Posts Tagged: "Microsoft"

Although some tech companies publishing earnings reports had rockier third quarters than others, performance was very good almost across the board, making now a very good time to be in the consumer or high tech industries. The third quarter of 2015 is the first one for which Google reported its earnings under the name of its new parent holding company, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). The early returns are showing that the new structure is a profitable one for Alphabet, which beat analyst estimates for earnings per share (EPS) by almost 15 cents per share. It was a much different story for IBM (NYSE:IBM) of Armonk, NY, when its earnings report missed on the low side of analyst expectations, marking the 14th straight quarter for which the enterprise tech developer has reported falling revenues.

The top two spots on the list of the 100 most valuable brands are occupied this year, as last year, by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), respectively. These two companies have held their respective spots since 2013, when both were able to ouster The Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE:KO) from the leading position in the Interbrand study, which it had held since Interbrand began releasing the report in 2000. Interbrand’s top 10 global brands include a collection of Companies We Follow often here on IPWatchdog, including 4th-placed Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), 5th-placed IBM (NYSE:IBM), 7th-placed Samsung Electronics Co. (KRX:005930), 8th-placed General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) and 10th-placed Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN).

Microsoft is often found soaring high atop the intellectual property world in terms of the patents it’s issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In 2014, the company was 5th overall in the world for U.S. patent grants with 2,983 patents that year, a 6 percent increase from the previous year’s totals. In the three months leading up to this writing, Microsoft has earned 597 U.S. patents, a slow quarterly pace compared to last year but still one that would likely put the company in the top 10 most innovative organizations this year.

The big winner among social media e-businesses in the 2015 consumer index is Pinterest, the personal web cataloguing service headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Its consumer satisfaction index score rose by about 3 percent since last year to a score of 78, tied for the best 2015 index score of any e-business. Most people think of Pinterest as a fun website for getting party ideas or tips on how to style a home, but there have been some interesting aspects of Pinterest’s business developing. Recently, the Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC) announced that Pinterest, which manages about 1.3 billion pins related to money management, is driving about 30 percent of the company’s social media traffic. A police department in Dover, DE, recently became one of a small but growing contingent of departments who have launched Pinterest accounts to advertise a public lost & found service. Pinterest users who have ever found themselves frustrated at an inability to purchase imaginative items they find on the site may be happy to note that the site is rolling out buyable pins.

In this issue of the Federal Circuit Review: (1) A Patent Owner Must Show They Are Entitled to Amended Claims In an Inter Partes Review, Including in View Of All Prior Art of Record, and Known to the Patent Owner; (2) Federal Circuit Reverses Every E.D. Va. Claim Construction on Appeal in TomTom v. Adolph Mobile Tracking System Suit; and (3) Federal Circuit Overrule the “Strong Presumption” Embodied in § 112 para. 6 for Functional Limitations Expressed Without the Term “Means.”

This year’s E3 conference heralded the coming of some highly anticipated titles as well as some interesting technological trends that may change the course of the industry in the near future. Since the earliest days of the video gaming, the business model has largely been predicated upon a model in which consumers own a hardware console and buy additional game cartridges or discs. Video game developers create hardware with exacting technical specifications which are able to execute ever more complex game software. With the rise of cloud-based app gaming, however, a very basic aspect of video game retailing might be set to undergo a massive change.

Microsoft applauded the introduction of the PATENT Act. Universities seem to be on the fence, recognizing that the Senate alternative is an improvement, but likely to support amendments. The Innovation Alliance opposes the bill, pointing primarily to customer stay language that could effectively immunize large corporations from patent infringement liability. Meanwhile, according to BIO, any patent reform bill that does not address abusive filings of inter partes review (IPR) petitions will be opposed.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has just cleared up the picture over its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the company’s forecast looks sunny. The corporation recently announced its first quarter earnings for 2015 and financial pundits were flabbergasted to see just how profitable AWS has been for Amazon, earning $5.16 billion in revenue over a recent 12-month period and growing…

The navigation and guidance technologies protected by Rovi’s IP holdings have been incorporated into a wide array of electronics such as set-top boxes, digital video recorders, tablets and other mobile devices. As a result, the company is engaged in a range of licensing and litigation activities relative to its patent holdings. The corporation has brought suit against Netflix in recent years for alleged infringement of patents held by Rovi which protect interactive program guide (IPG) technologies. Recently, Rovi renewed a product and patent licensing agreement for many of those same IPG technologies with major Japanese electronics manufacturer Sharp.

Now more than ever succeeding is all about making better products and offering new and improved services quicker and more reliably than your competitors. Surprisingly, at a time when many major technology corporations are struggling to innovate, we see utter disdain for patent owners. Void from the discussion is any perspective on the real problems facing American companies – namely innovating to obtain a competitive advantage and set themselves apart from the competitors they have today and the competitors they will surely have tomorrow. Increased patent licensing, or outright acquisition of patents, will not only help, but will likely become essential for those companies who understand the importance of continually squeezing out innovation as fast and efficiently as possible.

It’s impossible to actually support the idea that patents harm smartphone innovation because there is no consumer product that has changed so much over the past decade thanks to innovation. And if patents would get in the way of anything, it would definitely get in the way of an industry which accounted for one out of every six active patents. But more smartphones are being sold than ever before and new improvements continue to be developed, from curved touchscreens to waterproof phones to dual-screen phones.

”A few years ago we ramped up our foreign filings and recognized that we’re writing this one document, this one patent application for so many different audiences. We started settling in on the European technical standard as a guide for how to draft, how to cover the innovation from that vantage point, in order to try to write this document that would satisfy the USPTO as well as the EPO, Chinese Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and so on. So for me, what this environment means as a practitioner has more to do with how the patent is drafted and how we capture the innovation, and not really a huge difference about what the underlying innovation is or how it’s implemented.”

Microsoft pays a premium for R&D but its investment has paid off as the company currently holds one of the world’s strongest patent portfolios. Just recently the company decided to flex this patent muscle in a big way by filing a patent lawsuit against Kyocera; Microsoft is seeking an injunction. The company was 5th overall during 2014 in terms of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with 2,829 U.S. patents last year. That’s a slight rise from Microsoft’s 2,814 U.S. patents in 2013, which was good for a 6th place finish in that year.

I do feel that the whole notion of trying to find an “inventive concept” is really challenged. While the Supreme Court went out of its way to say we are really not putting Sections 102 or 103 in here, I think what’s happening is the Courts are basically trying to do that. And they’re looking deeply into prior art in some cases to knock out patents under Section 101 and whittle away the invention, and trying to find the abstract idea by doing a prior art analysis, and I think that’s troubling.

It will be interesting to see how ipCreate and AOP combine forces and even more interesting to see the technologies that come from ipCreate’s collaboration with global tech brands. ipCreate’s invention on demand model could also become an important vehicle for overcoming the widely-reported “innovation slowdown” in Silicon Valley, where many large tech companies no longer invent new products in-house but rather use their large cash reserves to buy other companies and their innovation.