intelmirc.com

But it wasn’t a total loss for Qualcomm. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Qualcomm was not infringing on one of the three patents in question. This patent relates to video compression technology.

In August a federal judge ruled that Qualcomm was in contempt of an injunction that bans the use of patented wireless technology owned by Broadcom. Qualcomm appealed the decision.

That said, the court affirmed the judgment of infringement on two other patents. One patent has to do with walkie-talkie technology and the other one involves cell phones that switch between multiple wireless networks.

On Wednesday a federal appeals court affirmed that Qualcomm is infringing on two cell phone patents. It also upheld an injunction against Qualcomm selling products with technology that infringes the two patents.

Chipmaker Broadcom has won the latest battle in a long patent war with Qualcomm.

In May 2007, a jury found that Qualcomm had violated patents held by Broadcom that help cell phones process video and walkie-talkie conversations. And the judge in the case ordered Qualcomm to stop using the technology and to pay Broadcom royalties on existing infringing QChat products.

The permanent injunction contains a sunset provision that allows Qualcomm to sell its products and pay royalties to Broadcom through January 2009. But Qualcomm has developed technology that circumvents the disputed patents, which means newer QChat phones, which use the walkie-talkie technology, aren’t affected.

Qualcomm and Broadcom have been battling each other in court since 2005. In the past couple of years, the smaller Broadcom has aggressively defended its patents and won several victories. Last year, it won a major victory when the U.S. International Trade Commission ordered a ban on the import of all new models of 3G wireless handsets with Qualcomm chipsets that infringe Broadcom patents.

Like other online store makers, you can take a single design and populate it onto a multitude of products without any sort of repetitive reproduction on your part. You can set markups and pick which items you want to let people buy, from mouse pads to kitchen aprons

As for the end result, most shirts cost around what they do on other services. Like competing customized apparel stores, you don’t need to buy an entire box of shirts; you and your buyers can simply get them printed one at a time. What makes the service especially cool is that you can track some of these purchasing statistics, including where your traffic is coming from, and what operating system and browser your users are on. These are the things typically found in analytics services like Google’s, and very helpful for helping to target your audience.

Related: Web Shirts: 20 rad T-shirt sites

Pikistore’s angle for getting you to ditch the competition is that the online store you create exists as its own destination, and not a part of some network of other stores. Unlike Etsy, which does something similar, but focuses on the network of other sellers as part of the advantage, Pikistore is all about letting you create a standalone site that can be populated with your products, then giving you a way to make it a part of your existing blog or Web site.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Make your own custom clothing to sell to others with Pikistore.

CafePress and Zazzle got you down when it comes to creating an online shop? Check out Pikistore: half site builder, half storefront for apparel that sports whatever logo or design you slap on it. Believe it or not, it’s from the same folks who did Comeeko, the zany comic strip builder our very own Caroline McCarthy called “the best Web 2.0 site in the history of the universe.”

In case you’re wondering what it’s like to actually create a Pikistore, I’ve embedded an example video below (try not to get nauseous):

It’s also got some pretty slick-looking themes you can simply click to reskin the look and feel of your site entirely. Users of WordPress, or any other Web-based blogging platforms, will be familiar with this, and advanced users who want to make the store simply match with their own sites can drop in the CSS and whatever graphics, logos, or backgrounds they’re using. It also allows for free domain transfer, which means you can link it up to your site’s .com address without having to sign up for a premium plan–something we’ve rarely seen in a free service.

I’m interested to see what the final product looks like, something that can only be accomplished with a purchase. My one qualm is that the editing interface might be a bit complicated to novice users who aren’t comfortable going outside the general boundaries of the theme builder. Intermediate to advanced users, however, will find the high level of customization refreshing.

In the last four years, of course, John Roberts has succeeded Rehnquist and Samuel Alito has succeeded O’Connor, who was often a swing vote on free speech matters. The question for next year is whether the court’s conservatives can pick up a majority, which would uphold COPA as constitutional and breathe life into a decade-old law that everyone else has forgotten about.

That’s not a typo. The Supreme Court has handed down two preliminary rulings, once in 2002 and again in 2004. The first time it sent the case back to the Third Circuit with instructions to broaden its legal analysis beyond the law’s interaction with community standards; the second time it wanted a review of whether “technological developments” have affected the law’s constitutionality.

As a side note, because the law was written so long ago, it’s surprisingly limited. It applies only to material delivered “by means of the World Wide Web”–meaning it doesn’t cover peer-to-peer file sharing, the Usenet newsgroups that alarm New York’s attorney general, games like Virtual Hottie 2, those naughty things happening in Second Life, videos watched via a third-party
iPhone application, or streaming porn viewed through the VLC, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player desktop applications.

Still, it’s too early to say that this is the end of COPA. The Bush administration is guaranteed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has come up with some surprising rulings in the two times it has already reviewed the law.

It could work like this: The Supreme Court’s ruling in 2004 against the Justice Department and in favor of the ACLU commanded a narrow 5-4 majority, with justices Stephen Breyer, William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, and (separately) Antonin Scalia dissenting.

Now the court seems ready for a final ruling probably by next summer–and the more conservative justices conceivably could assemble a majority to uphold COPA as constitutional.

This week’s ruling (PDF) by the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit Court of Appeals means Web site operators can continue to relax, at least for now, about the Child Online Protection Act being enforced against them. COPA includes criminal penalties, including fines and six months imprisonment, for anyone found guilty of violating it.

The court concluded that COPA “cannot withstand a strict scrutiny, vagueness, or overbreadth analysis and thus is unconstitutional” and upheld a lower court’s ruling from March 2007 that said the federal law was unconstitutional.

The U.S. Department of Justice has been fighting an extended legal battle since 1998 to enforce a federal law that targets Web sites deemed “harmful to minors.” On Tuesday, it lost again.

The Breyer-written dissent said that COPA places “minor burdens on some protected material–burdens that adults wishing to view the material may overcome at modest cost. At the same time, it significantly helps to achieve a compelling congressional goal, protecting children from exposure to commercial pornography. There is no serious, practically available ‘less restrictive’ way similarly to further this compelling interest. Hence the Act is constitutional.” Scalia went even further.

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Digg raises $28.7 million in Series C round

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The Android software developer kit will allow programmers to create applications that will run on Android phones, even before T-Mobile starts selling the first Android-powered G1 on October 22.

Google releases final Android programming kit

Senator warns of DTV-transition ‘crisis’

Ning closes in on 500,000 users

An Oakland Raiders executive went ballistic in front of a room full of reporters–well, no big deal about that. It happens all the time in sports. But wait, we’re in the Internet world where EVERYONE is watching.

Digg has raised another round of funding–no mean feat in this economy. But not everyone in the Web 2.0 crowd has had such luck. Webware editor in chief Rafe Needleman explains why there are new clouds hovering over a market that has enjoyed a remarkable run.

Cisco ramps up collaboration software portfolio

Oracle and Intel jump on a cloud

‘Mad Men’ star leads Yahoo’s pitch to Madison Avenue

With new iPods out of the way, the next priority for Apple is the
Mac.

If that date comes to pass, Apple will have officially missed the back-to-school shopping season, which is generally one of the best-selling quarters for the Mac. Even if it launched the new notebooks tomorrow it would have missed most of the college students who were looking to upgrade before heading back to campus, but delays with the launch of Intel’s Centrino 2 mobile chips probably didn’t help.

(Credit:
Apple)

John Gruber at Daring Fireball is reporting that Apple will roll out new MacBooks on October 14, which fits the usual Apple profile of launching new products on a Tuesday. We’ve expected that new Apple notebooks are coming for some time, with reports of a redesigned exterior for the MacBook to go along with Intel’s latest mobile chips.

By all appearances the Mac is still selling pretty well, but new notebooks never hurt, especially heading into the holiday season. I’ve also heard a few rumblings about new iMacs–perhaps just a speed bump–around the same time, but Gruber’s report didn’t elaborate on the iMac.

A mid-October MacBook launch misses the back-to-school rush, but has Apple in the right place for the holidays.

But tweens aren’t the only young demographic that the mobile industry is interested in targeting. On Friday the CTIA will feature a session at its fall trade show here that will provide results of a national survey of thousands of American teenagers. It will also provide a live panel of 13- to 19-year-olds, who will discuss how they use wireless. So stay tuned for more on those results later this week.

The main reason these kids have phones is because their parents want them to have them in case of an emergency or problem. But about 92 percent of those surveyed said they restrict how tweens use their phones, with 69 percent of them prohibiting the download of games and ringtones, which typically incur charges. Roughly 65 percent of tweens with phones get cell phone service through family plans.

Nielsen says that 46 percent of the 20 million young consumers known as “tweens” are using mobile phones. On average kids get their first cell phone between the ages of 10 and 11 years old. About 55 percent of tweens, who own cell phones, send text messages and 21 percent download ringtones.

SAN FRANCISCO–Nearly half of kids age 8 to 12 years old own cell phones in the U.S., in what could be the next big cell phone demographic for the mobile industry, according to a Nielsen report released here Wednesday at the
CTIA Fall 2008 trade show.

As cell penetration approaches 85 percent in the U.S., cell phone operators are looking toward younger consumers to drive growth. And operators are focusing more effort in figuring out what is needed from this often difficult to survey group of consumers.

“Tweens have grown up with mobile phones and expect them to do much more than make a call,” Richard Wood, a vice president for Nielsen Mobile said in a statement. “Our clients want to understand tweens’ attitudes and mobile behavior in the context of their daily life and media consumption.”

Alienware gaming system: Dell XPS game PC line ate into Alienware sales

Dell’s XPS game PC line “ate into” Alienware sales, according to the report.

Alienware competes with brands such as Hewlett-Packard’s Vodoo PC line and Falcon Northwest.

(Credit:
Alienware)

Alienware is also expected to bring out redesigned systems based on new materials that go beyond the longstanding Alienware design (photo), according to the report.

This will effectively leave Alienware as the sole high-end PC game offering from Dell which acquired the Miami-based game system maker in 2006.

Game PCs can cost as little as $1,000 but typically range from $2,000 to $5,000 and feature high-end Intel and AMD quad-core processors and graphics chips from Nvidia and ATI Technologies.

UPDATE: Dell Inc. will begin phasing out its line of XPS desktop game machines, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

(Note: Dell made a statement Tuesday night–after this article was posted–explaining how Dell’s XPS line and Alienware systems will coexist.)

When Azmi joined the FBI as the acting CIO, the bureau was scheduled to roll out Virtual Case File, a software program meant to replace its archaic, paper-based criminal tracking system. Instead, the system was scrapped–and Azmi got to break the news to FBI Director Robert Mueller that the $170 million system, designed by Science Applications International, was unsalvageable.

WASHINGTON–The FBI’s chief information officer announced his resignation Wednesday, nearly five years after inheriting an information technology program fraught with disaster and dramatically turning it around.

Zalmai Azmi

After 24 years working for the federal government, Azmi said he is resigning to spend more time with his family.

The biggest challenge for his successor, Azmi said, “will be maintaining those relationships. More than anything, it’s about the transparency we’ve brought.”

Azmi’s last official day will be October 17, and he said his successor will likely be named a few weeks after that. From a large pool of applicants from the public and private sectors, the bureau has narrowed its choices to candidates from the private sector.

Officially named the CIO in 2004, Azmi has since been working to build the bureau’s IT branch and build confidence both within the agency and on Capitol Hill, where he meets with lawmakers twice a week.

(Credit:
FBI)

“We should be measured not where some think we should be, but on where we have come from and what we have accomplished,” Azmi said.

The FBI has been slow with providing its employees with desktop Internet access, since its closed network infrastructure was its first priority, but now more than 20,000 BlackBerrys have been deployed to its agents, analysts, and task force officers.

The FBI’s IT branch currently has 54 IT projects in development and plans to complete 20 by the end of the calendar year. It’s already deployed the first phase of Sentinel, the program developed to replace VCF, and the rest of the project is on schedule and on budget, Azmi said. Sentinel is expected to be completed and fully deployed by 2012.

“In 2004, everyone was asking when the FBI would join the 21st century,” said CIO Zalmai Azmi. “Today I can tell you that we are in the 21st century and continue to move forward.”

• Google for the first time attained a majority of the search ad money spent in Japan, with 56 percent in the quarter.

Google increased its share of money spent on search ads to 77.4 percent in the second quarter, up 2 percentage points from the year-earlier period, according to new data that doubtless will interest those gauging the antitrust implications of the search leader’s new advertising partnership with Yahoo.

According to the statistics from search marketing firm Efficient Frontier, which bases its conclusions on data from a specific set of large-scale search advertisers, Yahoo dropped nearly 2 percentage points to 17.8 percent of spending and Microsoft stayed level at about 4.8 percent.

(Credit:
Efficient Frontier)

• Google’s cost per click–the amount advertisers pay on average–increased 13.8 percent in the second quarter. Microsoft’s increased 5.6 percent, but Yahoo’s dropped 7.3 percent, Efficient Frontier said.

Google dominates the share of search ad spending measured by Efficient Frontier.

• Among specific search advertising categories, automotive ad spending increased 24 percent, retail increased 1 percent, financial services dropped 7 percent, and travel dropped 17 percent.

Search ads are shown next to some search results; advertisers bid for placement next to searches using specific keywords and pay only when a searcher clicks on an ad. Yahoo signed a deal in June under which Google will supply some search ads. Yahoo expects up to $800 million in new revenue during the first year of the deal, but it’s triggered antitrust scrutiny from the Justice Department, several states, and Congress.

Also of interest:

“We made an inadvertent mistake,” an NBC spokeswoman said in an interview with CNET News.com. “We’re not aware of any other complaints, and we believe we have addressed the problem.”

A week after some users of Vista Media Centers were prevented from recording two NBC Universal shows, the network acknowledged Monday that it inadvertently blocked some people from recording the shows.

“The success of the entire distribution chain is dependent on all involved maintaining the necessary checks and quality control so that coding is correctly applied,” a Microsoft spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail to News.com.

The courts ruled that the FCC was out of bounds, but there is nothing to stop Microsoft or other electronics makers from choosing to adhere to flags.

The owners of
Windows Vista Media Centers were prevented from recording American Gladiators and Medium last Monday. At the message board The Green Button, Vista users gathered to complain about receiving a prompt that informed them that the broadcaster had “prohibited recording of this program.”

Meanwhile, the larger issue for some is that Microsoft and possibly other hardware and software makers will honor broadcast flags.

The EFF says it’s important for consumers to know whether their DVRs can be controlled by entertainment companies.

For a week, fans of digital video recorders wondered if Hollywood was trying to force DVR (digital video recorder) owners to watch commercials. Historically, TV and cable networks have resented DVRs for enabling viewers to jump past ads. The Federal Communications Commission proposed rules that would require electronics manufacturers to set up their technologies to block recording at the request of TV networks.

The NBC spokeswoman said the network had no intention of blocking the show but declined to specify how the error was made. Flags that have been issued accidentally aren’t uncommon, some industry insiders say. While acknowledging that it “fully adheres to flags used by broadcasters,” Microsoft said that it was working with content owners to reduce the number of false flags.

“Customers need to know who Microsoft is listening to and how that affects their equipment,” said Danny O’Brien, a staffer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users.