Publisher Simon & Schuster said the highly anticipated tell-all biography, written by acclaimed biographer Walter Isaacson, will include Wednesday night’s announcement from Jobs’ point of view.

Simon & Schuster spokeswoman Tracey Guest told PCMag that Isaacson “speaks to Jobs regularly and is still working on the final chapter of the book.”

The biography, simply titled “Steve Jobs”, is the first authorized look at Steve Jobs’ life. It is being written by former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson and is based on over 40 interviews with Jobs and additional interviews with over 100 colleagues, friends, and family members. Jobs has offered his complete cooperation with the effort, making no subject off-limits and not requesting the right to review material before publication.

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.

Speaking at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Technology Conference, Sanjay Jha, who heads up Motorola Mobility, said that the lack of quality control in the Android Marketplace was behind the high number of handset returns – along with the multitasking nature of Android, which permits background apps to eat into the battery and processor time.

“Anyone can put an application on the Android Marketplace … without any testing process,” Jha told delegates, explaining that the ability to multitask is a blessing and a curse. “Seventy per cent of devices are coming back because they have downloaded a third-party application, and the effect that has on performance.”

During the presentation, which was staged as an interview and is available on the conference site, Jha also spoke extensively about Motoblur. Motoblur is often seen as a simple UI skin for Android, but is really about customer ownership and identity aggregation.

Motorola would like its users to consider themselves customers of Motorola, rather than customers of their mobile network operator, or Google, and so it is pleased to have 10 million subscribers signed in with Motoblur, and has plans to increase that number significantly.

As well as hooking customers, Jha talks about Motoblur being able to help manage third-party apps by warning the user when something is consuming excessive power or processor cycles, but the company told Fierce Wireless that its current approach was based on better developer support though its Motodev programme. ®

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.

Appsfire crossed 1 million downloads in February, and then the 2-million mark in May. Ohayon says its various apps for the iPhone, Android, iPad, and kid’s apps is generating 3 million leads to app developers each month. Appsfire lets you share your favorite apps with your friends via the web, your mobile device, or Facebook.

Previously, in February, 2010, company raised a seed round from a group of French angel investors including Marc Simoncini (CEO of dating site meetic.com), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of Vente-Privee.com), Xavier Niel (CEO of French ISP Free), and entrepreneur and angel investor Jean-David Blanc.

The applications concerned are games-console emulators: N64oid, Ataroid, Gamboid and Snesoid have disappeared from the Marketplace in the last few days, following PSX4Droid which was vanished last month.

Such emulators are on very dodgy ground – not being licensed by the original manufacturers and almost certainly in breach of copyright. But Google isn’t just pulling the applications: as Engadget reports, it is also cancelling the developer accounts of those responsible, making it impossible for them to sell anything else.

In theory those developers can seek alternative markets – selling through their own website or via an alternative such as SlideMe – but the Android Marketplace is a lot more than an application shop. As well as collecting payments, the Marketplace application provides copy protection and ownership information, so switching to an alternative market means cutting off the existing customers.

Developer Yong Zhang, who has moved his plethora of titles onto SlideMe, has had to offer them free to appease customers who paid money via the Marketplace and want ongoing support and updates: there’s no way to transfer receipts between markets.

Yong Zhang is, of course, in breach of various copyrights in creating and selling the emulators, not to mention facilitating wholesale copyright violation by the players of console games who don’t own the corresponding cartridges (and, arguably, even if they do). So one might argue that he only has himself to blame.

Google has a very laissez-faire attitude to policing the Android Marketplace: only removing content when someone complains. In this case it seems Sega was the complainant, but with the chocolate factory proving so responsive it seems likely other companies will follow suit

“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.

Our app, Mix & Mash, has the common model of a limited free, lite, version and a full version that contains all the features. We were told that the button that users click on to upgrade the app, or rather link to the full version on the app store was in breach of US patent no 7222078, we couldn’t believe it, the upgrade button!?!

The patent in question was filed in December 2003 as part of series of continuations on earlier patent applications dating back to 1992. The patent is credited to Dan Abelow, who sold his extensive portfolio of patents to holding firm Lodsys in 2004. Lodsys is indeed the company issuing the threats of a lawsuit regarding the patent in question.

Computer LogiX is not the only App Store developer being hit with threats of a lawsuit, as Cult of Mac notes that James Thomson, the developer behind PCalc, has been hit with a similar notice. While Thomson has not identified the company pursuing the action, the timing and details suggest that Lodsys is also responsible.

“Just got hit by very worrying threat of patent infringement lawsuit for using in-app purchase in PCalc Lite. Legal docs arrived via fedex,” Thomson wrote.

“No idea what to do… They seem to be effectively claiming the rights to in-app purchase, but going after me, not Apple.”

Thomson has reached out to Apple for guidance, and it remains to be seen how things will play out. According to Thomson, the patent holder is demanding that a license be negotiated within 21 days or a lawsuit will be filed.

At least one other developer is cited in the report as receiving similar notice of patent infringement, and that total will almost certainly grow as awareness of the situation increases, so it appears that the action is a relatively widespread one by Lodsys.

Notably, Lodsys cited the same patent, among others, when it filed suit against a host of major printer companies earlier this year.