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Groupon Starts Fight With IBM
May 16, 2016 by admin
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The online marketplace Groupon Inc has filed a lawsuit against IBM Corp, accusing it of infringing a patent related to technology that assists businesses to solicit customers based on the customers’ locations at a given moment.
Groupon filed its lawsuit on Monday with the federal court in its hometown of Chicago, two months after IBM accused Groupon of patent infringement in a separate lawsuit.
“IBM is trying to shed its status as a dial-up-era dinosaur” by infringing the rights of “current” technology companies such as Groupon, according to Groupon spokesman Bill Roberts.
The latest lawsuit concerns IBM’s WebSphere Commerce platform, which Groupon said lets merchants send messages to customers with GPS-enabled devices based on their real-time locations, and their use of social media including Facebook.
Groupon said the platform infringes a December 2010 patent, and that it deserves royalties based on the “billions of dollars” of revenue that Armonk, New York-based IBM has received through its infringement.
“IBM, a relic of once-great 20th Century technology firms, has now resorted to usurping the intellectual property of companies born this millennium,” Groupon said in its lawsuit.
On March 2, IBM accused Groupon in a federal lawsuit in Delaware of infringing four patents, including two related to Prodigy, a late-1980s forerunner to the Internet.
“Over the past three years, IBM has attempted to conclude a fair and reasonable patent license agreement with Groupon, and we are disappointed that Groupon is seeking to divert attention from its patent infringement by suing,” Shelton said.
The Chicago case is Groupon Inc v International Business Machines Corp, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, No. 16-05064. The Delaware case is International Business Machines Corp v Groupon Inc, U.S. District Court, District of Delaware, No. 16-00122.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/groupon-gets-into-patent-fight-with-ibm.html
IBM Goes After Groupon
March 14, 2016 by admin
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IBM has filed suit against online deals marketplace Groupon for infringing four of its patents, including two that emerged from Prodigy, the online service launched by IBM and partners ahead of the World Wide Web.
Groupon has built its business model on the use of IBM’s patents, according to the complaint filed Wednesday in the federal court for the District of Delaware. “Despite IBM’s repeated attempts to negotiate, Groupon refuses to take a license, but continues to use IBM’s property,” according to the computing giant, which is asking the court to order Groupon to halt further infringement and pay damages.
IBM alleges that websites under Groupon’s control and its mobile applications use the technology claimed by the patents-in-suit for online local commerce marketplaces to connect merchants to consumers by offering goods and services at a discount.
About a year ago, IBM filed a similar lawsuit around the same patents against online travel company Priceline and three subsidiaries.
To develop the Prodigy online service that IBM launched with partners in the 1980s, the inventors of U.S. patents 5,796,967 and 7,072,849 developed new methods for presenting applications and advertisements in an interactive service that would take advantage of the computing power of each user’s PC and reduce demand on host servers, such as those used by Prodigy, IBM said in its complaint against Groupon.
“The inventors recognized that if applications were structured to be comprised of ‘objects’ of data and program code capable of being processed by a user’s PC, the Prodigy system would be more efficient than conventional systems,” it added.
Groupon is also accused of infringing U.S. Patent No.5,961,601, which was developed to find a better way of preserving state information in Internet communications, such as between an online merchant and a customer, according to IBM. Online merchants can use the state information to keep track of a client’s product and service selections while the client is shopping and then use that information when the client decides to make a purchase, something that stateless Internet communications protocols like HTTP cannot offer, it added.
Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/ibm-files-patent-infringement-lawsuit-against-groupon.html
BlackBerry And Amazon Team Up
June 30, 2014 by admin
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BlackBerry Ltd has agreed to a licensing deal with Amazon.com Inc that will let the Canadian smartphone maker offer some 240,000 Android applications from Amazon’s app store on its lineup of BlackBerry 10 devices this fall.
The move allows the Waterloo, Ontario-based company to add a vast array of consumer-focused apps to its devices, while at the same time directing its own efforts toward developing enterprise and productivity applications.
Customers who own smartphones powered by its BlackBerry 10 operating system will now be able to access popular Android apps such as Groupon, Netflix, Pinterest, Minecraft and Candy Crush Saga on their BlackBerry devices this fall. Google Inc makes Android, the mobile operating system used in more than a billion phones and tablets.
The apps will become available after the Canadian smartphone maker rolls out the upgraded BlackBerry 10.3 operating system, the company said.
The move is the latest by the smartphone pioneer to streamline its focus as it attempts to reinvent itself under new Chief Executive Officer John Chen as BlackBerry phones have lost ground to Apple Inc’s iPhone and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd’s Galaxy devices.
Analysts saw the move as a step in the right direction, but are not sure whether it will help turn the tide for BlackBerry.
“While this will widen the BB10 app ecosystem, the consumer
smartphone environment still remains challenging,” Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um said in a note to clients.
Um views the announcement as a positive for BlackBerry, but said “whether it stems consumer churn remains to be seen.”
Chen wants to remain a competitor in the smartphone segment, but is focused on making BlackBerry a dominant force in machine-to-machine communications. The company’s QNX software already is a mainstay in the automotive industry, powering electronic and other systems in a wide range of cars.
BlackBerry already works with hundreds of large enterprise clients, including corporations and government agencies, to manage and secure mobile devices on their internal networks.
Chen intends to build on those ties and BlackBerry’s security credentials to let these enterprise clients build and customize in-house corporate and productivity applications for their employees.
Oracle And Nokia Make A Deal
October 10, 2012 by admin
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Nokia Oyj has agreed to grant Oracle Corp’s customers access to its mapping products, as the wireless phone company attempts to expand its location services business.
The Finnish company, which bought the world’s largest digital mapping firm, Navteq, in 2008, has been looking for ways to boost the business
and recently signed mapping deals with Groupon Inc and Amazon.Com Inc.
In stark contrast with Nokia’s troubled mobile phone operation, sales at the location business grew last quarter, though it still generates only 4 percent of group revenue.
Oracle has developed a link between its own software and the Nokia Location Platform software, Nokia said on Monday. This enables the U.S. company’s business users to access the mapping services through its products.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but Nokia said Oracle users would license Location Platform from Nokia for use in Oracle applications.
“Nokia has been on a mission for the last 18 months to sign mapping and location deals with large internet players. The deal with Oracle extends this,” CCS Insight analyst Martin Garner said.
Last week Apple publicly apologized after customer complaints about errors in its maps, which have been put on its latest phone operating system instead of Google Inc’s mapping service.
Google Buys Clever Sense
December 21, 2011 by admin
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Google has purchased Clever Sense, the developer of Alfred, a personalized restaurant and bars recommendations app, for an undisclosed amount, both companies stated.
The Internet giant has been strengthening its local offerings. It acquired in September for example a restaurant ratings publisher Zagat to boost its online maps and local business listings with trustworthy reviews and recommendations.
Alfred, which currently provides recommendations on restaurants, bars, and night life in the locality where the person is, could however down the line broaden its scope, potentially making it the Android alternative to the Siri personal assistant on Apple’s iPhone 4S.
Clever Sense’s co-founder and CEO Babak Pahlavan suggested in a notice on the company’s website that Alfred may include other information sources and services.
Discovering local information is extremely important to both users and businesses, and the acquisition of Clever Sense will benefit both, Pahlavan said. “With Google and Clever Sense working together, our entire team looks forward to building more intelligent, serendipitous and magical services!”, he added.
Twitter Toying With Money Making Ideas
June 29, 2011 by admin
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Twitter is considering the option of placing ads into the live stream of messages, according to the Financial Times. The addition of “promoted tweets” — a more palatable way to say advertising — within the live Twitter stream is bound to turn off many users, at the same time as it attracts businesses looking to reach some of the company’s 300 million users.
Twitter’s executives have been in discussions with strategists at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France this week to find a way to increase revenues, which disproportionately trail those of social media companies such as Facebook.
Twitter is expected to generate revenues of about $100 million this year. Facebook, by contrast, reaps $3.5 billion from display advertising, according to a forecast by Enders Analysis.
A few other ideas leaked out of these meetings. One was that Twitter would offer mass coupon deals, which hold potential given the real-time nature of interacting on Twitter. A brand profile, which would allow advertisers to pre-schedule their company’s Tweets, is also being considered.
Cell Phones Can Be Dangerous
June 5, 2011 by admin
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It appears that an Australian brain surgeon has called the latest report in reference to the report on the potential harmful effects of mobile phones as a wake-up call to users and the telecommunications industry.
Dr Teo, said he was “pleased” that at last there came conclusive proof that mobile phones caused brain tumours. He also went on to say that the report should serve as a ”wake up call’ that should alert both the public and the mobile phone industry to the link between mobile use and cancer.”
As you know a report was released by the World Health Organisation’s cancer research wing that said radio frequency electromagnetic fields generated by cell phones are “possibly carcinogenic to humans” and heavy usage could lead to a possible increased risk of glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer.