On June 20, Marilyn Huff a U.S. judge upheld a jury’s ruling for $368 million in damages against Microsoft Corp for violating patents held by Alcatel-Lucent. The whole amount however, is bigger, because Bill’s company has to pay a total of 512 million, which includes interest on the original award.

“We had always believed we had a strong case and are pleased that the judge agreed that the jury’s thoughtful verdict was well reasoned and supported by the evidence,” Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman Mary Ward said in a statement.

Microsoft said the infringement for those two video-encoding patents (which are obviously still so relevant to the proceedings in these cases) are related to technology that allows users to enter dates into calendars and the other one is used in tablet computers to recognize patterns in handwriting. They are going to appeal the decision again.

I’m not sure what they’re based on but it’s pretty clear they may not win that battle.

Reuters

Research in Motion (RIM), which is BlackBerry’s producer, will sell its smartphones in China. The company has already shipped the first BlackBerry transport to China and intend to put them to sale later this year, perhaps close to Christmas holidays.

RIM has signed an agreement with Alcatel-Lucent for the Chinese distribution. The Chinese market has a great potential for increasing the company’s sales. Also, the RIM officials announced the company is interested to ship BlackBerry for the Indian market too. Both China and India are hot prospects for BlackBerry service subscriptions.
RIM said it has over 10 million subscribers and has shipped its 20 millionth handset recently. Although the company has a strong financial background, the Chinese market could be tough. RIM will face the low-cost rivals and a popular service called RedBerry, which I think is a copy of BlackBerry.

via Yahoo News