Author: Brad Reed

If Google really only did love Motorola for its patents, then it seems the company’s relationship with the iconic mobile phone manufacturer won’t end happily ever after. A new report from Bloomberg notes that Google’s $12.4 billion investment in Motorola looks even worse this week after a federal judge ruled that Microsoft “owes only pennies in royalties per sale of each Xbox video-gaming system and Windows operating system instead of the potential billions of dollars Google sought in a patent-infringement case.” The latest blow to Motorola’s patent portfolio value comes after Google agreed with the Federal Trade Commission late last year to not use its industry standard Motorola patents as weapons in intellectual property suits.

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Facebook isn’t in any danger of experiencing a MySpace-style implosion anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean the social networking giant isn’t in danger of seeing its clout slowly erode over time. The Guardian reports that a new study from SocialBakers shows that Facebook lost around 6 million visitors in the United States in just the last month alone, which represents a 4% decline of its total user base. The most recent drop in American Facebook visitors is part of a sustained decline, since SocialBakers estimates that the social networking site has seen a drop of around 9 million visitors over the past six months. The good news for Facebook is that its own photo-sharing social network Instagram has apparently picked up the slack and has “seen surges in popularity with younger age groups.”

While Microsoft’s next Xbox won’t feature virtual reality headsets, it will try to do the next big thing by making your entire living room into a big video game screen. Microsoft on Monday posted a new demonstration video showing off the new Xbox’s IllumiRoom feature that projects aspects of games onto the walls surrounding your television set to increase immersion within virtual environments. The new feature comes with several options for filtering content if you’re not interested in having your entire living room transformed into a game world: For instance, you can choose to only have weapons or enemies displayed on the peripherals of your television set or you can choose to only have the bare outlines of the game environment displayed outside your TV. It goes without saying that IllumiRoom will likely be one of the key features Microsoft shows off when it formally unveils the new Xbox on May 21st. The full video demonstration of IllumiRoom is posted below.

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Although Japanese carrier SoftBank has been courting Sprint for the past several months, it’s apparently willing to let the carrier see other companies. Sprint announced on Monday that it had received “a waiver of various provisions of the merger agreement” with SoftBank so that it can enter into a non-disclosure agreement and discussions with Dish to learn more about its competing merger proposal. Sprint may not enter into negotiations with Dish under the waiver, nor is it allowed to give Dish any non-public information. Instead, the point of the talks is to decide whether Dish’s offer represents a better deal for the company that would give it ample reason to break off its merger with SoftBank.

America’s ambassador to Australia wants the Aussies to act more like the Lannisters and pay their debts to HBO. Australia’s News.com reports that American ambassador Jeffrey Bleich has castigated Australians for being “some of the worst offenders with among the highest piracy rates of Game of Thrones in the world.” Bleich described the large-scale piracy of Game of Thrones as an “epic theft by online viewers around the world” and said that fans of the show had no excuse for illegally streaming it because “stealing is stealing.” HBO programing president Michael Lombardo has previously said that he sees the widespread piracy of Game of Thrones as a “compliment” that has actually helped the company sell more DVDs.

Google hasn’t had much luck so far with selling many Chromebooks but the company is hoping to have better luck selling super-cheap notebooks based on its popular Android operating system. Intel chief product officer Dadi Perlmutter tells CNET that Intel is supplying Atom processors for a line of Android touchscreen notebooks that will be aggressively priced in the $200 range. Perlmutter said that we’re unlikely to see Windows-based notebooks priced in this range, however, since their retail cost “depends on how Microsoft prices Windows 8” while Android is free for OEMs to use. The Intel executive didn’t provide any release timeframe or specifications for the future Android notebooks.

Google’s engineering director Ray Kurzweil, who has long been known for both his bold futurist predictions and his work in artificial intelligence, has laid out his vision for where search is headed in a new interview with Wired — and he’d apparently like to see Google become more like a friend with search benefits. Kurzweil starts off the interview by saying that he’s working at Google to help its search engine pick up more semantic meanings and thus help users receive good answers to more complicated questions.

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Google may wind up settling with antitrust officials in the European Union but it likely won’t get away virtually scot-free like it did in the United States. The Associated Press reports that Google is offering some more concessions to European antitrust regulators, including an agreement to “display links to three rival specialized search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users.” In other words, whenever Google shows sponsored search results for its own services, it must also display links to rivals’ services nearby. Previously, Google had agreed to clearly label its own services in searches as sponsored results in an attempt to satisfy critics who claimed that the company is pushing down rivals’ products to promote its own.

Gaming giant Electronic Arts has laid off 10% of its entire workforce, according to a report from Kotaku. While EA itself didn’t reveal how many workers it laid off on Thursday, it did acknowledge an unspecified number of staff reductions that it said were part of “hard but essential changes” needed to help the company “focus on delivering great games and showing players around the world why to spend their time with us.” The layoffs at EA come after its former CEO John Riccitiello resigned last month and the company has made several high-profile public relations mistakes recently, including its notoriously botched launch of the new SimCity game.