105794
submission
LabRat writes:
Today, a jury found that Vonage violated 3 key patents held by Verizon. Vonage is ordered to pay $58 million in past damages and a 5.5% royalty on future sales revenue. While much smaller than what Verizon was seeking ($5/customer/month)...it's still quite a substantial financial blow to a company that continues to hemorrhage cash as it seeks to buy it's way to market share through a marketing blitz campaign. It's unclear at this point if this victory will embolden Verizon to pursue blackmail, erm, settlements from other VoIP providers..though it seems highly unlikely that Verizon would pass up the opportunity to generate cash flow from its IP holdings. No word yet if Vonage plans to appeal.
104962
submission
MeanderingMind writes:
It seems that the rumors were true. Sony will be launching "Home" this fall for the Playstation 3. Home combines many of the features of Microsoft's Live service and Nintendo's Mii Channel into a product reminiscent of Second Life.
100628
submission
seriouslywtf writes:
We've all heard about BitTorrent going legit this week with legal movie and TV show downloads. Ars Technica took a look at the service to see how useable it was and ran into a few snags, including not being able to download or even open the video files on some computers. However, the ones that they did manage to open varied a lot in quality. Overall, they blame DRM. From the article:
Without knowing whether browser compatibility and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurrence or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.
100534
story
mikemuch writes
"Services like box.net, openomy, and eSnips are more than just places to access your files from the web. Some include media organization tools, Windows shell integration, drag-and-drop uploading, tagging, and social content sharing. ExtremeTech has a review up of six online storage services with Web 2.0 twists."