Earlier this year, HP released the Enyo framework source code as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license. This was done as part of HP’s bigger plan of open sourcing the entire WebOS platform. The WebOS open sourcing effort will reach a closure in August. WebOS was an excellent mobile platform and its UX has been appreciated widely. Popular mobile platforms like Android and Blackberry borrow heavily from it and this open sourcing would have helped HP create a competitive mobile platform. However, HPs plans have been disrupted with some latest development.

The Verge writes in an exclusive report saying that the entire WebOS Enyo team will leave HP to start working at Google shortly. This strikes a serious blow to the future of WebOS. It is not known what the awesome people in the Enyo team will do at Google. One of the best comments on the post was perhaps:

Google buys Palm for zero billion dollars.

Android took a major UX leap with design ideas from Matias Duarte and it showed in Honeycomb. Now, with the entire Enyo team and Matias Duarte under its belt, Android might just rock the mobile segment.

Google can either borrow their mobile expertise for improving the Android user experience, or leverage their HTML5 expertise to create a better ecosystem for Google Chrome and Chrome OS. Looking at the technology stack that the Enyo team worked on, the latter seems more probable. Either way, Google has gotten hold of a golden goose, which will lay golden eggs. What remains to be seen, is which way the eggs roll.

In the Google-Oracle billion dollar lawsuit case, the jury has come out with its decision: Google has not infringed Oracle’s patents with Android. Oracle was looking to get $6 billion from the lawsuit. However, now it will go home without the billions.

Previously, the jury found Google partially guilty over copying 9 lines of code. Google admitted to copying them and had already since then have removed them. It’s interesting to note that Oracle had also agreed that those 9 lines of code didn’t have any monetary value.

Google issued the following statement after the jury’s decision on their side:

Today’s jury verdict that Android does not infringe Oracle’s patents was a victory not just for Google but the entire Android ecosystem.

 

However the lawsuit is far from over. The judge will still have to decide on whether the SSO of the Java APIs can be copyrighted and then the jury will have to decide the damages if the judge finds that the SSO is not covered under copyright law. If it is not then Oracle will receive statutory damages from Google for the rangeCheck and test file usage, a maximum of $150,000 per infringement count. Nevertheless this is a huge victory for Google.

[The Verge]

China has cleared Google’s acquisition of Motorola on the condition that Android will be free and open for at least another five years. With the acquisition of Motorola, Google would have both, a specialized Android related hardware segment and the Android software under its control. Seeing this, China raised its eyebrows and refused to clear the deal until Google agreed not to create a lock-in situation in the Android market.

China has a number of low-cost Android device manufacturers who rely on the Android ecosystem created by the Open Handset Alliance. A few years from now, if Google starts giving Motorola priority over other handset manufacturers, it might create an antitrust situation. China took good care to make sure that this does not happen, though it is interesting to note that Google never suggested that it would do so in the first place. Truth be told, Google does not even have the power to do so, because Android is managed by the Open Handset Alliance and Google is only the largest contributor. Then why did China go through all this trouble?

Perhaps China was skeptical that Google might try to address the Android hardware fragmentation problem by monopolizing the market, now that it controls both the software and a big chunk of the hardware. Whatever may be the case, the good news is that Android has always been free and will be free for the next five years.

Given the price of this deal, which stands at 12.5 billion USD and is larger than all other Google acquisitions combined, Google is placing a huge bet on Motorola Mobility and it will be interesting to see what synergy this acquisition creates.

In other news, Microsoft clears a case win (just in time) against Motorola over ActiveSync.

(Via: The Verge)

Motorola is walking into this week with both good and bad news. When on one hand the Google Motorola deal is expected to close sometime next week, Microsoft, which has patent deals with all major Android handset manufacturers for its ActiveSync technology, has finally registered a win against Motorola.

Microsoft was able to persuade most mobile handset manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Acer, ViewSonic, LG and alike to sign a patent deal over one of its technologies. This has left Microsoft with an array of cash cows. Motorola was the only handset manufacturer that went to court over this case instead of accepting the deal. The case has been running for the last four months and yesterday, it was finally ruled in favor of Microsoft.

Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, David Howard reacts to this win saying,

We hope that now Motorola will be willing to join the vast majority of Android device makers selling phones in the U.S. by taking a license to our patents.

This case gained the utmost importance to Microsoft ever since Motorola became Google’s eye candy. The case, which started with Microsoft claiming six patent infringements, has been settled for one proven infringement.

From this infringement case, and Oracle’s, we see a common trend. Companies claim bloated infringements and finally manage to walk away with at least a minimal set of infringements being proved. On one hand where these cases are a hindrance for innovation, they also threaten smaller businesses that cannot help but infringe on patents unknowingly. However, patents also form an important asset for any company and it is only natural for them to defend those.

When Samsung announced the Galaxy S3 earlier this month, quite a few die-hard techies were disappointed with the SoC of the handset. The Exynos 4 Quad SoC inside the SGS3 is a beast in every sense, but it packs in 4 “older” generation Cortex-A9 cores instead of the latest Cortex-A15 architecture. The Qualcomm S4 (Krait) SoC is a custom Cortex-A15 competitor from Qualcomm, and even though it has two less physical cores, it manages to beat the quad-core Exynos and Tegra 3 in quite a few benchmarks pretty easily. The Exynos 5250 is Samsung’s Cortex-A15 dual-core based SoC, which is scheduled to arrive later this year.

According to some of the latest commits from Google’s Android git, it looks like Google and Samsung are preparing a new device that will be using an Exynos 5250 SoC. The other specs of this mysterious device also look impressive with a Wolfson WM8994 audio chip, a 720p display, ‘vithar’ GPU clocked at 533MHz, and a ‘S5K4E5/S5K6A3′ camera.

The Exynos 5250 just went into testing, and the early yields of the SoC are only able to scale up to 1GHz. Thus, the chances of the rumored Google Nexus tablet sporting the Exynos 5250 SoC do look bleak since its less than 2 months away from its unveiling. Samsung states that the Exynos 5250 SoC will be clocked at around 1.8-2GHz, so the yield of the SoC needs to improve before it goes into production. The SoC is scheduled to go into production sometime in Q3 of this year. It might be possible that the Galaxy Note 2 or even the next Nexus handset from Google will be sporting the above specs.

Via – Codeworkx

As you must have heard by now, Mozilla is furious. The non-profit organization behind Firefox is angry because Microsoft is practically making it impossible to develop third party browsers for Windows 8 for ARM through artificially imposed restrictions. A short while back, even Google backed Mozilla and expressed its concern about Windows 8 restricting “user choice and innovation”. My colleague Paul Paliath has already weighed in on the debate. While he believes Mozilla’s complaint is baseless, I am not quite so sure.

Before proceeding any further, let’s delve a little deeper into the technicalities involved. With Windows 8, Microsoft is introducing an entirely new class of applications. These applications will run in Metro mode, and will be built using the WinRT API. The Windows applications that we are accustomed with are all built using the Win32 API. Now, Microsoft isn’t exactly killing the Win32 API. Windows 8 for x86 (desktops) will continue to offer a classic mode, which will be capable of running all Win32 applications. However, if an app wants to run in Metro mode it has to use the new WinRT API. The trouble is that in an attempt to make WinRT power efficient, fast, and secure Microsoft ended up making it way too restrictive. Due to this, several classes of modern applications can’t be developed by leveraging WinRT alone. In order to skirt around this significant roadblock, Microsoft created a third category of applications. This category of applications have a frontend developed using WinRT, but they can also leverage the power of the Win32 API. In other words, they look like Metro apps, but offer the power and flexibility of a traditional Windows app. Unfortunately, on ARM devices, the only apps which will be allowed to leverage both WinRT and Win32 APIs are apps from Microsoft. Paul is right in saying that Microsoft isn’t specifically targeting browsers. In one fell swoop Microsoft has put all third party apps at a significant disadvantage. Whether it be office suites, media players, or browsers – all apps will have a hard time matching products from the Redmond giant as they will practically be running on two different operating systems. To make matters worse, Windows 8 for ARM won’t allow third party apps to run as pure classic apps either. Asa Dotzler explained the trouble faced by browser developers quite succinctly.

Microsoft has made it clear that the third category won’t exist on Windows for ARM (unless you’re Microsoft) and that neither will the first category (unless you’re Microsoft.) That means that IE on ARM has access to win32 APIs — even when it’s running in Metro mode, but no other Metro browser has that same access. Without that access, no other browser has a prayer of being competitive with IE.

You might be wondering exactly what kind of restrictions does WinRT impose that makes it impossible to develop a competent browser. Here’s an example – WinRT doesn’t allow translation of code at runtime. This is something absolutely critical for a technique called JIT (Just-in-time compilation). You might have heard of JIT before, as over the past few years, all browsers have been using JIT to deliver astounding improvements in JavaScript rendering speed. Lack of JIT will instantly push a browser back by several years. Keep in mind that this is just one example. Modern browsers are pushing the limits of what is possible within a browser. With the restrictive sandbox offered by WinRT, many of the bleeding edge features offered by modern browsers can’t be implemented in WinRT.

Mozilla has already issued thinly veiled threats of legal action, and considering that Windows 8 is pretty much done, the threat of another anti-trust ruling is the only thing that can realistically make Microsoft change its mind. However, is Microsoft really abusing its monopolistic position to crush competition? The answer is trickier than you might think.

Up until now, it was a known fact that Android updates for a majority of the Android handsets in the United States was intentionally delayed by the carriers. While Google has not publicly mentioned this, one of the key AOSP Android engineer had clearly mentioned this in a post on Google+.

Now, it looks like AT&T’s CEO wants to completely change the blame game and has blamed Google for the delay in the release of Ice Cream Sandwich update for some the handsets. Here is the official statement from AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson -:

Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when. A lot of times, that’s a negotiated arrangement and that’s something we work at hard. We know that’s important to our customers. That’s kind of an ambiguous answer because I can’t give you a direct answer in this setting.

This new certainly put a lot of bloggers and Android fanboys confused. Was Google really behind the delay in Android OS updates? Thankfully, before this news went viral, Google released a statement that it is not sure about what AT&T’s CEO means -:

Mr. Stephenson’s carefully worded quote caught our attention and frankly we don’t understand what he is referring to. Google does not have any agreements in place that require a negotiation before a handset launches.  Google has always made the latest release of Android available as open source at source.android.com as soon as the first device based on it has launched. This way, we know the software runs error-free on hardware that has been accepted and approved by manufacturers, operators and regulatory agencies such as the FCC. We then release it to the world.

I am kind of shocked how AT&T’s CEO publicly blamed Google for the delay in Android OS updates, while Google has been pretty transparent about the whole process. It is the ‘ software testing’ from the U.S. carriers that take up more than a month or so to finish, before any OTA update is rolled out to Android handset in their network.

Via – 9to5Google

Google’s legal woes just keep getting worse. After drawing the ire of American and European regulatory bodies, Google is now in hot water in India. According to WSJ, Competition Commission of India has initiated an antitrust probe into Google’s online advertising practices. Competition Commission is an Indian regulatory body responsible for enforcing The Competition Act (2002). It had earlier sued Apple for following a restrictive distribution model.

The initial target of the probe will be AdWords – Google’s automated service for selling ads that are served by its AdSense network. The instigating factor for the investigation is most probably a complaint by Consim Info Pvt. Ltd., which runs several matrimonial services including Bharatmatrimony, TamilMatrimony, and BengaliMatrimony. Consim believes that Google had engaged in discriminatory and retaliatory practices. It is currently suing Google in Chennai High Court. Earlier, Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS) had urged Competition Commission to investigate potential anticompetitive conduct of Google in the Indian internet, e-commerce market, online advertising and related markets.

Google is already in some trouble in India. It is currently facing criminal charges for failing to “adequately” censor itself. Back in February, Google also received a foreign exchange violation notice from the ED (Enforcement Directorate) for alleged irregularities in transfer of funds to its foreign entities. So far, Google has declined to officially respond, claiming that it is yet to be officially notified about the investigation.

Last month, we reported that Google had used code that allowed the company to bypass the standard Safari privacy settings, which allowed them to insert advertising cookies on an affected device. It was also reported that a Safari user had sued Google over the claimed privacy violation.

In fact, Google denied that by saying “The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.” Clearly not the case.

Now, Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is getting ready to fine Google over its efforts to bypass privacy settings in Safari for iOS to track users through ads on sites across the web. According to the source, the fine is likely to be tens of millions of dollars.

Google Inc. (GOOG) is negotiating with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over how big a fine it will have to pay for its breach of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s Safari Internet browser, a person familiar with the matter said. [...]

The fine would be the first by the FTC for a violation of Internet privacy safeguards as the agency steps up enforcement of the Web.

“Don’t be evil” indeed.

A phenomenon such as online advertising has gradually moved into the mainstream and has become one of the major marketing methods for companies to reach out to their current and prospective customers. Being a questionable marketing methodology in its introductory phase, businesses soon realized that it beholds the future of advertising. The tremendous amount of advertising being carried out in the social sphere is testimony to the former affirmation. Consequently, the amount of competition has become fiercer and fiercer regardless of whether there are small or big players.

The rivalry between Facebook and Google has been of utmost prominence in the present day era and it is of no exception to competition. Both players have been competing head-to-head with each other for quite a while now. They have not only become competitors but they have converted into worthy adversaries. From time to time, both Google and Facebook have been demanding attention from customers and to do so, they have been playing “pucker-up” with each other. The latest episode in this supposedly never-ending war is an initiative by Facebook. It recognizes Google’s competitive advantage is its search engine and its ultimate attempt to oust it is by portraying this giant advertisement of Microsoft’s search engine “Bing”. Take a look!

The social networking giant revolutionized the media industry and acquired an enviable consumer base in a short passage of time. The way it accomplished it motivated Google to introduce its own social network, Google+. However, its success index is still under examination. What remains interesting in this eternal clash between both these players is what they will keep on doing in the future with respect to each other in order to remain on top.