By David Meyer

Motorola has won a permanent injunction against the sale and marketing of Windows 7, the Xbox 360, Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player in Germany, but Microsoft says the products will remain on sale while it launches an appeal.

The ruling in Mannheim regional court on Wednesday morning dealt with two Motorola patents that are essential to the widely-used H.264 video compression technology. Both patents are supposed to be licensed under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, and a US court has pre-emptively granted Microsoft a restraining order against Motorola’s enforcement of the German decision, while it examines Motorola’s tactics around those patents.
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By Paul Ridden

The two-hundred and ninety-five feet (ninety meter) tall Building 54 on MIT’s Cambridge campus has become the canvas for a number of carefully planned and daringly executed visual displays over the years, not strictly allowed by the administration but often looked upon with some appreciation. The building is home to the Institute’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science (EAPS) and has a host of meteorological instruments and radio communications equipment on its roof – but its the grid-like windows to the front that have become the main attraction to hackers, as they are known. The latest hack is the successful realization of a long-standing challenge, a huge playable game of Tetris.

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by Ewan Spence

Congratulations Samsung, you made it. Top of the heap, number one, head honcho, the big man in the room, the all conquering mobile phone manufacturer. The King that was Nokia is no more, Samsung are now the number one mobile phone manufacturer on the planet.

That was the easy bit. Now they need to stay there, which is a different challenge altogether, and one that many companies have had to face up to before. One slip up in strategy and planning can start a chain reaction that could be masked by the market until the cliff face is reached. Just ask Nokia.

Samsung have many things to be careful of over the next few years, but there are three that cover the biggest areas of risk and opportunity.
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By Michael Kan

Huawei Technologies is aiming to bring touch-free smartphones and more inexpensive cloud storage to users, as the company boosts its research and development spending in order to bring “disruptive” technologies that will alter the market landscape.

“We are focused on disruptive technology and taking interesting ideas and turning them into something exciting,” said John Roese, general manager for Huawei’s North American research and develop center, on Friday.

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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE | Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google is already facing spasms of suspicion and confusion as it tries to persuade people to entrust their personal documents, photos and other digital content to the company’s new online storage service.

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By LOLITA C. BALDOR | Associated Press – Fri, Apr 20, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

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New chips code-named Trinity and Brazos 2.0 will offer more performance-per-watt than predecessors

By Agam Shah

Consumer laptops and desktops with Advanced Micro Devices’ new ‘Trinity’ processors will go on sale this quarter and do battle with Intel’s next wave of Core processors, based on its Ivy Bridge microarchitecture.

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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE | Associated Press – Fri, Apr 20, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Shifting from Google’s CEO to executive chairman proved to be lucrative career move for Eric Schmidt.

Google Inc. awarded Schmidt a compensation package valued at $101 million last year, according to a Friday regulatory filing. The amount is 322 times higher than the $313,219 package that Schmidt received in 2010 during his final full year as the Internet search leader’s CEO.

Schmidt, 56, ended a decade-long stint as Google’s CEO last April and turned over the job to Google co-founder Larry Page.

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