecom companies’ technology.

The agreement does not call for any payments by either company.

The settlement involves a limited cross-license to three Nortel and three Vonage patents, and dismisses claims relating to past damages and the remaining patents. The settlement is subject to final documentation.

Shares of Vonage rose 11 cents, or 5.5 percent, to $2.11 in morning trading. Shares of Nortel climbed 11 cents to $15.35.

Under the agreement, Toronto-based Nortel and Holmdel, N.J.-based Vonage will cross-license each other’s technology, which is used to make emergency calls and dial 411. Vonage won’t have to pay Nortel for any alleged unauthorized use of its technology.

“We are pleased to resolve this issue and enter into a productive relationship with Nortel,” said Vonage Chief Legal Officer Sharon O’Leary.

This year, Vonage agreed to settle four other patent suits, and in each case, promised to pay the other side for prior use of its products.

Earlier this month, it agreed to pay AT&T Corp. $39 million as part of a settlement. Vonage also has said it will pay Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. a total of $200 million to settle lawsuits.

Vonage spokesman Charles Sahner said earlier this month that the company was dragged into the legal battle with Nortel after it acquired three patents from Digital Packet Licensing last year. DPL had filed a suit against Nortel in 2004 alleging violation of those three patents, so Vonage continued with the lawsuit. Nortel countersued, claiming Vonage violated 13 of Nortel’s patents, and asked that Vonage be kept from using the technology.

Despite having now settled all of its legal battles, Vonage still faces many challenges as cable companies roll out their own digital phone services and consumers increasingly opt for cell phones…

Gilbert Strang is a quiet man with a rare talent: helping others understand linear algebra. He’s written a half-dozen popular college textbooks, and for years a few hundred students at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been privileged to take his course.

Recently, with the growth of computer science, demand to understand linear algebra has surged. But so has the number of students Strang can teach.

An MIT initiative called “OpenCourseWare” makes virtually all the school’s courses available online for free — lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures. Strang’s Math 18.06 course is among the most popular, with visitors downloading his lectures more than 1.3 million times since June alone.

Strang’s classroom is the world.

In his Istanbul dormitory, Kemal Burcak Kaplan, an undergraduate at Bogazici University, downloads Strang’s lectures to try to boost his grade in a class there. Outside Calcutta, graduate student Sriram Chandrasekaran uses them to brush up on matrices for his engineering courses at the elite Indian Institute of Technology.

Many “students” are college teachers themselves, like Sheraz ali Khan at a small engineering institute in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Noorali Jiwaji, at the Open University of Tanzania. They use Strang and other MIT professors as guides in designing their own classes, and direct students to MIT’s courses for help.

Others are closer to MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus. Some are MIT students and alumni, while others have no connection at all — like Gus Whelan, a retiree on nearby Cape Cod, and Dustin Darcy, a 27-year-old video game programmer in Los Angeles who uses linear algebra regularly in his work.

“Rather than going through my old, dusty books,” Darcy said, “I thought I might as well go through it from the top and see if I learn something new.”

There has never been a more exciting time for the intellectually curious.

The world’s…

You know your company is having a good year when its first-quarter profits top $1 billion. And that’s exactly how Google kicked off 2007, by pulling in revenues of $3.66 billion for the quarter ending in March.

While we may have joked back in April 2006 that Google could afford to pay $1 billion to advertise on the lunar surface, in 2007 that was definitely true.

And in a way the company is doing something similar by putting up a total of $30 million towards the Google Lunar X Prize to encourage international teams to land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon. Well, the company has already mapped the stars.

While Google can obviously afford a few frivolous activities, it didn’t take its business eye off the ball in 2007. Its most audacious move came at the expense of its biggest rival: Microsoft.

Microsoft was known to be in talks to buy ad tracking firm DoubleClick, valuing the company at $2 billion.

The buyout would have given Microsoft access to DoubleClick’s Dart technology, which monitors how Internet adverts perform, boosting Redmond’s ability to fight Google for online advertising market share.

A brilliant plan, except for the part where Google sneaked in and bought DoubleClick for itself.

The deal is naturally being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission over competition worries following complaints from Microsoft.

Germany is also questioning the buyout over user privacy fears, putting the $3.1 billion deal under threat.

Even if the DoubleClick deal does eventually come unstuck, Google has plenty of irons in plenty of other fires.

For starters there’s the rumored Google phone, a device that became much more likely when the company applied for a patent.

What Google eventually released was a mobile software platform called ‘Android’ that should have applications running on it by the second half of 2008.

Google claims that Android, which is…

The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card
and Social Security numbers soared to unprecedented levels in 2007,
and the trend isn’t expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers
stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive
information.

And while companies, government agencies, schools and other
institutions are spending more to protect ever-increasing volumes of
data with more sophisticated firewalls and encryption, the
investment often is too little too late.

“More of them are experiencing data breaches, and they’re
responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company’s security and seeing where the holes might be,” said Linda Foley, who founded the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center after becoming an identity theft victim
herself.

Foley’s group lists more than 79 million records reported
compromised in the United States through Dec. 18. That’s a nearly
fourfold increase from the nearly 20 million records reported in all
of 2006.

Another group, Attrition.org, estimates more than 162 million
records compromised through Dec. 21 — both in the U.S. and overseas, unlike the other group’s U.S.-only list. Attrition
reported 49 million last year.

“It’s just the nature of business, that moving forward, more
companies are going to have more records, so there will be more
records compromised each year,” said Attrition’s Brian Martin. “I
imagine the total records compromised will steadily climb.”

But the biggest difference between the groups’ record-loss counts
is Attrition.org’s estimate that 94 million records were exposed in
a theft of credit card data at TJX Cos., the owner of discount stores including T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. The TJX breach accounts for more than half the total records reported lost this year on both
groups’ lists.

The Identity Theft Resource Center counts about 46 million — the
number of records TJX acknowledged in March were potentially compromised. Attrition’s figure is based on estimates from Visa and
MasterCard officials who were deposed in a lawsuit banks filed
against TJX.

The…

On Friday, roughly a decade after Netscape’s fortunes started to slide, AOL announced it is finally pulling the plug on the Netscape browser. “While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” Tom Drapeau, AOL’s director of development, wrote on the Netscape Blog.

The start of the saga dates back to 1994, when a University of Illinois student named Marc Andreessen founded a company called Netscape Communications, after taking the world by storm with the NCSA Mosaic browser. For a time, it looked like Netscape would be the dominant player on the Web, as Microsoft seemed to regard the Internet as somewhat irrelevant.

In 1995, Netscape had a stellar IPO, with shares almost tripling in value on the first day of trading, and the dot-com boom was born. Soon enough though, Microsoft got in the game and released its Internet Explorer browser. By 1997, Microsoft was already up to Internet Explorer 4, with significant advances over its three earlier versions.

By 1998, not coincidentally, Netscape’s financial results had turned south and the company started laying off employees. A year later, America Online bought the struggling company for $4.2 billion, in what now looks like an exorbitant waste of money, but it was 1999, after all.

Birth of Mozilla

At the time of the acquisition, Netscape had started building an open-source version of the browser called Mozilla, an effort that in 2003 produced the independent Mozilla Foundation. Before the Foundation’s creation, Drapeau said, “AOL played a significant role in the launch of the Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser that was released in 2000 and continued to solely fund the development and marketing efforts of Netscape-branded…

Some cell-phone users were bemused a few years back when an episode of the Fox TV series 24 aired in which Jack Bower and his intrepid antiterrorist team used GPS technology to track the movements of a biological weapon riding on an underground train in Los Angeles.

Given that terrestrial cellular calls are unable to penetrate the wide expanse of concrete and earth that lies between trains underground and the sky above, viewers reasoned, then how could any space-based satellite be expected to succeed at the task?

These days, however, metropolitan subway systems are joining forces with technology providers to come up with a reliable method for delivering wireless services to their customers. Boston commuters, for example, now have the ability to use cellular phones and other wireless devices as they travel through some of Boston’s busiest subway stations.

“This is a major customer service enhancement for our ridership,” said Daniel Grabauskas, the general manager of the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority. “Not only can customers make calls, send text messages, and receive T-Alerts while using the subway, they can also access the Internet and check e-mails.”

Seamless Wireless Coverage

Boston’s MBTA wireless system was constructed by InSite Wireless, which specializes in the deployment of distributed antenna system (DAS) technology in public facilities, such as San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

DAS technology expands the wireless coverage of cellular networks in much the same way as access points extend the reach of today’s Wi-Fi systems. The DAS signal, which is received by small antennas scattered throughout a facility, is balanced among the antennas and then forwarded over fiber optic cables to the carrier networks.

The DAS providers make money by charging access fees to cellular providers, such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. And the subway system operators benefit by getting a slice of…

With Google users growing more irate over a sharing feature on its Google Reader service, the search giant is making moves to appease the masses.

The drama began on December 14 when Google announced that Reader, its RSS feed service, would connect with Google Talk and Gmail contacts. In other words, when users tagged a feed to “Share” in Reader the users’ Gmail and Google Talk contacts would see it.

The uproar arose almost immediately, as industry analysts and consumers alike expressed their displeasure. In fact, the Google Reader forum offers 277 comments on the Share feature since it launched. Not all of them were negative, but most of them ranged from mildly annoyed to extremely angered.

Comments and Questions

“Don’t you think there might be a method of being selective with what you share that might be slightly more fine grained than, you know, deleting our shared items en masse? This is the worst ‘feature’ you have ever introduced,” wrote a Google Reader Help poster named “Modulo Noh.”

Many had the same question: How do I turn this off? “Do I need to unsubscribe from all my feeds? I do *NOT* want colleagues seeing my personal feeds. Unless I’m misunderstanding something here, I have to stop using Google Reader,” wrote a user by the name of LeeWNYC.

Chrix Finne, the Google spokesperson who blogs about the Reader, fielded the questions in one overarching blog post. He first acknowledged the “helpful feedback” about the new sharing feature. Then he admitted that the company had hoped making it easier to share feeds with people they chat with frequently would be useful and interesting.

“We underestimated the number of users who were using the Share button to send stories to a limited number of people. We’re looking at ways to make sharing more granular and flexible, but…

In yet another step away from the digital-rights-management ties that bind, Warner Music inked a deal with Amazon.com on Thursday to sell songs and albums without copyright protections.

DRM-free music downloads from Warner Music Group are now available on Amazon MP3, Amazon’s digital music store.

Warner Music Group is home to a collection of some of the best-known record labels in the music industry, including Asylum, Atlantic, Bad Boy, Cordless, East West, Elektra, Lava, Nonesuch, Reprise, Rhino, Roadrunner, Rykodisc, Sire, and Warner Bros.

Targeting iTunes

Amazon MP3’s unique value proposition is that every song and album is playable on virtually any device capable of playing digital music.

Amazon targets Apple iTunes’ sore spot. Most of the digital music on iTunes only works on iPods or in the iTunes software. However, a recent deal between EMI and Apple has opened up a portion of iTunes to DRM-free digital tracks.

Bill Carr, Amazon.com vice president of digital music, said consumers have responded well to Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 service. Since the September launch, he reported, Amazon has received thousands of “thank you” e-mails from customers for offering MP3 downloads that play on any device.

Amazon officially offers the largest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads with more than 2.9 million songs.

Most songs available on Amazon MP3 are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than one million of the over 2.9 million songs priced at 89 cents.

The top 100 best-selling songs are usually 89 cents. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99, with the top 100 best-selling albums typically priced at $8.99 or less.

Bundling Bonus Tracks

In addition to Warner Music Group’s digital audio catalog, Amazon and Warner are working to make available additional digital music products, such as album bundles containing exclusive tracks. The companies did not announce a timeline…

Samsung Electronics is confronting bad news on many fronts. The South Korean company is facing probes into an alleged bribery scheme implicating powerful sectors of the country’s society, and its money-spinning memory-chip business is in the worst slump in five years. That’s why Samsung executives must be thrilled to have their mobile-phone business. There, executives can get a very upbeat view of Samsung’s future.

The numbers tell the story. With Motorola struggling for more than a year, Samsung overtook its American rival in 2007 to become the world’s second-largest handset maker after Nokia. Its global market share is up about three percentage points from last year, at 14.5% in the third quarter, compared with Motorola’s 13.1%. And for every quarter this year, Samsung set a new sales record, with the 115 million phones sold in the January-September period exceeding the 114 million sold during all of last year.

Samsung believes its record-breaking run is just beginning. This year, its sales are expected to top 160 million phones, up 40% from last year, and executives are confident the pace of its growth will be about double that of the rest of the industry next year, when they expect sales of 200 million. “The growth momentum is accelerating, and there’s no reversal in the trend,” says Samsung’s Executive Vice-President Chu Woo Sik.

Building on Cheap Handsets

The big question is whether Motorola can rebound and stop Samsung. New Motorola chief Greg Brown, who was chief operating officer before being named CEO last month, has spent the past few months tackling the company’s problems to try and restore the glory it had just after the Razr’s sensational debut in 2004. “Samsung will face challenges,” says mobile communications analyst Tina Teng at market researcher iSuppli.

Samsung’s top brass believe the company’s recent run is sustainable. That’s because Choi Gee…

Zvi Schreiber is a British-born serial entrepreneur who established the headquarters of his latest tech startup, a software company called Global Hosted Operating System (G.ho.st), in Israel last year.

G.ho.st has developed a “virtual PC” that saves all of a person’s files online so data and programs can be gathered from any computer. As Schreiber sees it, the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems that cram applications and documents all inside one physical computer will soon be obsolete.

“Our G.ho.st virtual computer will enable users to get their computing environment from any browser — and we’ll eventually compete head-on with Microsoft,” Schreiber predicts.

Taking on Microsoft is tough enough. But Schreiber is embracing another challenge: He’s helping create a high-tech economy in the Palestinian territories, one of the most poverty-stricken, crisis-riddled spots in the world. He has located the development center for G.ho.st in the West Bank.

A Tough Commute

It’s a bold move at a time when the Palestinians are facing an unprecedented economic crisis due to years of Israeli restrictions and border shutdowns imposed for security reasons. Some $7.4 billion in aid was pledged by international donors at a Dec. 17 conference in Paris to shore up the government of President Mahmoud Abbas. But what is really needed, according to a recent World Bank report, is economic integration of Israel and the Palestine territories — a task that’s far easier said than done.

Consider the challenges Schreiber confronts. Though he has hired three dozen Palestinian engineers and programmers in Ramallah, Schreiber has yet to set foot in the development center, located a mere 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) north of his home in Jerusalem. As an Israeli citizen, he is barred for security reasons from entering Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank. And Israel’s security fence prevents most Palestinians from entering Israel.

Still, the…

Warner Music Group, a major holdout on selling music online without copy protection, caved in to the growing trend Thursday and agreed to sell its tunes on Amazon.com Inc.’s digital music store.

Until now, Warner Music had resisted offering songs by its artists in the MP3 format, which can be copied to multiple computers and burned onto CDs without restriction and played on most PCs and digital media players, including Apple Inc.’s iPod and Microsoft Corp.’s Zune.

The deal raises the total number of MP3s for sale through Amazon’s music download store to more than 2.9 million. Warner Music’s entire catalog, including work by artists Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin and Sean Paul, will be added to the site throughout the week. The Amazon store launched with nearly 2.3 million songs in September.

Major music labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music Group PLC had already signed to sell large portions of their catalogs on Amazon, as had thousands of independent labels. Most songs cost 89 cents to 99 cents each and most albums sell for $5.99 to $9.99.

Warner Music Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Edgar Bronfman Jr. had been reluctant to follow in the steps of the rival recording companies.

In February, when Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs penned an essay calling on record labels to drop Digital Rights Management from tracks sold on the company’s iTunes Store, Bronfman shot back during a conference call with Wall Street analysts: “We will not abandon DRM nor services that are successfully implementing DRM for both content and consumers.”

The recording industry had argued that DRM itself is not what makes some songs incompatible with some digital players, but the fact that there are different versions of DRM in use. The companies suggested Apple, whose iPod outsells all other media players, should license its DRM technology to other…