Apple Samsung Patent Fights, Apple walked away with $1.05 billion damage

Apple won big on the recent big patent lawsuit when the court ordered Samsung to pay $1.05b damages to Apple... I am quite surprise the court gave the verdict within a week, i supposed it will be drag and a long lawsuits.... Apple share price has up up up and reaching the moon soon, Samsung down by close to 7% when the court judgement released to the public. But is that a really good news to Apple? Is Samsung really violate Apple's registered patents? 

Below are the 6 patents that jury says Samsung violated:

1. Utility Patent 163: Enlarging documents by tapping the screen

2. Utility Patent 381: 'Bounce-back' feature when scrolling beyond the edge of 3. Utility Patent 915: Distinguishes between single-touch and multi-touch gestures. An example of this would be pinch to zoom

4. Design Patent 087: Ornamental design of the iPhone (white color)
5. Design Patent 677: Ornamental design of the iPhone (black color)
6. Design Patent 305: Rounded square icons on interface

If the violation is correct and true, there should be more than one company being fined or penalties for the reason of patent violation. But why Apple only find trouble with Samsung? I believe Apple start worry and aware of the rises of Samsung and Apple competitive advantage is diminishing as Android is getting better and better. 

My first Apple product is ipod which i found that is really awesome, the centre controlled touch pad is really amazing and convenient, the whole concept was  stylish. First Apple phone is ......

to be continued..............

Steve Jobs and Pixar

While pretty much anyone you ask identifies Steve Jobs with his amazing work at Apple, that's not the only company he's responsible for turning into a major success.

After Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, he went on to buy Pixar from LucasFilm.

About a decade later, Pixar produced the first feature-length computer animated film, Toy Story, in a distribution deal with Disney.

From there, Pixar exploded and made Steve Jobs a very wealthy man. But it wasn't as easy as it sounds.

Here's how Jobs brought Pixar from a niche spinoff company to one of the most valuable movie studios on the planet.

1985: Steve Jobs ousted from Apple

Image: Bloomberg TV

Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple following poor Mac sales after an internal battle with John Sculley. Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, but he also had his eye on another company..

1986: Steve Jobs buys Pixar

1990: Jobs sells off Pixar's hardware division

Steve Jobs paid LucasFilm $5 million for Pixar, which was called Graphics Group at the time. He invested another $5 million into the company.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

From its earliest days, Pixar was also a hardware company. Its flagship product was the Pixar Image Computer, a $135,000 machine targeted at the medical and graphics industry. Even though Disney bought a bunch of them, the computer didn't sell well.1994: Pixar is bleeding cash and Jobs considers selling to one of his biggest rivals

Finally, Steve Jobs decided to sell off Pixar's hardware division to Viacom systems fo $2 million.

Image: Pop History Dig

It took a long time for technology to catch up and become cheap enough to fulfill Pixar's vision as a graphics production company.

Steve Jobs invested a lot of his own money into Pixar to keep the company afloat. (He would never say how much.)

According to this Fortune article from 1995, Jobs even considered selling Pixar to Microsoft. But then Pixar had its big, lucky break...

1995: Disney agrees to distribute Toy Story and Pixar becomes an instant cash cow

Toy Story, the first feature-length computer animated film, premiered during the 1995 Holiday season. Thanks to a distribution deal with Disney, Toy Story went on to make $360 million worldwide.

1995: Pixar goes public

Shortly after Toy Story's release, Pixar went public. The stock price was $22 per share.

2004: Relations between Pixar and Disney break down

Under the original Pixar-Disney agreement, the two companies split revenues earned from the movies. Pixar handled the production and Disney handled the distribution, marketing, etc.

But the two companies couldn't reach a new agreement by 2004,according to WIRED, and Steve Jobs said Pixar would go on the hunt for a new partner.

Jobs even sent some feelers out to Fox and Warner Bros.

2005: CEO Michael Eisner leaves the Disney and talks resume with Pixar

Image: Jason McELweenie via Flickr

Disney's CEO Michael Eisner had difficulty reaching an agreement with Steve Jobs. By the time Eisner left Disney in 2005, Jobs was ready to resume negotiations.

One of Jobs' demands was to switch Pixar's film release schedule to the summer from the winter. That would allow Pixar movies to make more money in theaters during the summer and on DVDs during the Holidays.

2006: Disney buys Pixar for $7.6 billion, making Steve Jobs very, very rich

Image: AP

After years of making successful movies for Disney, Pixar was finally acquired by the media giant for a whopping $7.4 billion.

Steve Jobs became the largest Disney shareholder, holding 50.1% of the company's shares.

Copy from: www.businessinsider.com

Some facts about Apple

Many investors are experiencing hindsight regret by not taking firm action with Apple long ago. In December 12, 1980, one share of Apple stock (APPL) was worth $2.75, which has grown to $396.75 in August 2011.

Since 2005, Apple stock prices have experienced an upward climb with the acclaim of the iPod and release of the first generation iPhone in 2007. Apple Inc. stock is among the leading competitors in the tech field, just behind Google and easily surpassing Microsoft.

Q1 2011 was booming with the iPhone being Apple’s highest revenue-generating product at $10.47 billion. The iPad takes the second seat at $4.6 billion in revenue, not to mention other revenue outlets such as portables ($3.7 billion), iPods ($3.43 billion), desktops ($1.73 billion), music ($1.43 billion), software ($786 million) and peripherals ($593 million).

Additionally, Apple Inc. has sold approximately 100 million iPhones, 275 million iPods and 25 million iPads to-date, making them the highest contender within portable technology.

Downloads are also another area which Apple dominates as 11.7 billion songs, 450 million TV episodes, 100 million movies and 35 million books have been downloaded via Apple Inc.’s iTunes store.

Apps are also breaking through to the top of the list with Apple Inc.’s extensive 425,000 apps, 90,000 of which are for the iPad alone. Currently, 6.5 billion apps have been downloaded by end-users at a rate of 200 apps per second.

Further emphasizing Apple Inc.’s supremacy, two-thirds of all mobile web browsing is through their Safari web browser. Mac fans are climbing the ranks of computer users with the existing 54 million active Mac users, 73 percent of whom use notebooks alone.

Copied from Business Insider

Here's A Big Flow Chart To Help You Figure Out Which Kindle Is Right For You

Four years ago Amazon introduced the original Kindle. Two years ago, there was just two models: the Kindle 2 and the large screen Kindle DX. After this week’s announcements, Amazon is now selling 14 different models under the Kindle brand.

The current Kindle lineup varies on no fewer than 11 different features by my count, with 2 to 5 possible variants for each of the 11 features. Many options are tied to others and can’t be chosen independently. Adding to the complexity, there’s not even a specific price for a particular feature. Depending on the model, getting rid of the “special offers” advertising can add $30, $40, or $50 to the price, while adding 3G can cost either $40 or $50. Even with these price variations, 13 of the 14 SKUs are crammed into a price range of just $120, from $79 to $199.

Here’s the Kindle product tree, rendered as concisely as humanly possible. Click through if you want to see the chart full size - I couldn’t get it any smaller, despite omitting the width/height/depth differences between the various models:


Image: Michael DeGusta

And the inevitable comparison…

Technically Apple has 18 different iPad models while Amazon has “only” 14 different Kindles. However, Amazon has taken (or perhaps just ended up with) a vastly more complicated approach to segmenting and differentiating the Kindle models.

Here’s the iPad product tree:


Image: Michael DeGusta

What’s Amazon Up To?

Everyone expected the Fire tablet but I don’t think many expected Amazon to introduce two new model lines (the basic Kindle and the Kindle Touch) and keep the existing “Kindle Keyboard” models, in addition to the DX.

One possibility is that they’re just running off old inventory, but that’s definitely not how Amazon’s positioning the older models. If they really wanted a simpler lineup, the old models would clearly be labeled closeout, not included on the top of each Kindle page and in all of their comparison charts, etcetera.

A second possibility is that Amazon couldn’t internally reach consensus about the product line, but that doesn’t match up with Amazon’s history nor Jeff Bezos’s demonstrated personal leadership style. Amazon isn’t Microsoft or Google.

So the most likely possibility is that Bezos and Amazon somewhat bizarrely believe this lineup is a rational one. It’s a range of options they apparently think will each find a substantive enough user base to justify the extra product line complexity and production/support hassles.

Why Amazon ended up with so many models in such a relatively narrow space is unclear, but right now the message from Amazon seems pretty clear to me: “we stopped making any choices, so you’re gonna have to start making a lot of them.”

This post originally appeared at The Understatement.