eBay Target of $3.8-billion Patent Infringement Suit

The Globe and Mail is reporting that eBay is the target of a $3.8-billion law suit filed Tuesday in Delaware by XPRT Ventures LLC, who cited six patents that they felt eBay had infringed upon in the development of Paypal Pay Later and PayPal Buyer Credit.

In the complaint "XPRT said that when eBay on April 30, 2003 filed a patent application titled “Method and System to Automate Payment for a Commerce Transaction,” it failed to tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office it knew of XPRT’s own patent applications." XPRT says information was shared in confidence with eBay by the inventors on XPRT’s own patents.

"XPRT is seeking a minimum $3.8 billion in monetary damages, based on their estimated present value. It is also seeking treble damages resulting from eBay’s alleged “willful and malicious conduct,” punitive damages, and other remedies."

Consumer Reports Says No To iPhone 4

Influential publication, Consumer Reports, says that it can't give the iPhone 4 a recommendation because of the faulty antenna issue. "When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone's lower left side — an easy thing, especially for lefties — the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you're in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can't recommend the iPhone 4."

Consumer Reports says that it consistently reproduced the issue on 3 separate iPhone 4 test devices and that it had also tried unsuccessfully to replicate the issue on older iPhone models, the Palm Pre, and other AT&T devices.

"Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4's signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that 'mistakenly displays two more bars than it should for a given signal strength,'" the site said. "The tests also indicate that AT&T's network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4's much-reported signal woes."

Hmmmm! So much for the "all phones suffer from this" defense! Maybe Apple is not perfect after all?

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/07/12/consumer-reports-apple-iphone.html?ref=rss#ixzz0tYgereYk

Roll Your Own Android Apps

Google is taking the wraps off of a new android development tool aimed at the masses and setting Google App Inventor for Android free. The tool has been under development for a year and tested by users with little or no formal technical knowledge, "User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors." 


"App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior." says the company's About page.


I think I know what I'll be doing this evening!

Huffinton Post Tells Americans To Look North For Jobs

Popular American blog, The Huffington Post, yesterday published an article entitled Need A Job? Try Canada, Where Hiring Is Booming And Home Prices Are Rising. Quoting statistics regarding unemployment numbers and housing prices the story, it would appear, is a compelling one. If this poll is any indication:

Would You Consider Moving To Canada For A Job?

Yes, I'll follow the money.

60.73%

No, I'm staying in the States.

14.05%

It depends on salary -- or how long I would have to be unemployed.

25.22%

The comments also make for an interesting read. At the top of the list right now is this one:

HUFFPOST SUPER USER

vlm1948   2 hours ago (2:15 AM)

38 Fans

Tell me again how that socialistic healthcare thingy will hurt the economy.

The Magic of iPad

I'll let the video do the talking on this one...

Bravo!

Hmmm.... Powerful... This Laser Is

The force has come down upon a Hong Kong-based manufacturer, Wicked Lasers, who makes and sells a product  called the Spyder III Pro Arctic Laser. The problem, it seems is that George Lucas and his company Lucasfilm believes the device too closely resembles the lightsaber made famous by the Star Wars franchise, and according to a cease and desist letter "It is apparent from the design of the Pro Arctic Laser that it was intended to resemble the hilts of our lightsaber swords, which are protected by copyright."

In it's defense Wicked Lasers contends that the Pro-Arctic is "real while the lightsaber is imaginary." I'd say they have a point there... however you might want to act quickly if you intend upon purchasing one of these lightsaber like devices as I fear the force is strong with Mr Lucas.

     (Credit: Wicked Lasers)


More info at cnet news.

Firefox 4 Beta Released To The Wild

Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 1 into the wild with an apparent emphasis on speed and support for new and emerging web standards. New features as pointed out by Wired's Web Monkey are:

• Support for WebM video
• More support for emerging web standards like CSS 3, Canvas and Web Sockets
• Better page rendering performance, including a new HTML5 parser
• Crash protection that prevents bad plugins from blowing up the whole browser
• New add-ons manager
• Recently updated Jetpack SDK for new-style lightweight add-ons

Sounds great, but remember this is Beta release 1 so things are bound to be broken or at least a little unstable.

Personally, I'm a longtime Firefox user who recently made the switch to Chrome for all of my personal browsing. Speed was definitely a deciding factor. I am not so far down the Google path that Mozilla can't entice me back but I'll need to see some compelling reasons to do so. I'll give it a download and let you know my thoughts.

Also, as a teaser, tomorrow marks one month of using the iPad for me and I hope to put together my thoughts in a post later this week, so stay tuned. 

Biometric ATMs Appearing in Europe

Hitachi has produced a finger tip scanner that scans patterns of micro veins beneath the surface of the skin rather than finger prints and has managed to get the scanners installed in ATM machines in Warsaw, Poland.  Poland's cooperative BPS bank claims to be the first bank in Europe to install biometric identity verification on it's ATMs.

Hitachi claims the likelihood of a false positive is about 1 in 1 million, or roughly as accurate as an iris scan which is generally accepted as the most secure of methods to date. Perhaps I watch too many spy movies but the first thing that came to my mind was quickly dispelled as I read further in CNN's article, "And before you ask, no -- it doesn't work with fingers that have been chopped off,"  said Peter Jones, Hitachi's head of security and solutions in Europe. (Admit it, you were thinking it too!)

I hadn't realized that Poland was so forward thinking but Jone's goes on to say "It's no surprise that Poland is the first in Europe. They are one of the most proactive at addressing the challenges of the information age. When they host the EU presidency in 2012, they want to say to the world: 'Look at what we've achieved.'"

Twitter's New Revenue Generator

Business Insider is reporting that Twitter is finding new ways to monetize and the latest appears to be via an account called @earlybird. Twitter PR told ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick,  "There are interesting things in store for @earlybird. Keep waking up early and you might be the first to find out what they are." Looks like they are taking a page out of Dell's book.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitters-newest-revenue-plan-daily-deals-2010-7?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+%28Silicon+Alley+Insider%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher#ixzz0snd8Og7h

Geek Beat By Cali Lewis

One of my favorite Internet celebs has a new show on Revision 3. Cali Lewis of geekbrief fame is now on the Revision 3 network with a new video show called GeekBeat.TV, you'll get the same Cali and plenty of product reviews ala Geek Brief. I'm embedding the show here using the sites self updating embed code, so you can simply bookmark this post if you choose. Check it out here or on Rev3 @ http://revision3.com/greekbeattv