Apple has been granted a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office that covers a camera system like the popular GoPro action camera, Patently Apple first reported.
The patent notes that the new camera system could be secured to various objects, such as a bike helmet or scuba mask, or mounted to the handlebars of a motorcycle or the front of a surfboard, like a GoPro.
Apple was awarded just over 2,000 patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2014, according to data compiled by IFI Claims Patent Services. That amount is good for a 13% boost over 2013, and enough to rank it #11 among top patent recipients for the year.
A total of 19 US-based companies appear on the 2014 IFI Claims Top 50 list. IBM finished in first, with 7,534 patents awarded in 2014, keeping its 22-year streak alive. Samsung came in second with just under 5000 patents, followed by Canon, Sony and Microsoft.
Apple has been granted a patent by the USPTO on Tuesday that describes a stylus that will allow a user to write on any surface, and translate it onto their iPhone or iPad. The feature set is similar to the Livescribe 3 Smartpen, that works on Livescribe Dot Paper by using an onboard camera.
However, the technology Apple has applied for sounds more advanced and more seamless. Instead of using a camera and specialized paper, Apple's stylus uses accelerometers and motion-sensing to activate only when picked up, its nib is pressed to paper, withdrawn from a dock or manually turned on by the user.
The Apple-backed Rockstar consortium has agreed to sell off more than 4,000 patents from its IP portfolio to RPX Corp. for $900 million. The move will effectively end several high-profile lawsuits filed by Rockstar, and is another sign that patent wars are starting to cool in Silicon Valley.
To that end, it's worth noting that the $900 million offer is substantially less than the $4.5 billion the consortium paid for the full portfolio just 4 years ago, and that RPX is a San Francisco-based patent clearinghouse, which helps companies protect themselves against patent litigation.
As TechCrunch reported this morning, the United States Patent & Trademark Office yesterday published a patent application for “Hand-held Video Game Platform Emulation” that Nintendo filed on June 23, 2014.
The invention describes software emulation of Nintendo's popular mobile game consoles such as the Game Boy family on a variety of mobile devices, including smartphones and in other settings such as seat-back displays in airplanes and trains.
Bloomberg is reporting this morning that Apple's iPhone and other devices have been found to infringe half a dozen pager technology patents owned by a Texas company called Mobile Telecommunications Technologies LLC.
Six patents owned by Mobile Telecommunications Technologies are valid and infringed, a federal jury in Marshall, Texas, has found.
The iPhone maker was ordered to pay the Texas company $23.6 million in damages.
Apple on Wednesday defeated a civil suit put forth by GPNE, a non-practicing patent holding company in Honolulu, that was seeking nearly $100 million in damages. The company alleged that three iPhone and iPad models infringed on its pager technology patents.
A jury in the US District Court of San Jose disagreed, and rejected all of patent infringement claims. Apple applauded the verdict, calling GPNE a "patent troll," a term given to companies who acquire patents for the sole purpose of collecting licensing and lawsuit fees.
Apple and GT are continuing their work to strengthen sapphire, according to a new report from Wall Street Forensics. The site says the pair are hoping to reduce the material's "fundamental flaw of cracking," as well as improve its reflective properties.
On September 18th, the US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that covers new processes to both aid in the strengthening of sapphire, and cut manufacturing costs—a major point of contention with sapphire critics.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit tossed out a verdict today handed down by a Texas jury in late 2012 that would've forced Apple to pay $368 million to patent holding firm VirnetX. The jury determined that Apple's FaceTime feature infringed on on the firm's intellectual property.
The Wall Street Journal reports this afternoon that the appeals court has ruled that the verdict was "tainted" by erroneous jury instructions in the case and therefore is invalid. It also held that some trial testimony from a VirnetX IP "expert" should have been completely excluded from the case.
Apple has once again been shot down by US District Judge Lucy Koh in its ongoing effort to win a sales ban on Samsung devices. In San Jose, California today, Koh denied the Cupertino company's latest bid to ban select Samsung smartphones.
Despite two US juries finding multiple Samsung products to be infringing on its patents, Apple has seen little success in its injunction attempts. This time, the company had hoped to make its request more viable, asking for a "narrowly tailored" ban.
Apple and Samsung may have called a truce in patent litigation overseas, but here in the United States, they're still locked in a heated battle. The two firms are wrapping up post-trial hearings from their 2012 meeting, and they've just begun post-trial activities for this year's lawsuit.
This week a significant development has occurred, which could have a major impact in the ongoing fight. The US Patent Office has rejected several claims of one of the patents Apple asserted against Samsung in their most recent infringement trial, saying certain parts aren't valid...
Rumors of Apple's supposed intent to port its iOS digital personal assistant, Siri, over to the Mac have persisted for years, and intensified lately. Back in November 2012, for example, 9to5Mac claimed that Siri would be baked into OS X Mavericks.
Mavericks is here without Siri and the feature is nowhere to be seen in Yosemite, which looms on the horizon. Of course, the Mac's Dictation feature, powered by Nuance, doesn't count as it's simply speech-to-text with no real intelligence.
That being said, it would seem that the Cupertino firm has been quietly researching ways of enabling Siri on the Mac. Case in point: a newly discovered patent application filed back in February of this year which details how Siri for Mac might function, what features it could include and how it should improve your desktop productivity...