Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) is buying up VOIP provider Jajah for $206 million in cash. The company—which had raised $35 million in venture capital funding—had been up for sale for more than a month now and several companies, including Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) had also been said to be interested. In recent days, however, there were reports that Telefonica had beat out those two companies in the bidding.
In a release, Telefonica says that it will offer Jajah’s services to “customers wishing to extend their communication experience”—beginning in Europe, where it operates under the name O2. It will retain the Jajah brand.
Whoa. A judge for the The U.S. Court of Appeals has just upheld an earlier verdict forbidding Microsoft from selling both Office and Word after January 11th, 2010. This suit, which was filed by i4i, a creator of a XML plugin for Microsoft Office, alleged that Microsoft’s Open XML format, which uses the DOCX and XLSX extensions that have been a part of Office on the Mac since Office 2008, violated i4i’s patented XML handling algorithms. The court ruled in favor of i4i back in May, and Microsoft today lost their appeal, with the judge telling them that they don’t have the right to sell the software as-is.
Microsoft now either has to attempt to appeal the ruling again, or settle with i4i (read as: “Ballmer has to write a big honking check”), and is currently considering further legal options. The company is also working to remove these features from Microsoft Office (possibly in time to release new versions of the old software on January 11th), and this ruling doesn’t affect the upcoming Office 2010 for Windows. We’ll keep you posted if anything further develops.
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Whoa. A judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals has just upheld an earlier verdict forbidding Microsoft from selling both Office and Word after January 11th, 2010. This suit, which was filed by i4i, a creator of a XML plugin for Microsoft Office, alleged that Microsoft’s Open XML format, which uses the DOCX and XLSX extensions that have been a part of Office on the Mac since Office 2008, violated i4i’s patented XML handling algorithms. The court ruled in favor of i4i back in May, and Microsoft today lost their appeal, with the judge telling them that they don’t have the right to sell the software as-is.
Microsoft now either has to attempt to appeal the ruling again, or settle with i4i (read as: “Ballmer has to write a big honking check”), and is currently considering further legal options. The company is also working to remove these features from Microsoft Office (possibly in time to release new versions of the old software on January 11th), and this ruling doesn’t affect the upcoming Office 2010 for Windows. We’ll keep you posted if anything further develops.
It’s getting closer and closer to check-writing time for Steve Ballmer, as the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit has just upheld a decision that would see Microsoft Word and Office banned from sale starting January 11. If you’ll recall, Microsoft lost a patent infringement suit against XML specialists i4i back in May when it was found that Word’s handling of .xml, .docx, and .docm filed infringed upon i4i’s patented XML handling algorithms, but the injunction against further Word sales was put on hold pending the results of this appeal. Now that Microsoft has lost once again, we’d expect either an appeal to the Supreme Court and request for the injunction to be stayed, or for a settlement between these two that would end this whole mess right now. We’ll see what happens — stay tuned.
P.S.- Just to be clear on this, i4i isn’t a patent troll — it’s a a 30 person database design company that shipped one of the first XML plugins for Office and was actually responsible for revamping the entire USPTO database around XML to make it compatible with Word back in 2000. What’s more, the patents involved here don’t cover XML itself, but rather the specific algorithms used to read and write custom XML — so OpenOffice user can breathe easy, as i4i has said the suite doesn’t infringe its patent. Engadget: Helping you flame with accuracy.
We recently wrote about OneRiot’s foray into the advertising word, RiotWise, which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search and getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot believes in the strong potential of serving relevant ads beside results. Today, the realtime search engine is launching RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web.
RiotWise will match Trending Ads display ads that are highly relevant to the same trending topics within an application. OneRiot says says the “realtime relevance” result in a higher click through rate on the ads. The system is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm.
When Facebook bought FriendFeed a few months ago, no one was really sure what would happen to the service. The acquisition was mainly for FriendFeed’s talent, so there was much concern that FriendFeed would wither. And to an extent it has. But, as it’s proving today, it still can serve some purpose for Facebook: A testing ground for new technology.
As Facebook’s David Recordon writes today on the Developer Blog, the development team has implemented a prototype version of the new OAuth WRAP specification on FriendFeed. One of FriendFeed’s co-founders, Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook’s Director of Product Management for Platform, also writes at length about it on his own blog. The basic gist is that Facebook decided to test out implementing it in FriendFeed so that they could get feedback from the developer community who want to try it out.
As you may or may not have heard, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell announced that he was leaving the company late last month, but neither he nor Microsoft was doing much talking at the time about what he would be doing next — other than that he would be “looking at a number of opportunities that will expand his career beyond being a CFO.” Well, it looks like he will still be a CFO after all — this time at General Motors. That move was just made official today, and follows news earlier this month that GM’s current CFO, Ray Young, would be transferring to China. As you might expect given the executive situation at GM, however, there’s plenty of speculation that this hire might be more than what it seems, and folks already talking that Liddell may actually be being groomed to take over as CEO of the company once he gets a bit more experience in the automotive industry.
Jeremy Stoppleman, the CEO of Yelp, has walked away from an all-but-signed deal to be acquired by Google for more than half a billion dollars.
The deal was, as we wrote late last week, in the later stages of negotiation. The two companies had agreed on a price – around $550 million plus earnouts – and were working through the final details of the acquisition.
Last month, we wrote about the VoIP startup Jajah being the target of a bidding war. Today, it appears that war is over, with the winner being O2, and the price being $200 million, according to a report sent out by the financial website TheMarker, and being circulated by Reuters.
It was believed that Microsoft and Cisco were two other companies that were vying to get the company. Back in June, the company served up its 1 billionth VoIP call. While the company has some 15 million subscribers of its own, many of the calls originate from Yahoo Messenger, which has used Jajah since 2008 for its VoIP calls. They also have a deal in place with Microsoft.