Samsung wants details of Apple's settlement with HTC

Samsung is showing its first public interest in the settlement that ended the legal fight between rival Apple and HTC this past week.

Samsung this afternoon filed a request with the court for Apple to provide a copy of its patent license agreement with HTC.

That deal, announced on Saturday, put an end to the bitter battle between the two companies, a conflict that's similar, but smaller in scale to the one between Apple and Samsung.

In its filing, Samsung says it wants to see what patents were covered as part of the agreement since there may be some overlap with the ones used in the case between it and Apple, including the '381 and '915 patents, which cover "bounce back" and scrolling and zooming, respectively.

"As you know, the issue of Apple's willingness to license its patents was briefed in Samsung's opposition to Apple's motion for permanent injunction," wrote Quinn Emanuel's Robert Becher, who is representing Samsung in the case. "This license has direct bearing on the question of irreparable harm and whether monetary remedies are adequate."

Becher added that the license could also shed light on whether Apple included some of its "unique" user experience patents, which it doesn't share with other companies. In a testimony about that collection, Apple patent licensing director Boris Teksler referred to that collection as "untouchables," that it only shared with a very small handful of other companies.

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Upcomming Tech - Eye-Tracking / Voice Commands

Today’s eye-tracking technology from companies like Tobii is used heavily in usability research. Where are people looking on a webpage, and how do their eyes move around it? Voice recognition products like Dragon from Nuance are used extensively when transcribing voice to text.

In the future, this technology will be combined with augmented reality (AR) to create a near-invisible and natural user interface for your PMC. We’ll call these information glasses. The object you’re viewing and the words you speak will be transmitted to your PMC, which will interpret your intent, find and compute and then transmit the results back to you visually and/or verbally. Look at a restaurant and say, “Do they have good salads there?” A moment later, you will hear the highest-rated salads, communicated via your information glasses either by visual display or audible voice, depending on what you are doing at that moment, like driving.

WorldS First Gaming tablet

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In Q4 of 2012, we can expect the release of the world’s first ever gaming tablet. Razer, who are primarily known for their PC peripherals, have dubbed the tablet “Project Fiona”.
Project Fiona will be the first ever mobile device that is specifically designed the run PC games such as Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed, out of the box. After its introduction at CES earlier this year, it is expected to house an Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge processor, 8GB of high-speed DDR3 Memory, and a 10.1-inch HD screen.

Read more: http://techod.com/upcoming-technology-2012/#ixzz2C6jaXDZV

Upcomming Tech - Autonomous Cars

Today’s cars are packed with a variety of driver assistance aids. You can get most any car today with GPS, but luxury car makers such as Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Volvo provide a whole lot more. Options now include active cruise control, lane departure warning/intervention, traffic info and blind spot warning. These cars can even brake on their own to avoid hitting an obstacle or pedestrian in front of the vehicle.

A few years ago, DARPA ran its Grand Challenge, in which teams competed to race fully autonomous cars that drove themselves. They were tested in off-road, highway and urban settings. Some of these competitors later went to work for Google’s autonomous vehicle efforts.

In the future, we will have autonomous cars, where driver control will be optional. Even though the thought might seem scary, the cars will be safer than any car you’d pilot yourself. They will constantly evaluate their current environment with multiple sensors -- and they’ll never get distracted by text messages.

Will they be complex to operate? Not at all. Your PMC will act as a user interface to any device, including your autonomous car. It will know your schedule and address book, so when you get into your car one hour before an appointment, the car’s GPS will instantly display the destination address and arrival time. All you have to do is say, “Let’s go!”

Mozilla Will be Creating a OS based On Android

Mozilla, who are renowned for their successful internet browser, are entering the mobile race, developing a new web-centric OS that will directly compete with Google, Apple and Microsoft.

If the name Mozilla rings any bells it's because they're the tech boffins who put together Internet Explorer, the browser that Windows defaults to. Mozilla took the leviathan computing company on with its Firefox browser, and today it stands as the second most popular browser worldwide.

Now the company who was underdog to Microsoft looks to be playing the same role, but this time against internet mogul Google.

Announced on the Mozilla discussion forum, Mozilla have begun coding for phones and tablets. The BBC revealed the mobile operating system will draw on Android code, with Mozilla writing as much fresh code as possible. The hybrid-like operating system will be named Boot To Gecko. 

It is an unusual name for an OS, until you remember Gecko is the rendering engine employed by the Firefox browser that interprets web page coding and displays it in a screen-friendly format, a homage to its origins.

Even though Android coding will form the operating system's foundations, Mozilla hope to add a much more open wrapper around it than Google currently do, making it more versatile as an operating system.

Its shared foundations will also make Boot To Gecko compatible with the same phones as Android, competing as a direct alternative to Google.

Often, when you select a link from an application native to the Android or iOS market, the operating system will have to open a new webpage in the browser. Boot To Gecko aims to limit this by making applications much more web-centric.

If the venture proves successful, Mozilla will be waging war against industry giants, with Google, Apple and Microsoft dominating many facets of the technological world. 

Mozilla have acknowledged the project is in infancy and have chosen to make the development public in hope it will attract talented enthusiast coders who will contribute to the Boot To Gecko's cause.

According to their project team, all of the code development will be completed and shared with the public as soon as it is written.

Researcher Andreas Gal, who announced the development, admits the company has set a high target, but wants to do it "the way we think open source should be done.

Gal says his ultimate goal is to break "the stranglehold of proprietary technologies over the mobile device world," implicitly referring to the practices of Apple, Windows Phone and Google.

Credits Smarthouse.