The Business of Tech

webOS goes open source, HP will continue hardware development
• Meg Whitman and Marc Andreessen on webOS: 'We will use webOS in new hardware... in tablets'
AT&T kills T-Mobile merger plans, will pay Deutsche Telekom $4b breakup fee
• T-Mobile to get seven-year 3G roaming deal, 128 markets of AWS spectrum from AT&T
RIM reports fiscal Q3 earnings: profits down 71 percent on $5.17 billion revenue
Acquisitions
• Nuance acquiring Vlingo to accelerate voice recognition software development
• Apple buys flash storage maker Anobit for $500 million, aims to establish R&D lab in Israel

Do we need to talk about SOPA/PIPA?

Future of CES

There's been a bit of back and forth today over Microsoft's announcement that it would be ending its long-standing CES keynote role, and will no longer have a booth at the show as it's done for many years. Head of Microsoft's corporate communications, Frank X. Shaw, posted a rather direct note about it on the company's blog, and the CEA confirmed the move on its blog.
Shortly thereafter, GigaOM posted a report that it wasn't Microsoft who initiated the end of the relationship, but the CEA itself. According to the article (via a source) "Microsoft didn't pull out of the keynote — they were kicked out."
"Paris Lemon" posts on Twitter indicated his thoughts that CES had dismissed Microsoft and wrote a blog post backing up this claim.
Apparently last year the CEA requested that Microsoft sign on for another three-year deal for keynoting and presenting at CES. We're told that Microsoft declined that offer and accepted only a single year deal (covering 2012) — which would indicate a lead-up to the more comprehensive move the company announced today.
Our source did indicate that the CEA was interested in playing the field for the lead keynote address, and that Microsoft would ultimately have had to pony up more cash for the privilege of holding onto its spot (everybody at the show, even Microsoft, pays to exhibit and participate). As we were made to understand it, Microsoft simply didn't feel it was getting a reasonable return on its investment with CES, and the reality is that the show hadn't aligned with its launches for a few years.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/21/2654285/the-truth-about-microsoft-and...

Mozilla is back online

What the pair declined to add: The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.
Google’s main rival in the bid, sources said, was Microsoft’s Bing search service, which was aggressively trying to hip-check it from the main search spot on the browser.
Yahoo was also in the mix, even though Microsoft powers its search technology, because a hookup with Firefox was considered a plus in holding on to its declining search market share.
Ultimately it didn’t happen for one reason: money. At $300 million a year (with a minimum three-year contract), Google is nearly tripling their annual payments to Mozilla to keep Microsoft away.

http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almost-300m-per-y...
Browsers
○ Mozilla and Google agree to new Firefox search deal for three years
○ Internet Explorer to start automatically updating itself in January
Court battles Won and Lost

Apple
but relating only to HTC Android phones implementing one of two claims of a "data tapping patent": a patent on an invention that marks up phone numbers and other types of formatted data in an unstructured document, such as an email, in order to enable users to bring up other programs (such as a dialer app) that process such data.
HTC's Reaction: HTC declared "an actual victory" because the ruling was based on only one out of ten originally asserted patents, and announced that a workaround is already in place. HTC also told its investors that HTC would "completely remove [the related feature] from all of [its] phones soon".

Microsoft

This is the patent the ALJ found to be infringed: U.S. Patent No. 6,370,566 on "generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device".
Motorola's Reaction: Motorola Mobility welcomed the fact that "the majority of the rulings were favorable to Motorola Mobility", or more specifically, "Motorola Mobility does not violate six of the seven Microsoft patents listed in Microsoft’s suit". Motorola also recalled that Microsoft had dropped two other patents during the course of the investigation. And it declares its intent to modify its products to steer clear of infringement: "The ALJ's initial determination may provide clarity on the definition of the Microsoft 566 patent for which a violation was found and will help us avoid infringement of this patent in the U.S. market."

Florian Mueller Reaction: I'll comment quickly on the point that both companies make about numbers, and go into more detail on the question of workarounds and designarounds. As my headline indicates, if the result of such a lawsuit is that someone works around the enforced patent claims, it's anything but a defeat for the plaintiff. It's perfectly in line with how Apple and Microsoft have previously commented on their Android-related lawsuits. Those two companies have very different strategies -- Apple optimizes for product differentiation while Microsoft is interested in license agreements -- but neither of them has ever said or implied that workarounds wouldn't be acceptable or wouldn't suit their strategic purposes.
ITC judge issues initial ruling that Motorola infringes Microsoft patent

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/