According to a court filing from Apple, the company sent representatives to Apple Story and Fun Zone in Flushing on “multiple occasions over several weeks,” where they bought an assortment of iPod, iPhone and iPad cases, as well as stereo headsets designed for use with iPhones.

All of the purchased goods carried an Apple trademark, according to the amended complaint. They were also marked with the phrase “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China,” and included markings similar to those found on genuine Apple goods.

The headsets came with packaging that was “nearly an exact duplicate” of that for genuine Apple goods, the lawsuit said.

Apple was granted a warrant to seize the counterfeit products on July 27th, and the courts have granted a preliminary injunction barring the two stores from selling the knockoff products. Apple has also requested that one of the stores, Apple Story, change its name in order to prevent confusion with Apple’s own stores and branding, but the court has yet to rule on that issue. A settlement between Apple and the stores’ owners is said to be under negotiation.

Apple’s case appears to extend beyond the two stores, however, as the lawsuit seeks to include people and businesses engaged in the production, sale, and distribution of the products, although those defendants have yet to be identified.

But while Apple has stepped forward and asked to intervene in Lodsys’ case against the App Store developers, arguing that Apple’s own license extends to developers using its tools, the company has not joined the effort to have the patents themselves invalidated. FOSS Patents now reports that Apple (and Google, whose developer ecosystem is also being targeted by Lodsys) may actually be barred from challenging the patents by virtue of their licensing agreements already in place with Lodsys.

None of the attorneys I talked to knows the language of the license agreement Apple and Google signed with Intellectual Ventures while the four patents later acquired by Lodsys belonged to that entity. But they and I concur that it’s highly likely that Apple and Google are contractually precluded from challenging Lodsys’s patents because such license agreements often come with clauses under which a licensee will lose a license once he participates in an effort to invalidate any of the related patents (in addition to possibly having to pay contractual penalties).

So even if Apple and Google had wanted to attack Lodsys’s patents proactively, they would have lost their license — at least to any patent they attack; more likely to all four Lodsys patents; and possibly even to any or all of the more than 30,000 patents they licensed from Intellectual Ventures, a patent aggregator in which those companies (alongside many other industry players) invested.

But that does not mean that Lodsys’ patents are safe by any means. In addition to the four invalidation lawsuits already filed against Lodsys, CNET reports that crowdsourcing intellectual property research firm Article One Partners has launched a series of bounties for information on prior art or other issues that could help in the effort to invalidate Lodsys’ patents.

Article One Partners, a business that crowdsources intellectual property (IP) research, has launched three new studies into patents held by Lodsys. Each offers a reward to the party that finds prior art, or examples of pre-existing technologies or other IP that could be used as evidence to invalidate one or more of Lodsys’ patents.

Each of the three studies carries a $5,000 bounty guaranteed to be paid out to the researchers who submit what is judged to be the “highest quality prior art” to be used in attacking Lodsys’ patents.

It is unknown who is funding the bounties on Lodsys’ patents, as that information is not disclosed by Article One Partners. Article One is, however, an established company with a community of around one million people participating in crowdsourced intellectual property research on a variety of topics.

At the heart of the new interface is a new start screen that draws heavily on the tile-based interface that Microsoft has used with Windows Phone 7. All of a users programs can be viewed as tiles and clicked on with a touch of a finger.

The shown Windows 8 screenshot carries over the tile-based appearance of the Windows Mobile phone, but the new operating system is said to support two types of applications. One is the classic Windows application which will run in the familiar desktop interface, while the second type are HTML5/Javascript applications that look more like a full screen mobile application.

Windows 8 is said to have been influenced by the iPad and is meant to scale from touch screen devices to desktop. The prominent “Store” link seems to suggest that Microsoft will be offering a Windows App Store, much like Apple’s Mac App Store. Microsoft promises that while the interface is optimized for touch, it should also work equally well with a mouse and keyboard.

Microsoft details many of the changes they demoed:

• Fast launching of apps from a tile-based Start screen, which replaces the Windows Start menu with a customizable, scalable full-screen view of apps.
• Live tiles with notifications, showing always up-to-date information from your apps.
• Fluid, natural switching between running apps.
• Convenient ability to snap and resize an app to the side of the screen, so you can really multitask using the capabilities of Windows.
• Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.
• Fully touch-optimized browsing, with all the power of hardware-accelerated Internet Explorer 10.

Microsoft has not yet announced a timeframe for Windows 8′s launch.

“It is more challenging for developers in the Google Android Market than in the Apple App Store to monetize using a one-off fee monetization model,” reads a report issued Friday by the app-watchers at Distimo.

Distimo’s numbers put an empirical foundation under what Google’s Android platform manager told Forbes earlier this year: that Mountain View is “not happy” with the low rate of paid-app sales in the Android Market.

Overall, iPhone apps have a crushing sales advantage over Android apps. Since the Android Market opened, only two paid apps have been downloaded more than a half-million times. In just the last two months, six paid apps in the App Store achieved that milestone.

As Distimo correctly surmises from that data: “The possibility [of] generating over 500,000 paid downloads is a real possibility for more applications in the Apple App Store than in the Google Android Market.”

Paid games are also far more popular on the iPhone than on Android phones. In March and April, five games in the Android Market hit the quarter million–download mark – and that was worldwide. Over in the iPhone App Store, that same sales figure was reached by 10 paid games in the US alone.

One major reason for the success of iPhone apps, Distimo suggests, is that Apple’s App Store moves more apps through their “Top Charts” for both paid and free apps than does the Android Market. The more apps that are brought to users’ attention in this way, the more apps they’ll buy. “Being visible in the top charts is very important for generating more downloads,” Distimo explains, understatedly.

The difference in top-app exposure is striking. In April, the Apple App Store promoted 94 apps to their top 10 free and paid apps, while Google rotated only 26 apps into that highly visible position in the Android Market.

The difference between the top 300 apps in both app stores was also stark: Apple gave 843 free and 584 paid apps that status during April, while Google honored only 388 and 363, respectively.

Google recently revamped how it promotes apps in the Android Marketplace to improve the visibility of both paid and free apps. “Perhaps these, and future changes, will provide a higher probability for success for a larger proportion of the applications in the Google Android Market,” Distimo says, proffering a bit of hope to Android devs.

Developers are pouring apps into the Android Market at such a rate that Distimo predicted in a prior report that the number of apps in Google’s app store would surpass Apple’s offerings by this fall. Whether those devs will make a decent living from that effort remains to be seen.

The EFF lays out its case that because the developers are taking advantage of Apple’s developer tools to deploy the functionality being cited in the dispute, Apple is in the best position to defend against the threat.

This is a problem that lawyers call a misallocation of burden. The law generally works to ensure that the party in the best position to address an issue bears the responsibility of handling that issue. In the copyright context, for example, the default assumption is that the copyright owners are best positioned to identify potential infringement. This is because, among other reasons, copyright owners know what content they own and which of their works have been licensed. Here, absent protection from Apple, developers hoping to avoid a legal dispute must investigate each of the technologies that Apple provides to make sure none of them is patent-infringing. For many small developers, this requirement, combined with a 30 percent fee to Apple, is an unacceptable cost.

Apple’s developer agreement, however, precludes developers from turning to Apple for assistance in legal disputes, meaning the company could leave developers to fend for themselves.

Many observers have, however, argued that it is in Apple’s best interest to step into the situation, shouldering the cost and effort in order to protect its valuable ecosystem of independent App Store developers. If developers are reluctant to embrace the App Store for fear of being targeted by lawsuits driven by their use of Apple technology, the platform could suffer significantly.

By putting the burden on those least able to shoulder it, both Apple and Lodys are harming not just developers but also the consumers who will see fewer apps and less innovation. We hope that going forward companies like Apple will do what’s right and stand up for their developers and help teach the patent trolls a lesson.

Meanwhile, one week has passed since the first notices from Lodsys arrived in developers’ hands, leaving two weeks until the firm’s deadline for licensing passes and at which point it has threatened to file suits against the developers. Apple has yet to address the issue publicly, but the company is famous for waiting to speak until it has a firm grasp of the facts at hand rather than trying to address public relations crises as quickly as possible.

In a separate announcement, the company also revealed that the winner of its billion app download contest is Connor Mulcahey; a 13 year-old iPhone owner from Weston, Connecticut which downloaded a contact information swapping application called Bump.

The speed at which the apps have been flying out the door has been incredible lately. If you recall, just over five weeks ago Apple had hit 800 million downloads since the original launch of the store back in July of 2008. That means that 20% of that one billion happened just within the last month. Part of that can be attributed to the hype Apple has generated, though probably much more of it can be attributed to the release of the iPhone SDK and the increasing number of programs available (now over 35,000).

It may be a good day for Apple, but they haven’t gotten here without trouble. There have been several controversies related to the App store, ranging from Apple attacking third parties to squelching certain apps. Draconian entry rules or not, Apple has still managed to make their App Store an example of success. RIM and Google have both followed suit, crafting app stores of their own – and likely there will be many more to come.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/

When Google decided to get into the smartphone business, it brought with it a philosophy.

Its Android devices would be everything that the iPhone was not.

Where Apple offered a set menu – one or two handsets at a take-it-or-leave-it price – Google was laying out a buffet.

Manufacturers could use the new operating system for free.

In return they would create scores of phones for every section of the market – high powered and pricey, cheap and cheerful.

But Android’s real selling point would be the apps.

Here too, the policy was one of openness.

Apple ruled its App store with an iron fist, vetting every submission and rejecting those that contravened its rules.

There would be no bouncers on the door of the Android Market.

Anyone who had written an app could upload it. Quality products would prosper; the chaff would be lost in cyberspace.

At first, users and app developers welcomed the free-and-easy approach.

However, some have begun to question if Google’s policy of app glasnost is the best way to manage the Market.

Google’s growth

There is no doubt about the success of the basic Android platform. Three years after its launch, hardware sales are booming.

According to research by Kantar WorldPanel Comtech, Android now accounts for 38% of the UK smartphone market, compared to 23% for Apple’s devices.

Stateside, Android is faring even better, holding a 54.7% share, while iOS has 27.2%.

Last month, Google revealed that 350,000 Android phones are being activated every day.

Yet sales of Android apps remain relatively poor.

IHS Screen Digest estimates that £1.1billion of revenue flowed through Apple’s App store last year.

Android Market managed just £62m. The figure was lower than both Blackberry App World (£100m) and Nokia’s Ovi store (£64m).

Research predicts massive improvements for Android by this time next year, but it is still expected to lag far behind iOS.

Disgruntled developers

For many application developers, the problem lies with Android Market, the main download portal for apps.

“People complain about Apple where you have restrictions and it takes a while for things to be reviewed,” said Chris McClelland, director of Ecliptic Labs, a mobile app developer based in Belfast.

“I think on one hand it’s quite a good thing – one focused source, and you get feedback that’s very useful for your app. It’s quality control.”

The Android Market needs to become that focused source, he says.

“Android is very popular with developers. It’s got a lower barrier to entry, easier learning curve, and excellent tools, but app developers find making money on the Android platform more difficult.”

Another criticism is the lack of quality control on Android Market.

While many developers welcome an alternative to Apple’s walled garden, Google’s offering, they say, has become over-run with weeds.

“There’s a lot of apps on the Marketplace that are either copycats or pirates or scams,” said Chris McClelland.

Security firm Symantec, in its 2011 Internet Security Threat Report, warned that Android was at particular risk from malware embedded in apps.

It found that at lease six varieties of malicious software were already being circulated.

There are also more benign threats to Android’s success.

Michael Heller, from Android blog Androinica, is critical of the way that apps are catalogued and promoted.

“One of the most ridiculous things about the Android Marketplace is that the search feature is terrible.

“I mean, this is Google! You have to find out about the apps somewhere else and then go get them from the Android Marketplace,” he said.

‘Like Autotune’

Users’ frustrations with the Market have not gone unnoticed by Google’s rivals

Amazon, Cisco, Barnes and Noble, Verizon, GetJar, Andspot and OnlyAndroid are just a few of the tech companies hoping to improve the experience with their own Android app stores.

Unlike Apple’s retail monopoly on apps, Android’s open setup means anyone can set up shop.

“I feel like right now we’re in one of those annoying periods like when Autotune got big, where everybody started using it,” said Mr Heller, referring to the popular voice correction software, widely used in the music industry.

“Everybody is putting out an app store.

“There are all these different players that want to create their own store but eventually it’s not going to be a sustainable model.

“If all of these app stores are populated with all of the same apps that’s kind of a waste for developers, isn’t it?”

Amazon’s store, named – despite the best efforts of Apple’s legal team – the Appstore, launched in April.

It is not available on all Android devices due to individual carriers’ rules on adding apps from sources other than the Android Market, but is likely to become a major player in the paid-app market.

One notable peculiarity of the Appstore is that, although its very existence is only possible because of Android’s open policy, the store itself is a closed system.

Instead of letting everything and anything on, Amazon curates and monitors each app and developers must adhere to set standards in order to get their work in – just like the Apple’s App Store.

“The Amazon store solves some of the problems that the standard marketplace has,” said Mr McClelland. “It makes things a bit more exposed and helps search.”

While a wider choice of app stores gives Android users more choice about the kind of environment they want to shop in, it may also make life harder for developers.

“One of the biggest problems with Blackberry was that there were fragmented app stores, and I think the same problem’s going to happen with Android,” said Chris McClelland.

“I think having to submit apps to different stores, it just becomes another problem.”

He also worries that with more and more stores appearing, it will be hard for one company – even a giant like Amazon – to become the definitive source for all the best apps.

Ideas grab

Which is why Google will eventually win, according to Mr Heller.

“Some of them may do certain things pretty well but eventually Google just takes the good ideas and fold them into their own product as best they can.

“Even if Amazon gets huge, and everyone is using it, if Google sorts out their store… what’s the point of using Amazon?

“It’s an Android phone, it’s a Google phone. You’re already in this ecosystem, why would you go somewhere else if the product is just as good?”

But there may be money to be made in niche markets – especially corporate.

“Cisco alone has a chance to become fairly big because enterprise is something that neither Android nor iPhone really had figured out quite yet.

“They’re still very consumer oriented devices,” said Mr Heller.

It is predicted that the appetite for paid apps will increase massively in the very near future, surpassing $8bn (£4.8bn) in the next three years.

But just how much of that lucrative pie will come from Android remains to be seen, and it could be make or break for Google’s open mobile ambitions.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk/news/

Now available from the Android Market, the app lets you search for and open files stored across your Google account, and it offers built-in tools for sharing files with others users.

You can also upload files stored on your phone, and you can add widgets to your phone’s home screen that handle common tasks. One widget, for instance, lets you upload a photo to Google Docs. Another lets you instantly create a new document.

Using Google’s optical character recognition (OCR) technology, the app also lets you convert images of documents to editable text. At least in theory. “OCR does a pretty good job capturing unformatted text in English but won’t recognize handwriting or some fonts,” the company says.

The app is available only in English, and it runs on Android 2.1 phones and later. You can’t edit documents unless you have a live internet connection, as we confirmed with a brief test of the app. This is also the case with the full desktop version of Google Docs and other Google Apps, but the company is working to provide offline access via HTML5. ®

Take those numbers with a few dozen grains of salt, however: the stats come from a survey conducted by analysts at Appsfire who surveyed “over 1,000 [iOS] devices registered and synchronized with the Appsfire service.”

Seeing as how Apple has sold over 160 million iOS devices, such a small sampling doesn’t provide data hearty enough to take to the bank. Also, Appsfire’s data comes only from iOS users who have registered for its apps-listing service, so an argument could be made that users whom Appsfire is tracking are more apps-hungry than your average fanboi.

That said, there is some interesting information in the Appsfire survey, as long as you keep in mind from whom the data was gleaned.

For one, native apps soundly thrash web-based content viewing when it comes to the amount of time spent by the users surveyed by Appsfire. Out of the 84 minutes per day that those users spend with their device, only 10 minutes (12 per cent) is spent on the web or using web-based apps.

The other 74 minutes are spent using native apps (40 minutes, or 47 per cent); telephony apps such as the Phone app, Skype, and the like (27 minutes, 32 per cent); and the Mail app (seven minutes, nine per cent).

Out of those 40 minutes of native-app usage, users are playing games 32 per cent of the time. Of the 88 downloaded apps, 63 were free, and 25 were purchased.

Appsfire’s numbers contrast with those in a recently published survey conducted by the “market intelligence” group Asymco, which put the average – mean, not median – number of apps per iOS device at “over 60.”

Asymco’s survey also points out that the rate of app downloads per device is rising faster than did songs-per-device back when the iTunes Music Store debuted.

“In the fall of 2008,” Asymco’s report says, “there were about 10 apps downloaded for every iPhone/iPod touch.” Now that number is 60 in Asympco’s estimate and 88 in Appsfire’s. No matter how you slice it, that’s a stunning growth rate. “Growth like this is hard to get one’s mind around,” Asympco says. “Not only are downloads increasing, but the rate of increase is increasing.”

Or, as Appsfire puts it: “‘Apps everywhere’…we told you so.” ®