TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Motorola will have to modify its Android smartphones or pay Microsoft a licensing fee if it wants to continue selling them in the United States.

After postponing its decision several times, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled Friday that Motorola’s Android phones violate a Microsoft patent, and ordered an import ban for the offending devices.

“Microsoft sued Motorola in the ITC only after Motorola chose to refuse Microsoft’s efforts to renew a patent license for well over a year,” Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel David Howard said in a statement. “We’re pleased the full Commission agreed that Motorola has infringed Microsoft’s intellectual property, and 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.”

If the decision survives the review period and appeal process, Motorola could license the Microsoft patent or build a workaround. The decision will affect all the Motorola Blur and Google Experience devices that existed at the time of the trial, including the Droid 2, Cliq and Devour, and any devices using the patent that are developed after the decision.

While most people’s eyes glaze over when you mention patents and intellectual property law, they can have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line — both in revenues and legal fees.

Microsoft, to name one Puget Sound-area company, is involved in more than 60 patent infringement lawsuits, according to recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

While the company wouldn’t tell me how much it spends on legal fees, a survey published by the American Intellectual Property Law Association found that when $25 million was at risk, companies spent $5 million on legal fees.

If every Microsoft patent infringement case were worth $25 million or more, a conservative estimate would be $300 million in legal fees for Microsoft to fight battles over intellectual property. Some cases may not be $25 million suits, but others, such as the Microsoft-Motorola patent suit that I examined for this week’s print edition of the Puget Sound Business Journal (subscription required), are worth a lot more.

Microsoft has estimated that if it were forced to pay the licensing fee that Motorola has demanded for its video compression and WiFi patents, it would cost the company $4 billion per year.

Jim Gray, a Microsoft Corp. computer scientist who vanished while sailing off the coast of San Francisco five years ago, has officially been declared dead.

The New York Times reports that Gray's widow Donna Carnes was granted closure this week when a California court granted a court order that allows a missing person after five years to be presumed dead. Gray was the subject of an intense search mounted by his friends in the tech industry after his boat went missing near the Farallon Islands off the coast of Northern California.

Want to buy Bill Gates' old Porsche 911 that he bought a few years after he started Microsoft Corp.?

The 1979 pearlescent turquoise Porsche 911 Turbo model will be auctioned in Vienna, Austria, on June 2. The car comes complete with registration papers that it indeed, was owned by Microsoft's Bill Gates and it could be sold for more than $60,000.

In the battle for television platforms, Microsoft Corp. is leading competitors with its Xbox.

According to the New York Times, a report by Forrester Research indicates Microsoft currently leads with Xbox users watching online video through their television sets and holding that audience’s attention for the longest amount of time, with half of all Xbox users connected to the internet.

Want a computer that runs Windows 7 without all the desktop clutter that usually comes with a PC? Microsoft will be happy to get rid of all that clutter, for $99.

Yahoo Inc. photo

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson

Yahoo Inc. CEO Scott Thompson agreed to resign over the weekend, and the company compromised with the activist shareholder who uncovered false academic claims Thompson had made.

The Sunnyvale-based Internet hub and hedge fund Third Point LLC announced the news on Sunday afternoon, 11 days after the discrepancies in Thompson's biography were made known. A report on Monday said another factor in the resignation was a recent cancer diagnosis that Thompson told the board about last week.

Media Chief Ross Levinsohn will be the interim CEO, the company said.

In a memo to Yahoo employees on Sunday, Levinsohn said, "Importantly, today's announcements lay to rest the unfortunate and serious distractions surrounding our senior leadership and the composition of our board going forward."

Microsoft Corp. saw its Bing search engine capture 15.4 percent of the market last month, but search giant Google Inc. leads the market by far with a 66.5 percent share in April.

Investor's Business Daily reports that in the past year, Microsoft has passed Yahoo Inc. in the search engine market race, and improved from last April's 14.1 percent share.

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates saw his wealth rise $35.5 million to $61.8 billion last week on Bloomberg's "Billionaire Index" while Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos saw his wealth fall $87.1 million to $21.3 billion.

Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer is the "worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today," according to Forbes.

Ballmer, according to Forbes, has destroyed shareholder value and jobs at Microsoft and "singlehandedly steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets." He's also seen the company's share price drop from $60 when he took over more than 10 years ago to its current price in the low $30s.

This story was updated Friday afternoon to clarify details of the multiple Motorola-Microsoft lawsuits underway.

For the time being, Microsoft will not have to change or update its products before selling them to German consumers.

A German court has decided to hold off on allowing Motorola Mobility to enforce patents it owns that would affect a variety of Microsoft products distributed there.

The decision comes after the court ruled in Motorola’s favor on a different set of Motorola patents, agreeing that Microsoft’s products infringe on Motorola’s patents.

Now, the court is spending more time evaluating both companies' arguments in this case to determine whether to stop Microsoft from distributing products that use the patented technology until the company can reach a licensing deal with Motorola or change its products so it no longer needs the patented technology, something the company could do relatively easily.

Microsoft Corp. is upgrading its Bing search engine, which will incorporate closer ties to Facebook.

The New York Times reports Microsoft's Bing now will add the experiences of a user's Facebook friends to Bing searches, as the computer giant tries to make a dent in search engine king Google Inc.'s dominance.

Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that created the Firefox browser, is upset with Microsoft Corp. because the upcoming Windows 8 system designed for tablets will work only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

The Financial Times reports Microsoft is trying to compete with Apple Inc. in the tablet market, and one of its new Windows 8 systems, designed to work with ARM processors instead of Intel-based processors in the past, will exclude independent browsers such as Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google Inc.'s Chrome. Microsoft's other new Windows 8 systems, designed for computers with Intel processors, will be compatible with all browsers.

Mozilla has yet to file a formal complaint with regulators.

Is Microsoft pitching Windows Phone to Facebook?

As Facebook prepares to make its initial public offering of stock, and Microsoft prepares to make more than $1 billion from an investment it made in the social network six years ago, there are rumors the two companies are working together on a smartphone.

The Puget Sound Business Journal explored the relationship between the two companies last week (subscription required), including Microsoft’s 1.6 percent share in Facebook and Microsoft’s recent sale of $550 million worth of patents and licenses to Facebook. Neither company was willing to comment on the relationship for the story.

But this week, rumors are flying that Microsoft is pitching its Windows Phone as the platform for Facebook to launch a smartphone of its own.

Students gather at the UW's Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering, to hear Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates speak last fall.

You'd think the Seattle area would rank higher than No. 16 nationally for the percentage of young adults with college degrees, but you'd be wrong.

The percentage of college-educated young adults is larger in the Boston area than anywhere else in America.