Displaying items by tag: Licensing

AMD kicked an interesting product out the door today in the form of their Operton X-Series APU SoC. You might remember that the possibility of this APU was leaked a while ago by an inadvertent inclusion on a slide showing the Operton X logo. Everyone knew this was going to fold over into an x86 APU based SoC and the launch was just a matter of time. Now the lid is off and we can talk about the Opteron X (Kyoto) and where AMD sees this new product in their server business and in the market as a whole.

Nokia and Microsoft made an agreement back in 2011 under which Microsoft will pay the Finnish manufacturer for support of their platform, while Nokia will pay Microsoft a license to use Windows Phone. During the term of the agreement, Microsoft's payments slightly surpassed what Nokia has paid, but a good part of the "bonus" Finnish manufacturer already used.

Microsoft believes that every Android device manufacturer earns money by using their patents, and therefore seeks to enter into licensing agreements with each of them to avoid lawsuits. Also this way they can earn money from what is often naively believed to be "pure" Google product that is based on open source software and Linux.

Microsoft has changed the terms of use of the new version of Office. Originally, with the retail version of Office, customers could have installed Office on another computer (provided it is installed on only one computer). However, with Office 2013 this is no longer the case.

A Project on Kickstarter called POP, which stands for Portable Power, has collected $140,000 from individual investors. This is almost three times more than the required capital to begin production. POP is a universal charger for portable devices which can be used to charge both old iOS devices and devices with microUSB connector.

If you're a Last.fm user and you pulled three euros a month for a subscription, you probably did it for two reasons: to see who visits your profile and for the possibility of listening to internet radio. Last.fm's radio works in a way that you type in the performers name, genre or one third of the tag by which you want to perform a selection of music (or choose friends whose music collection you want to listen to), then the stream will immediately initiate. That is a great way to listen to music when you do not know what to play, or if you just want to discover new bands.

Apple rested their case today in the Samsung V Apple trial currently underway. Apple’s last big hurrah was parade their licensing chief in front of the jury. From looking at the testimony it was an attempt to show how much Apple tries to cooperate with the competitors. We are not sure that their effort was successful though. The primary focus was to put in a value on the “infringement” that Apple claims Samsung is guilty of.

There is good news for consumers, but some pretty bad news for content owners as the High Court in the European Union has declared that it is legal for someone to sell their software licenses to another person. The caveat is that they (the original purchaser) must uninstall or otherwise deactivate their copy first. This is sure to annoy many software companies that felt the resale of these items was a violation of their copyright (as it cut them out of the resale).