Author: Brad Reed

While it’s too soon to tell whether Foxconn will try to become the next Samsung, the company is certainly looking to diversify its product portfolio in order to lessen its dependence on Apple. Unnamed sources tell The Wall Street Journal that Foxconn “is moving aggressively to add new clients and is looking at ways to diversify beyond contract manufacturing,” including “reviewing plans to sell its own brand of electronics accessories to improve profit margins.” It’s unclear from the Journal’s report whether these Foxconn-branded devices would compete directly with Apple’s devices, although an earlier report indicated that Foxconn was mostly interested in producing its own television sets rather than smartphones or tablets.

So how much will it take for Yahoo to buy itself a stake in Hulu? According to a new report from AllThingsD, at least $600 million. Citing “numerous sources close to the situation,” AllThingsD reports that Yahoo is bidding between $600 million and $800 million for Hulu, a range that reflects the fact that Yahoo “has proposed several different prices based on a variety of circumstances” including “the length of the licensing rights for content and how much control the programming companies selling Hulu have over their media.”

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Samsung is still trying to expand its patent portfolio as a way to combat intellectual property lawsuits filed by Apple, and the company has now gone so far as to start its own patent trading and development firm in the United States. Korea Times reports that Samsung last week plunked down $25 million to launch Intellectual Keystone Technology, a firm based in Washington, DC that will focus entirely on acquiring and developing patents. Unnamed sources tell Korea Times that Samsung is most interested in acquiring patents related to LCD and OLED displays that the company uses in smartphones, tablets and televisions. One Korea Times source says that Samsung is “eager” to buy display-related patents to maximize its “indisputable leverage” in the display manufacturing business.

A prominent anti-piracy commission, whose members include former Utah governor Jon Huntsman and former U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, has released a new report making the case that copyright holders should start deploying software capable of locking down the computers of alleged pirates. The new report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property says that copyright holders should be allowed to take more assertive action against intellectual property thieves, including developing software that will “allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information” and will potentially lock down any unauthorized computer that tries to access the file.

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Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Apple CEO Tim Cook may be rivals but they both agree that government officials need to look at themselves in the mirror more when they decry the low tax rates paid by major tech companies. Per BBC News, Schmidt this week said that Google paid all the taxes it was legally required to pay in the United Kingdom and said that governments should change the laws if they want companies to pay more.

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One of the more intriguing stories to follow in recent months has been the relationship between Samsung and several of the big-name tech companies that have relied upon it for components. Apple has made definitive moves away from Samsung and Google has shown some wariness about the company’s overwhelming clout in the Android ecosystem. But any anxieties Google might have about Samsung haven’t been enough to keep the South Korea-based manufacturer out of the loop on Google’s most experimental projects.

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The good news with patent suits is that even when they’re successful they very rarely result in outright sales bans of popular products. And now Ars Technica reports that yet another attempt to enforce a sales ban has fallen flat on its face, this time Motorola’s attempt to stop sales of Microsoft’s Xbox. According to Ars, Motorola filed suit against Microsoft back in 2010 because its Xbox allegedly infringed upon Motorola patents that detailed technologies for “video transmission and compression as well as Wi-Fi.” Motorola’s quest against the Xbox ended this week, however, when a six-person panel at the International Trade Commission decided to toss out the company’s complaint. A Microsoft spokesperson described the ITC’s decision as “a win for Xbox customers” that “confirms our view that Google had no grounds to block our products.”

One of the most common problems that annoyed early Xbox 360 adopters was the appearance of the “red ring of death,” a flashing red light on the console’s start button indicating that its hardware was essentially fried and would need to be sent to Microsoft to be replaced. But Microsoft Game Studios vice president Phil Spencer tells Edge that the company has learned its lessons and that the new Xbox One will not experience hardware failures on a mass scale like the Xbox 360 did. In particular, Spencer noted that Microsoft’s success rate on the more recently released Xbox 360 Slim was “very high” and said that the same team behind the Slim also built the Xbox One, so chances are very good that the new console won’t burn out within months of buying it.

The common knock on Google Glass has been that it’s far too dorky-looking for normal people to want to wear. David Pogue, writing at Scientific American, says that he got a chance to play around with Google Glass recently and came away with a somewhat different take: Google Glass is too creepy. In particular, Pogue says that people who are wearing Google Glass instantly make everyone else around them uncomfortable if they’re not also wearing the headset. Pogue came to this realization after he “ran into a Google employee wearing it in public” and had a “screamingly uncomfortable” conversation with her.

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Patent trolls’ days of effortlessly rolling into court and collecting licensing fees for products they don’t produce may be coming to an end. The Washington Post reports that courts have been increasingly citing the landmark 1978 Supreme Court case Parker v. Flook, which is the strongest ruling that the court has ever made against patents for abstract ideas such as algorithms. Given that courts are applying the Parker v. Flook precedent more often in software patent cases, it seems that courts are starting to reassert control over what can and cannot be patented. The Post acknowledges that “not every citation of Flook means that a patent was invalidated” but says that “it’s at least a sign that the courts are wrestling with the limits the high court articulated more than three decades ago.”

With all the emphasis that Microsoft is giving to its redesigned Kinect sensor as a key feature of the Xbox One, it’s not surprising that the company wants to bring it to its Windows operating system as well. And sure enough, Microsoft on Thursday announced that it will “deliver a new generation Kinect for Windows sensor next year” that will deliver several improvements to the previous version of Kinect, including a higher resolution camera capable of more accurately tracking and identifying objects, an expanded field of view and improved skeletal tracking. Microsoft says it will share more details about the next-generation Kinect for Windows at its BUILD 2013 conference in June and also says that the new sensor will likely be available on Window-based devices sometime next year.

Shocking as it may seem, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) still isn’t happy with Google’s efforts to stamp out piracy. On its official blog this week, the RIAA once again bemoaned Google’s supposed lack of enthusiasm for removing links to alleged pirated content from its search results. In particular, the RIAA complained that online piracy is still thriving despite the fact that Google has removed 20 million links to alleged piracy sites from its search results.

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In addition to scoring rumors about the low-cost iPhone on Thursday, Japanese blog Macotakara also published the latest news on the fifth-generation iPad, which it says will likely launch after Apple releases the iPhone 5S in September and will feature a rear microphone located directly next to the camera, similar to the design of the iPhone 5. AppleInsider notes that early prototypes of the iPad mini also had a rear microphone but that this design was apparently ditched for the final version of the product. Earlier rumors have indicated that the fifth-generation iPad will take more design cues from the iPad mini, such as having thinner side bezels.