News to follow - Week ending July 3rd 2011

Important tech news for the week ending July 3rd

1. Apple and Microsoft join hands to beat rival Google - This story begins in Jan 2009, when a former telecom major 'Nortel', filed for bankruptcy. After this Nortel began selling the company assets. A key part of this sale was about 6000 patents believed to be related to 4G and wireless networks. Google was first off the block by offering USD 990 million. Soon a consortium of companies joined the race. It was Google vs 'Microsoft + RIM + Apple + EMC + Sony'. So each of the companies individually paid less than 990 million, but in total they coughed up USD 4.5 billion to clinch the deal. Google has stated that it is "disappointed' with the result, but so much for trying to win the race alone.The interesting question is whether the consortium of companies can stay away from suing each other in the future with regard to these patents. Google may eventually have the last laugh :).

2. Oracle wants 2.6 Billion from Google - While this lawsuit was expected to be worth billions, it was never clear, how many. Finally the word is out. A new filing in the case shows that Oracle wants USD 2.6 billion from google. It has also alleged that sun had offered google reasonable licensing terms, despite this, Google went ahead to create andriod. Will this be the biggest revenue that the java platform has been able to earn for it's owners? The other way to look at this - Oracle bought Sun for USD 5.6 billion (nett of cash and debt on Sun's books). If they win this deal, then they would have got Sun for just USD 3 billion. Good thinking Mr. Ellison, it all makes sense now.

3. Reliance shuts down india's Social networking site bigadda.com - While Facebook and Zynga prepare for mega IPOs, india's social networking site bigadda.com will turn itself into an ecommerce site instead of focusing on social networking. Good idea. It seems to have been a busy 4 years for the team behind the website, who can do better fighting flipkart rather than facebook.

Interesting read

Here are 2 links that celebrate similar news. Windows phone marketplace has crossed 25,000 apps. Meanwhile Apple celebrated 100,000 apps on the app store for ipad. It justifies the market cap of the 2 companies too.