Apple, Samsung Verdict: Implications?

Will Samsung appeal? Will there be judicial review of the amount? There was when the jury awarded billions to Oracle in its fight with SAP.

Will the appeal last a long time? How long?

This is Google's loss more than Samsung's. If Android came before the iOS, why is Android losing legal battles?

Samsung has to take this decision through the appeal process.

If an injunction were to take effect, how exactly would you apply it? Do we see empty stores? How does that work? It feels Soviet.

I can easily see conflicting verdicts on the same tussle around the world.

Samsung Galaxy S III is a superior phone to the iPhone 4. Will not iPhone 5 have copied the Samsung Galaxy S III? Because, when you copy, you can only hope to be as good, if that.

Samsung is not a clear loser. But Google is. For simply not fighting back hard enough.

A Verdict That Alters an Industry

Samsung .. lost on almost every count ..... Google, which makes the Android software that runs at the core of Samsung phones, will clearly feel an impact .... Most popular smartphones today are a slab of glass and metal controlled through a touch-screen full of icons arrayed on the screen. .... the user interface — the icons and other features that users see and touch — of the Nokia Windows phones look distinctly different from the iPhone. Nokia, a longtime maker of phones, also has a thick portfolio of patents to protect itself. .... Android phones are the most common smartphones on the market today. Samsung is the world’s largest maker of smartphones and it has been quickly gaining market share. Collectively, the various Android phones from Samsung and other makers easily outsell Apple’s iPhones. .... While Google is not involved in this case, Apple was clearly going after Android all along .... “It’s not good news for Google ..... Apple’s real target is the Android ecosystem, the Android world, everything having to do with Androids. That’s really what they are targeting here.”

Jury Awards $1 Billion to Apple in Samsung Patent Case

That is not a big financial blow to Samsung ..... Consumers could end up with some welcome diversity in phone and tablet design — or they may be stuck with devices that manufacturers have clumsily revamped to avoid crossing Apple. ...... Samsung said it would ask the court to overturn the verdict and, if that is unsuccessful, appeal to a higher court. ..... Because Samsung was found to have willfully infringed Apple patents, the judge in the case could grant an Apple request to triple the damages Samsung is required to pay, though lawyers said the size of the initial award made this less likely. ....... the eye-popping award, one of the largest ever in a patent case .... Apple’s suit against Samsung, the world’s largest maker of smartphones, has partly been viewed as a proxy war against Google ..... Apple is expected to ask the judge in the Samsung case for an injunction preventing Samsung from shipping products that infringe on Apple’s patents. The verdict could also bolster Apple’s legal attacks on Android devices from other companies. ..... the iPhone inspired a major effort by the Korean manufacturer to overhaul its mobile phones. .... The verdict in the trial hardly concludes the legal battles over patents among companies in the mobile business. There are dozens of such cases winding their way through the courts; Samsung and Apple have also been battling in Germany, Australia and elsewhere. Even so, Samsung remains a major supplier of components for Apple products. ..... Samsung said in a statement that the decision was a “loss for the American consumer.” ...... “It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices,” the company said. “This is not the final word in this case or in battles being waged in courts and tribunals around the world, some of which have already rejected many of Apple’s claims.”

Counterintuitive: Did Samsung emerge a winner?

Samsung may have come out ahead even with the court loss. ..... Samsung also sells an array of products that Apple doesn’t and setting up the comparison with Apple worked out well for the entire company ..... “It only cost $1 billion to become the #2 most profitable mobile company. Remember how much Microsoft paid for Skype? $8 billion. So, for 1/8th of a Skype Samsung took RIM’s place and kicked HTC’s behind…I bet that RIM wishes it had copied the iPhone a lot sooner than it did. So does Nokia, I bet. Samsung is a much healthier company than any of those BECAUSE it copied the iPhone” ....... Samsung does $1 billion in revenue every 2.4 days. .... PR win: Any phone Samsung launches will be super hyped — and compared to Apple ..... could actually help cement Samsung’s place atop the global smartphone market. As a “fast executioner”, Samsung should be able to churn out new devices that don’t infringe on Apple patents and avoid any potential ban. ..... more than a dozen pending cases elsewhere around the globe, the Samsung brand has gained recognition — as an equal to Apple rather than merely a supplier.

Samsung’s exposure: It can survive the Apple hit

Samsung is much more than a phone maker, but its smartphone business has been a growth juggernaut in recent years as its Galaxy line has emerged as the flagship brand for Android phones and the iPhone’s one legitimate challenger in the smartphone wars. ...... If Apple’s patents are held to be valid, Samsung could be forced to redesign its phones and their user interfaces. It’s found a recipe for success in the Galaxy line, but now it may have to change up the ingredients.

Related articles

• Copying Works: How Samsung's Decision to Mimic Apple Paid Off in Spades
• Apple wins $1B verdict against Samsung
• Apple to seek injunction against Samsung smartphones and tablets and could triple fine
• A Verdict That Alters an Industry
• Apple awarded over $1bn in Samsung patent infringement trial
• Apple decisively wins Samsung trial: what it means
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Facebook's Proposed Campus: Lots Of Open Space

What if it were a four story building with a similar square footage? I think that would bring about greater interaction.

I like the warehouse concept, broadly speaking.

Lots of open space, easy access to food, a huge rooftop garden. So far so good.

I only struggle with why this is a one story building. Also, where is the emphasis on exercise? And the opportunity for naps? Something Arianna Huffington is big on.

The rooftop garden is a good idea, but there are not enough trees around the building. The Apple campus plan has more trees. I am talking about the spaceship.

And there's no big body of water either. That is a minus.

Facebook envisions swanky new digs as shares sink

a single-story, hangar-like building covering 420,000 square feet, or roughly the area of eight football fields combined under one roof..... a tram will shuttle employees back and forth through a tunnel connecting the two work sites. .... the new structure will have few interior walls and instead resemble a minimalist warehouse with an open layout, so the social network's engineers and designers can easily collaborate on projects .... Scattered around the building will be numerous cafes and a restaurant and a garden will nearly span the entire roof

Facebook Unveils New Campus: Will Workers Be Sick, Stressed and Dissatisfied?

a single room, stretching 10 acres, where everyone will sit in the open with moveable furniture .... “It will be the largest open floor plan in the world,” housing over 2,800 engineers. ..... Open work environments are supposed to foster greater communication and chance meetings, which in turn would lead to more creativity, teamwork and the breakdown of silos. However, many people who work in open environments point out: The increased noise from phone calls and casual conversations impedes their ability to concentrate and focus .... Germs spread more readily and workers are more likely to get sick .... The lack of privacy (whether to take a call or to scratch an itch) increases stress and reduces morale ........ “In 90 per cent of the research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative, with open-plan offices causing high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover.” ..... traditional office environments may increase individual wellbeing by 32% and office productivity by 15% .... “Some studies show that employees in open-plan spaces, knowing that they may be overheard or interrupted, have shorter and more-superficial discussions than they otherwise would.” ...... Proximity, Privacy and Permission....... Proximity: Give people plenty of space between each other, but facilitate traffic patterns that result in “run-ins” at shared resources like restrooms, entrances/exits, snack rooms, elevators, etc....... Privacy: Work stations need to be designed to offer visual and acoustic privacy; a cardinal rule is that workers should always be able to see if someone is approaching them. ....... Permission: The corporate culture dictates what is “permissible”; workers need to know to what degree is informal socializing accepted or encouraged, and what is acceptable or not when it comes to interrupting someone who is working

Facebook taps Gehry to design campus expansion

everyone will sit out in the open with desks that can be quickly shuffled around as teams form and break apart around projects ..... "cafes and lots of micro-kitchens with snacks so that you never have to go hungry" ..... "And we'll fill the building with break-away spaces with couches and whiteboards to make getting away from your desk easy." ...... Facebook will maintain its current campus and use an underground tunnel to connect the two areas

Guggenheim Architect To Design Facebook HQ’s New 3,400-Employee Tree-Topped Engineering Building

Engineers will hack away in one giant room, separated from the product and ads teams in the main campus. ..... the idea of taking a stroll through a rooftop tree garden to help your brain work through a tough coding problem sounds pretty awesome

Facebook’s new engineering campus to sport rooftop garden, underground tunnel

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Samsung Galaxy S III Design Story

Source: The Verge

New York Tech Scene: Thriving

Technology Review: Fred Wilson

his first big deal was an investment in the Web community GeoCities, which Yahoo bought for about $3 billion in 1999. He went on to back startups including Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare .... because VCs often shy away from technologies that take a very long time to bear fruit, such as many in energy or biomedicine, some critics contend that VCs flood the world with too much money for ideas that don't solve big problems. ..... the returns haven't been very good in the venture capital industry for a long time ..... There are a lot more places to go for money, which I think is a good thing for venture capital, because it allows more entrepreneurs to get going. We see more projects. There are more quality opportunities for us to invest in. At first blush, you might think that more capital means more competition. But I think what more capital really means is more entrepreneurs. ..... I don't think there's too much money sitting around. I think there's too much money in too few hands. So when six white guys in suits control two and a half billion dollars, that's not a good thing. Instead of being allocated just to one firm, it would be better if that two and a half billion dollars was allocated to 25 firms at $100 million each. It would lead to more diversity or people trying more things: data sciences, urban sciences, transportation, energy, materials science, and many others. ..... people who invest in venture capital like to go into deals together, and they like to invest in firms that have brand names and have long track records. That's what leads to a concentration of money in a few big-name firms

If You Don’t Know Your Co-Workers, Mix Up the Chairs

I learned early on not to feel badly about reaching out for help, and not to feel embarrassed about saying that you’re in over your head. We have a fantastic group of investors, and I’ve always felt comfortable asking for guidance. Early on, everyone in the organization became really comfortable with the idea that if there’s something you can’t do, just talk to someone about it or find someone to help you........ The importance of overcommunicating .. it’s taken me a while to realize that just because I understand things doesn’t mean that everyone else understands them. In our company meetings, I’ll say things that sound repetitive, but you have to do that. ...... As the company has grown, I can sometimes start to feel disconnected, and I’ll decide to randomly meet with one person a day, and we’ll go out for a half-hour coffee. You do that for six weeks or so, and then all the channels of communication are open again. ...... I always ask them for feedback, too. “Is there anything that I can do better to make your job easier? Is there anything I can do to make the company better?” ..... creates a really healthy environment so that people aren’t running off to a conference room and saying, “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” If you want to talk about that, talk about it in public. That’s one of the things that have made it easier for us to be 120 people and still feel relatively small. ..... I keep a notebook in my pocket and I write down all the stuff we could ever do with Foursquare. ..... I’ve learned when to bite my tongue about things I’m excited about. ..... We mix the seats up occasionally so that everyone gets to sit next to other people. And I’ll move my seat around so I’m sitting next to different people. They can ask me questions, and I get to know everyone better. ...... I started to feel a bit disconnected from our San Francisco office, so we got two big screens with cameras there and here in New York. They’re on all day long, so you just walk by and say: “Hey, Pete, what’s up? Can you get Ben?” It works so well. ....... this idea of weekly snippets. Every Monday, you send in a bullet list of the stuff you’ve been working on, and the software compiles a list and mails it out to the entire company. So you can quickly scan them to find out the status of a project or what somebody is working on. It gives you a nice general overview of the company. So you follow the people you want to get updates from, but we make sure that everyone automatically gets them from me and our C.O.O. and our head of engineering and our head of product. ....... When I send out mine, the first heading is, “Things I’m Psyched About,” and the next is, “Things That I’m Not So Psyched About” or “Things I’m Stressed About.” The next thing is usually a quote of the week — something I heard from one of our investors or maybe overheard from an employee — and then I have my snippets below that. ...... I get a lot of feedback from employees. It only takes them a minute or two to read, and it’s like a bird’s-eye view of what I think is going well at the company and areas where I think we could improve. It’s also a good way to start a conversation. ...... We always talk about when the company feels broken — let’s say you have 10 employees, and suddenly you have five more, and the stuff that worked at 10 doesn’t work at 15. So we’ll say, O.K., the company is broken — let’s step back and figure out how to fix it, and it might happen again from 20 to 50, from 50 to 70, whatever the numbers are. ...... The teams might be too big. Maybe there are too many reviews. There are all these little levers that we can tweak, and that’s how you take something that’s feeling a little bit broken, or not as efficient as it could be, and right it.

The Rise of the New York Startup Scene

"We never even had a conversation about, 'the only way to make it succeed is to go to California—should we pack up our stuff?' " ...... a pool of engineers who have come to or stayed in the city as companies like Facebook and Twitter built offices in New York ..... the amount of New York City-based startups that received venture funding rose 34 percent between 2007 and 2011, while deals in Silicon Valley declined 7 percent and those for the country overall dropped 8 percent. Last year, venture investors plowed $2.75 billion into 390 startups in the New York City area—the most money and investments since 2001 ..... So far this year, $942 million has been invested in 182 startups in New York. .... the Silicon Valley scene is still many times larger (1,202 companies grabbed $12 billion last year), and is nowhere near being eclipsed. Still, New York's startup growth is palpable ..... Like Crowley, Zach Sims decided to set up shop in New York when he cofounded Codecademy, a startup that teaches people how to write software code—even though his company's early days were spent in Silicon Valley as a participant last summer in Y Combinator ..... Sims and cofounder Ryan Bubinski had attended Columbia University in Manhattan, building up a network of people they wanted to hire, and their main investor, Union Square Ventures, is based in the city. Sims also thinks working in New York is a good way to be in touch with the kinds of people who would use Codecademy, since the startup's offerings are geared toward people who aren't entrenched in the tech scene—and those people are easier to find in New York than in Silicon Valley. ..... there's New York's always-on atmosphere: she'd worked previously in Silicon Valley and "felt like a weird person" leaving the office at 2 or 3 a.m.—but New York is always buzzing. "You can get food here any time of night," she says. "You can get anything."

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Denveen

Source: Betabeat

Dennis Crowley On Disqus

Avoid The Haters

I noted both Fred Wilson and Dennis Crowley had replied to one of my comments at Fred's blog. How often does that happen!

So I proceeded to follow the guy on Disqus. Then I noticed he had left a few comments on some article about Naveen, his Cofounder.

When you become famous like Dennis has, media is just something you deal with. Dog bit man is not news, man bit dog is news. There is always that background radiation of sensationalism.

I remember being very surprised when Naveen relinquished his day to day role at FourSquare, but I quickly stood on neutral ground, primarily because Naveen himself had a blog post on the topic, and all I knew was what I had read in the media.

Naveen Leaving FourSquare
More To The Naveen Story
Models Naveen, Dennis
Naveen Selvadurai, Vin Vacanti

Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him
Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
Dennis Crowley: Role Model For Kids?
Dennis Crowley: FBI Background Check
Dennis Crowley: Mayor Of Mars?
Dennis Crowley, Facebook, And The Location Ecosystem
FourSquare Should Rent A Stadium
Dennis, Fred, Scott: Tweet Boom Tweet Boom

I was hoping Naveen would start a new company. It would be good for the NY tech ecosystem.

How to Avoid Being Pushed Out of the Company You Founded

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Apple, Samsung, And The Circus

Apple took the GUI from Xerox - we all know that - and later sued Microsoft for doing the GUI. Apple stole the iPhone from Sony and is suing Samsung for doing what?

Who Cares If Samsung Copied Apple?

If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case. ..... Apple didn't stop innovating at all. Instead: they came out with the iMac. Then OS X ("Redmond, start your photocopiers"). Then the iPod. Then the iPhone. And now, most recently, the iPad. Given the underlying reason that Apple has been bringing these cases to court was to enable them to continue to innovate, it's hard not to ask: if copying stops innovation, why didn't Apple stop innovating last time they were copied? Being copied didn't stop or slow their ability to innovate at all. If anything, it only seemed to accelerate it. Apple wasn't able to rest on its laurels; to return to profitability, and to take the mantle they hold today of one of the technology industry's largest companies, they had to innovate as fast as they could. ..... "Great innovations often build on existing ones — and that requires the freedom to copy." Which even seems to be true at Apple — see this email from Apple exec Eddy Cue, advocating a change to Apple's lineup of tablet products... as a result of him trying out a product that Samsung had released on to the market. ..... Too often, it seems that companies fall back on the broken patent system when they can't compete in the marketplace. ..... All these lawsuits flying around suggest that everyone is already copying each other, anyway. A better solution? Let's have these companies solely focused on duking it out in the marketplace — where consumers, not courtrooms, make the decisions about innovation.

In Apple’s Patent Case, Tech Shifts May Follow

Apple is seeking $2.5 billion in damages from Samsung, while Samsung has asked for $422 million in a countersuit against Apple....... Apple wants an order permanently barring Samsung, the largest maker of Android smartphones, from selling products in the United States that violate its patents. A legal victory against Samsung could give Apple extra ammunition in lawsuits it has filed against other Android makers. ...... Google’s operating system powered 64.1 percent of the smartphones shipped worldwide during the second quarter this year.... The iPhone’s share was 18.8 percent. ....... The iPhone set off a “crisis of design” at Samsung ...... the difference in the experience of using the iPhone and Samsung phones was akin to “that of Heaven and Earth.” ...... many of Apple’s patents were invalid because of earlier technologies that either looked or operated similarly to Apple’s products. ...... For now, the only clear victors are the large squads of lawyers who have been busy on the case. ...... On Thursday, she told Bill Lee, one of Apple’s lawyers, that he must be “smoking crack” if he thought Apple could call all the witnesses it wanted to in the remaining hours of the trial.

Apple-Samsung Trial: The Jurors’ Final Exam