Samsung says Apple would not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of their patented technology

Next week Samsung and Apple go at it in the courts again. I know, what else is new? Anyways, the Wall Street Journal posted some excerpts from Samsung’s trial brief. Of course Samsung’s argument is that they didn’t copy Apple’s iPhone one bit and that they were working on the next generation of mobile phones in the Summer of 2006, months before the iPhone was announced. These designs were based on market trends for increased screen sizes. They certainly weren’t going to scrap everything and change just because of the iPhone.

As to patents, Samsung said, “Indeed, Apple, which sold its first iPhone nearly twenty years after Samsung started developing mobile phone technology, could not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of Samsung‘s patented technology.” Hit the break for some of the highlights.

Samsung has been researching and developing mobile telecommunications technology since at least as early as 1991 and invented much of the technology for today‘s smartphones. Indeed, Apple, which sold its first iPhone nearly twenty years after Samsung started developing mobile phone technology, could not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of Samsung‘s patented technology.

For good measure, Apple seeks to exclude Samsung from the market, based on its complaints that Samsung has used the very same public domain design concepts that Apple borrowed from other competitors, including Sony, to develop the iPhone. Apple‘s own internal documents show this. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article that contained an interview of a Sony designer to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, the Sony designer discussed Sony portable electronic device designs that lacked “excessive ornamentation” such as buttons, fit in the hand, were “square with a screen” and had “corners [which] have been rounded out.”

Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them. . . . Also contrary to Apple‘s accusations, Samsung does not need or want to copy; rather, it strives to best the competition by developing multiple, unique products. Samsung internal documents from 2006, well before the iPhone was announced, show rectangular phones with rounded corners, large displays, flat front faces, and graphic interfaces with icons with grid layouts.

Prior to the iPhone‘s announcement in January 2007, Samsung was already developing numerous products and models with the same design features that Apple now claims were copied from the iPhone. In the summer of 2006, Samsung began designing its next generation of mobile phones, based on the market trend of ever-increasing screen size. At that time, Samsung‘s designers envisioned a basic design: a simple, rounded rectangular body dominated by a display screen with a single physical button on the face.

As . . . documents confirm, Samsung independently developed the allegedly copied  design features months before Apple had even announced the iPhone. It did not switch its design direction because of the iPhone.

Apple‘s utility patents relate to ancillary features that allow users to perform trivial touch screen functions, even though these technologies were developed and in widespread use well before Apple entered the mobile device market in 2007. Samsung does not infringe any of Apple‘s patents and has located dead-on prior art that invalidates them.

Apple relied heavily on Samsung‘s technology to enter the telecommunications space, and it continues to use Samsung‘s technology to this day in its iPhone and iPad products. For example, Samsung supplies the flash memory, main memory, and application processor for the iPhone. . . .  But Apple also uses patented Samsung technology that it has not paid for. This includes standards-essential technology required for Apple‘s products to interact with products from other manufacturers, and several device features that Samsung developed for use in its products.

Long before Apple even announced any of its 3G products that use Samsung‘s standards-essential technology, Samsung had offered licenses for these patents (along with other patents) to virtually every major player in the mobile phone industry, successfully striking cross-licensing deals with all of them. After Apple released products that use the technology patented in the [two standards-essential patents at issue in the trial], Samsung similarly offered a cross-licensing deal to Apple, asking for a fair and reasonable royalty in return for Apple‘s use of Samsung‘s technology. Unlike all the major players in the mobile phone industry, however, Apple refused to enter a cross-licensing deal with Samsung.

Instead, despite the fact that virtually every other major industry participant was willing to take a license from Samsung for use of the standards-essential patents in this suit, Apple claimed that Samsung‘s patents are unenforceable.

Read more >>

Tweet

Infinitec Pocket would TV unveiled

Infinitec has introduced the Pocket TV, which is an Android 4.0-powered HDMI micro computer which is capable of transforming any TV into a Smart TV, making this a small miracle that you might just want to discover for yourself. This Pocket TV can now be pre-ordered on KickStarter, where it has been touted to be one of the world’s smallest computers. Capable of functioning as a fully functioning micro-computer that measures roughly the size of your thumb, it has enough processing power underneath the hood which will enable you to display Android on your TV, transforming it into a really large sized tablet.

With the Pocket TV, you are able to download apps from the Google Play Store in order to stream videos, play games, hook up with the rest of your friends on Facebook, in addition to reading up on what is happening on the world front where news is concerned, perform some work, or just to surf the Internet. Not only that, you are able to hook up a video camera to perform Skype video-calls on your TV.

Since the Pocket TV is diminutively sized, you are able to tote it with you wherever you go, but there is also the risk of you losing it because it is just so small. Imagine plugging it into a projector, and your presentation can be played from the cloud (for example, a Dropbox account), or locally from the SD memory card.

According to Ahmad Zahran, Founder of Infinitec, “Our motivation to create the Pocket TV was that we found ourselves with too many gadgets. Nowadays we had a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop and we thought wouldn’t it be great to have one small portable solution that did what all these gadgets do but on a big screen TV. Pocket TV will give users a simple solution to accessing their digital life, surfing the internet, streaming video, playing games, doing video-conferences and much more from anywhere and on any TV or monitor. Unlike with smartphones and tablets they will be able to do all this on a large screen with something that literally fits into their pocket.”

Other multimedia capabilities of the Pocket TV include the ability to stream video, which means you can watch YouTube, Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Videos on your TV in HD glory, instead of doing so on a tiny computer screen. Audio capabilities of the Pocket TV are also worth noting – it functions as a streaming device for music, letting you play all content on your computer or home network drive (NAS).

You can place a pre-order for the Pocket TV for $99 at the moment, although the regular price stands at $160.

Product Page

Read more >>

Tweet

International Energy Agency: ‘Safe’ fracking cheap, but would destroy a livable climate

By Joseph Romm

A version of this article originally appeared on Climate Progress.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has a new report out, “Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas” [PDF]. Unfortunately, the IEA buried the lede — the Golden Age of Gas scenario destroys a livable climate — so the coverage of the report was off target.

For instance, The New York Times opines, “Energy Agency Finds Safe Gas Drilling is Cheap.” And the Council on Foreign Relations headline is similar: “Safe Fracking Looks Cheap.”

That’s true only if a ruined climate, widespread Dust Bowlification, an acidified ocean, and rapidly rising sea levels constitute your idea of “safe.”

Still, the IEA deserves much of the blame for this miscoverage. It’s not until page 91 (!) of the full report [PDF] that the agency explains that adopting its “Golden Rules” for developing shale gas doesn’t stop catastrophe:

The Golden Rules Case puts CO2 emissions on a long-term trajectory consistent with stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse-gas emissions at around 650 parts per million, a trajectory consistent with a probable temperature rise of more than 3.5 degrees C [6.3 degrees F] in the long term, well above the widely accepted 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] target. This finding reinforces a central conclusion from the WEO special report on a Golden Age of Gas (IEA, 2011b), that, while a greater role for natural gas in the global energy mix does bring environmental benefits where it substitutes for other fossil fuels, natural gas cannot on its own provide the answer to the challenge of climate change.

D’oh! Or is that duh?

The IEA was far clearer and blunter when it released its original report, as I wrote last year. At the time, the Guardian story put it well:

At such a level, global warming could run out of control, deserts would take over in southern Africa, Australia and the western U.S., and sea level rises could engulf small island states.

Not exactly a champagne moment.

Also, it’s far from clear that 650 parts per million (ppm) is even stable, in the sense of not triggering carbon cycle feedbacks that cause further warming — or not crossing dangerous tipping points.

If we risk warming beyond 3.5 degrees C, we are courting multiple, simultaneous disasters. Such warming is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation,’ is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable (i.e. 4 degrees C would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

Also, the IEA scenario assumes coal use is basically flat from 2020 to 2035, which the report makes pretty clear would require a price on carbon. Without a carbon price, natural gas is a brige to nowhere and can actually crowd out carbon-free sources of power. That was precisely the point made by Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA, at a London press conference for the 2011 report:

While natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, it is still a fossil fuel. Its increased use could muscle out low-carbon fuels such as renewables and nuclear, particularly in the wake of Fukushima. An expansion of gas use alone is no panacea for climate change.

The Guardian focused on the crowding effect for its piece Tuesday on the new report, “‘Golden age of gas’ threatens renewable energy, IEA warns.”

To be clear, the “Golden Rules” proposed by the IEA still lead to a 20 percent rise in energy-related CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2035, a time we need to be slashing global CO2 levels. As climatologist Ken Caldeira told me in March, natural gas is “a bridge to a world with high CO2 levels.”

Oh, and there’s a mini-bombshell that the IEA sticks in a footnote when discussing options for avoiding the 3.5-plus degrees C warming:

This conclusion could be changed by widespread application of technologies such as carbon capture and storage, which could reduce considerably the emissions from the consumption of gas (and other fossil fuels); but this is not assumed in the period to 2035.

It’s wise not to assume much carbon capture and storage (CCS) by 2035 given the unresolved feasibility, permanence, and safety issues surrounding CCS as well as the fact that CCS efforts around the world are being scaled back or terminated.

But here’s the footnote:

There is the possibility that the capacities for CO2 storage might be affected by hydraulic fracturing. A recent study (Elliot and Celia, 2012) estimated that 80% of the potential area to store CO2 underground in the United States could be prejudiced by shale and tight gas development, although others have argued that, even if the rock seal in one place were to be broken by hydraulic fracturing, other layers of impermeable rock underneath the fractured area would block migration of the CO2.

Yeow!

I’d been meaning to blog on that study, “Potential Restrictions for CO2 Sequestration Sites Due to Shale and Tight Gas Production.” No, this study doesn’t mean fracking will wipe out all potential CCS storage areas. But it does suggest that an all-out fracking spree — aka the Golden Age of Gas Scenario aka GAGS — will constrict our storage options in the future.

Finally, on my 2011 post on GAGS, Tyler Hamilton, business columnist at The Toronto Star, commented:

Not only is gas threatening to crowd out renewables, cheap natural gas — viewed as an input fuel — is dramatically improving the economics for unconventional oil. More cheap gas means more dirty oil. Not a good combination.

The bottom line is that if your goal is to stay under or as close to 4 degrees F warming as possible, then we can’t be investing significant resources in new fossil fuel infrastructure — especially without a high and rising CO2 price.

Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

var OB_langJS = 'http://widgets.outbrain.com/lang_en.js'; var OBITm = '1322003100161';var OB_raterMode = 'none';var OB_recMode = 'strip';var OutbrainPermaLink='http://www.grist.org//natural-gas/international-energy-agency-safe-fracking-cheap-but-would-destroy-a-livable-climate/';if ( typeof(OB_Script)!='undefined' )OutbrainStart(); else { var OB_Script = true; var str = unescape("%3Cscript src=\'http://widgets.outbrain.com/OutbrainRater.js\' type=\'text/javascript\'%3E%3C/script%3E"); document.write(str); }

Read more >>

Tweet

Recession Survivor: Would You Eat Bugs and Roadkill to Cut the Grocery Bill?

I try to be flexible with my family menu in order to save on groceries, but recently I learned about a couple guys who are waaay more flexible than I am when it comes to ingredient choices. They eat bugs and roadkill. And they have recipes to share. (See also: 25 Frugal Food Changes You Can Make Today)

Jonathan McGowan, of Dorset in England, says he has been eating roadkill and other dead animals he finds for the past 30 years. At first blush that sounds disgusting and possibly even deranged, but Jonathan makes a very good point when he compares eating a recently-killed woodland animal to eating a chicken from one factory farm he visited. McGowan told the Daily Mail:

There was a broiler production unit close to where I was living where there was always three layers of chickens — a dead, rotting layer at the bottom, a squashed layer in the middle and a layer at the top where they could barely move.

If you think you'll join McGowan in his culinary adventures, however, keep in mind that he feels that only someone with years of experience with wildlife can do this safely:

It's not something everyone can do. I have grown up around nature and know just by looking how an animal has died and how long it has been there.

I grew up in Wisconsin and have heard of plenty of people legally taking home deer that they struck with their own cars. So it didn't freak me out too much to hear that McGowan enjoys venison. However, some of his other favorites raised even my eyebrows. He calls both fox and rat "most delicious," and has even eaten wildcats and birds of prey.

I wonder if McGowan knows that you are supposed to report it to authorities — even in England — if you find certain kinds of birds dead, so they can be checked for bird flu. He also mentions eating birds of prey, the majority of which are considered endangered over there. He doesn't kill these animals, mind you — just finds them, butchers, and cooks 'em up.

McGowan will even throw some bugs into his stir fry, which brings to mind another fellow I read about recently.

University of Chicago undergrad Matthew Krisiloff is not just eating insects but wants to put bug burgers in your grocer's freezer case. After all, he told Time Out Chicago, insects can provide protein just like chickens or cows, but without putting so much strain on the environment or costing so much. One really interesting thing about Krisiloff's company, Entom Foods, is that he wants insect protein to succeed first in the West, in order to set a good example for the rest of the globe, where people tend to copy our diets as they get wealthier.

As Krisiloff told Time Out Chicago:

In about 80 percent of the countries in the world, there are communities that do eat insects in some fashion. But as countries Westernize, they kind of shun those diets.… They look at Western examples and think, Oh, [they] eat hamburger, [they] eat chicken, that's what [we] should be doing as well.

Well, carnivores, what do you think? Would you buy bug burgers or rake in some road kill in order to cut your grocery bill? After all, meat is often the biggest expense at the supermarket. Or are these ideas enough to turn the most dedicated meat-eater into a vegan?

If you really want to try it, here is McGowan's recipe for roadkill Badger, from the Daily Mail:

Serves: 4

1. Skin one badger and cut into pieces before browning in a frying pan with butter until pieces are golden and stiff.

2. Flambee with glass of Armagnac and pour over one bottle of dry, sparkling wine, then simmer gently for two hours.

3. Mix cooked, chopped badger liver, a glass of pig's blood, two egg yolks and a pot of creme fraiche and serve immediately.

Serve with mushrooms or chestnuts.

A New York Times blog has tips on cooking mealworms, moth larvae and crickets.

To learn more about harvesting and eating insects, check out the book Man Eating Bugs by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio.

Read more >>

Tweet

Which Amazon Kindle Would You Consider Buying First? [POLL]

Amazon is offering consumers new goodies that will heat up the ereader and tablet markets: Kindle Fire and the Kindle Touch — just in time for the holiday shopping blitz.

The company’s first tablet, Kindle Fire, two versions of the new Kindle Touch and the price-slashed Kindle will likely attract buyers with their uncharacteristically low prices. Stocking stuffers, anyone?

Read more >>

Tweet

Read More