A U.S. judge on Monday ordered Apple to pay $506 million in damages to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the University of Wisconsin-Madison's patent-licensing arm, for violating its chip efficiency patent.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association, an industry lobbying group which counts technology giants Google, Intel, Amazon, Facebook and Apple rival Samsung as its members, among others, has sided with the Cupertino giant in its escalating legal dispute with Qualcomm over smartphone royalties related to cellular technology.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday published Apple's patent filing for an “In-ear speaker hybrid audio transparency system” that would give future AirPods an advanced noise-cancelling system not unlike that on Bose headphones, but with a twist.
Chinese consumer electronics and smartphone maker Xiaomi has acquired a swathe of patents from Nokia. According to an announcement yesterday, the multi-year patent agreement includes a cross license to each company's cellular standard essential patents.
Xiaomi also acquired patent assets from Nokia for an undisclosed sum as part of the transaction. Since its inception seven years ago, the Chinese firm has applied for over 16,000 patents, of which about 4,000 have been granted to them.
“Our win-win patent agreement with Nokia after months of negotiations is a significant milestone for Xiaomi,” Wang Xian, Xiaomi's Senior Vice President, wrote on Twitter.
The two firms will also co-operate on a wide range of strategic projects, including network infrastructure, optical transport solutions for datacenter interconnect, IP routing based on Nokia's newly announced FP4 network processor and a data center fabric solution.
The companies will join forces to “explore” VR and AI technologies, too.
The latest move gives the Chinese startup access to some cool Nokia technologies while providing legal shelter from possible lawsuits as Xiaomi looks to expand internationally.
The company's smartphone shipments declined 15.6 percent to 61 million units in 2016, down from a peak of 70 million units in 2015. Xiaomi has pledged to build a thousand retail stores in China by 2019 to ramp up sales.
In May, Nokia signed a similar deal with Apple following licensing disputes in the US and Europe which eventually led to the removal of Nokia's Withings-branded products from Apple Stores. Putting an end to all litigation, the Apple-Nokia multi-year patent license also entails providing “certain network infrastructure products and services" to Apple.
Apple's Siri design patent in the European Union and Hong Kong has been updated ahead of today's live-streamed WWDC keynote to also cover “smart glasses” as a category. As noted by PatentlyApple, the patent now lists “smart glasses” under the “remote control for” category.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo gave the rumored standalone Siri speaker a 70 percent chance of being formally unveiled during the keynote presentation, but he had nothing to say about any kind of Apple-branded smart glasses.
A sketchy report that appeared on Reddit this weekend, attributed to an alleged Foxconn insider, leaked more info about the purported Google Glass-like augmented reality accessory.
Apparently code-named “Project Mirrorshades,” the glasses are said to include polarized or prescription lens with smart optics from German maker Carl Zeiss, noise-cancelling microphones, a light sensor, bone-induction modules, an accelerometer sensor for tracking steps and head movement, magnetometer for navigation, a capacitive panel on one side, a ceramic battery, an Apple-designed chipset and more.
The bone conducting modules would presumable allow for Siri command and hands-free phone calls, among other features. The poster mentions there's a 65 percent chance that the project is cancelled so take the report with a pinch of salt.
Another new entry covers making hotel reservations. Siri can currently make a reservation at a restaurant, but not a hotel. The Cupertino technology giant is expected to announce plans today to make Siri work with a larger variety of apps, Reuters reported yesterday.
The updated patent is no guarantee that Siri could be used to control the rumored smart glasses or that Apple's voice assistant could play a major role in its augmented reality plans.
All shall be revealed in less than an hour and a half.
Any predictions?
Despite low buying power, India with its population of 1.32 billion people represents a massive marketing opportunity for the increasingly popular smartphone payment services. Small wonder that the Cupertino company now appears to be preparing to bring its own mobile payments service to its customers in India, said a new report.
Apple Pay currently works in sixteen major markets.
According to a BusinessStandard article, the iPhone maker has submitted at least five applications with the Indian Patent office over the past year, all related to its digital payments system. The patent applications range from using biometrics to authenticate payments to securely transferring payment to a device such as a point of sale device.
While Indian law clearly states that software is intrinsically not patentable, exceptions exist for devices with software. If Apple's patents are granted, Apple Pay could hurt homegrown digital payments firms such as Paytm, Mobikwik, Freecharge and several others.
Samsung Pay launched in India in March 2017, while Google plans to bring Android Pay there later this year by anchoring the service to the government-backed Unified Payments Interface.
Last week, Facebook made a patent application of its own with the Indian Patent office. It outlines a digital wallet service that would presumably be integrated into its popular Messenger and WhatsApp messaging services.
Apple has been doubling down on the Services category as a way to boost sales of iPhones in India and elsewhere. Recently, the firm began assembling iPhone SE in Bangalore, in a facility run by its supplier Wistron, marking the first time the cupertino company has assembled any iPhone model in the country.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office yesterday awarded a new patent to Apple, seemingly covering a future Apple Pencil that would work with an iPhone. Apple's $99 stylus is currently exclusive to iPad Pro models because the accessory requires a special system underneath the display, which iPhones currently don't have.
The U.S. Patent No. 9,658,704, titled “Devices and methods for manipulating user interfaces with a stylus”, describes a future Apple Pencil as supporting a myriad of electronic devices outfitted with a touchscreen and one or more sensors to detect signals from a stylus.
In some embodiments, the patent describes using a stylus with portable communications devices like iPhone, iPod touch and iPad by taking advantage of the projected mutual capacitance sensing technology that Apple's existing OS devices currently use.
The wording of the patent indicates strongly that a future Apple Pencil may work with other types of apps like word processing, spreadsheet making, game playing, web browsing, image editing, email and more.
Other devices like Macs with touch-sensitive trackpads might also work with a stylus.
Both “iPhone” and “phone” are referenced many times throughout the patent application. One of the included patent drawings clearly illustrates a stylus being used with an iPhone-like device.
The patent was originally filed for in September 2015 and credits Apple engineers Jeffrey Traer Bernstein, Linda L. Dong, Mark K. Hauenstein and Julian Missig as its inventors.
Tim Cook may have hinted in an interview last September that Apple Pencil could soon work with iPhones, thereby suggesting that the next iPhone might incorporate additional sensor support for a next-generation digital stylus from Apple.
The United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) on Tuesday awarded Apple patents for a bezel-less screen, a depth mapping system and an always-on Touch ID fingerprint sensor integrated into the display, which are the three key features expected from iPhone 8. The patents are part of a series of 56 newly granted patents for Apple today, according to PatentlyApple.
Edge-to-edge displayTitled ”Reducing the border area of a device”, the U.S. Patent No. 9,652,096 covers the process for bending the edges of a touch sensor panel and a display panel to help reduce the non-interactive border area of a mobile device.
The patent abstract explains that an electronic device could feature a flexible panel comprised of a flat surface, “an active area” and one or more bent borders “contiguous with and extending from the active area of the substantially flat surface”.
The panel can be folded back against the back surface.
This helps extend the active touch area closer to the edges, thereby reducing the overall width of a device. The patent was filed for in July 2014 and names Apple engineer Steven Martisauskas as its inventor.
In-screen Touch IDThe U.S. Patent No. 9,652,066 for an “Electronic device including finger biometric sensor including transparent conductive blocking areas carried by a touch display and related methods” covers moving Apple's Touch ID from the Home button to beneath the display itself.
The system would use at least one transparent conductive layer beneath a touch display to define “touch sensing pixels”. A finger biometric sensing layer, which includes an array of transparent conductive finger biometric sensing pixels, is capacitively coupled to the at least one transparent conductive layer of the display.
Apple also mentions switchable transparent conductive blocking areas between the finger biometric sensing layer and at least one transparent conductive layer of the touch display. These areas could alternate between blocking and reading states.
Apple argues that biometric authentication should occur automatically as the user is interacting with the device, not require them to scan their finger in a separate step which would force them to switch between tasks to authenticate themselves. In other words, Apple's proposed solution would allow auto-authentication because your iPhone could read the fingerprint that's already on the touchscreen, providing a more seamless experience.
According to the patent's description, an in-screen Touch ID may support iPhone, iPad and MacBook devices. The late-2016 MacBook Pro is the first Apple computer to come with Touch ID, found at the rightmost side of its Touch Bar OLED display.
This patent was first filed for in January 2015 and lists Apple engineer Dale Setlak as its inventor.
3D sensingAnd lastly, we have the U.S. Patent No. 9,651,417 for a “Scanning depth engine” which covers optical 3D mapping associated with a Kinect-like device and details methods and devices for projection and capture of optical radiation.
The solution requires a bespoke transmitter and a scanner.
The job of the transmitter is emitting a beam comprising pulses of light. The scanner, basically a micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) device then uses micro mirrors, receives the light reflected from the scene. Using time of flight calculations, the system is able to generate 3D models of any objects in a volume of interest, based on the calculated distance of the individual points in the scene from the scanner.
“A processor is coupled to control the scanner so as to cause the beam to scan over a selected window within the scan range and to process the output of the receiver so as to generate a 3D map of a part of the scene that is within the selected window,” reads the patent abstract. The scanner can be configured to scan the reflected light within a predefined scan range, over a scene, adds the company.
While this particular invention could power iPhone 8's rumored 3D scanning and mapping features, Apple specifically mentions a Kinect-like accessory that could be also integrated into a next-generation Apple TV to permit users to interact with games or exercise videos played.
This patent was filed for in February 2013 and lists Apple's Israel-based PrimeSense engineers Alexander Shpunt and Raviv Erlich as its inventors.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today published an interesting patent application filed for by Apple, which indicates that the Cupertino company might be exploring much deep integration between the Siri personal assistant and its iMessage message platform.
Titled “Intelligent automated assistant in a messaging environment”, the company's patent application proposes chatbot-style Siri functionality within the context of the Messages app for those times when using voice-based interactions would be impractical, like in noisy environments such as libraries, movie theaters and so forth.
The patent application appears to be an enhanced version of Apple's prior invention, titled “Virtual assistant in a communication session,” filed for last year and outlining basic Siri-Messages integration via bot-style commands.
Today's patent application includes deep Siri integration with audio, video and image files, as well as with deep links to websites/apps and more. The system could potentially permit users to use image and video recognition with Siri, asking the personal assistant to, say, send an image of a Volkswagen Beetle to a contact or return a text-based web answer.
Siri cannot process images in its current form.
Other image-related queries could include “Where is this?”, “What insect is this?”, “Which company uses this logo?” and more. Siri would be able to remember user preferences and data, too. In one embodiment, a user sends a picture of a bottle of wine and says, “I like this wine” to have Siri remember this preference.
She would also be able to store custom text for later retrieval.
Lastly, Apple proposes chatbot-like functionality where the AI-driven assistant would offer its services to chat participants in a manner not unlike the AI assistant in Facebook's Messenger app. The system could intelligently provide relevant information in the text form about stuff like a nearby restaurant while being able to suggest transportation options and even create an entry in each chat participant's calendar about an upcoming meeting.
Here's an excerpt from the patent abstract:
User input can be received and in response to receiving the user input, the user input can be displayed as a first message in the GUI. A contextual state of the electronic device corresponding to the displayed user input can be stored. The process can cause an action to be performed in accordance with a user intent derived from the user input. A response based on the action can be displayed as a second message in the GUI.
Siri currently includes a feature that allows you to edit your queries by typing, but it's not very practical as it's only available after the user has initially issued a voice-based command to the personal assistant.
Apple's technology, assuming it sees the light of day, would permit users to review previous Siri interactions in a chronological format. Today's patent application was first filed for in May 2016 and credits Apple engineers Petr Karashchuk, Tomas A. Vega Galvez and Thomas R. Gruber as its inventors.
The United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) recently published a patent application from Apple, uncovered by PatentlyApple, that's interesting on many levels. It basically hints at a new security feature that may or may not come to Siri in the future. In a nutshell, Apple’s proposed solution would let Siri recognize the voice of the device owner.
The invention has the potential to prevent unauthorized Siri interactions on the Lock screen and across CarPlay and HomeKit devices.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on Thursday published Apple's patent application for an “Electronic accessory device” acting as a dock that would turn your iPhone or iPad into a touchscreen-enabled Mac notebook, something many people have been craving for. The patent application outlines an ultra-portable MacBook of sorts with a special dock into which an iOS device could be inserted to provide compute power, software, storage and other features.
As with many other Apple patents, there's no telling when this particular invention might see the light of day, if ever.
Apple has been granted yet another patent for a fingerprint reader embedded underneath the display itself, a feature widely expected to debut on iPhone 8.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) this morning awarded the iPhone maker a patent for an “electronic device including finger biometric sensor carried by a touch display and related methods”. The company first applied for this patent on January 27, 2015.