To understand the importance — and irony — of last week’s court victory by Apple, it’s necessary to go back to 1979. It was 33 years ago that a young Steve Jobs paid a visit to the Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), a research and development facility in Silicon Valley owned by Xerox. Xerox Parc is renowned for having
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Last week a US court ruled that Samsung Electronics had to pay US$1bn to Apple for patent infringement. Samsung made a cool $6bn profit in the second quarter of 2012 on revenue of nearly $50bn, so $1bn, in the final analysis, is pretty manageable. But that’s not the point. The Apple-Samsung patent war
A California court has ruled in Apple’s favour in its patent-infringement case against Samsung. Slapped with a fine of US$1bn, and facing the possibility of having some of its products banned in the US, Samsung will almost certainly appeal against the decision. But with Apple’s own history of pilfering ideas, is an iron-fisted
The Apple-Samsung trial had been running in the San Jose, California, federal court for four weeks, although the saga has been brewing for a lot longer with the two companies going at each other hammer and tongs for years now. The verdict, handed down on Friday, is by far the
The move to digital terrestrial television isn’t simply a chance for set-top box manufacturers to make a quick buck. It presents a unique opportunity to introduce new competition in the broadcasting market where, until now, consumers have had precious little choice. In terrestrial broadcasting
It’s not often I find myself cheering when reading through government documents, but I did just that last week as I took in the plan’s revised proposals for the information and communications technology sector. Here, in black and white, a government commission has laid out many
It sounds trite, but in the growing litany of lawsuits between the world’s major consumer electronics manufacturers, the only real winners are the lawyers. Although patents have a place, particularly in the early days of any new technology, they’re ill-equipped to deal with one of the inevitable consequences of innovation: the best
US President Barack Obama’s former White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is reported to have said, when confronted with the 2008 financial crisis: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you
With hype building once again ahead of the launch of the next iPhone, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the world doesn’t revolve around the fruity company in California. The new iPhone — or whatever it’s eventually called — is guaranteed saturation coverage in the next few weeks leading up to a rumoured 12 September
Public enterprises director-general Tshediso Matona said last week that government has made no decision about what it plans to do about the vexing question of Telkom. Ruling-party politicians are debating whether the company will remain listed on the JSE or