The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘suit’

As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Apple has filed a lawsuit against device-maker HTC over 20 patents they control. As you might imagine, Google has something to say about it too.

“We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it,” a Google spokesperson emailed us.

A little odd that Google would proactively send us a statement for something they’re not technically involved in. But, as we’re all well aware, this suit is much more about Google’s Android operating system than HTC. And it seems that Google is well aware of that too.

As we noted earlier, the clear focus of the suit centers around the HTC devices that are Android-based, including the Nexus One, the Magic/myTouch 3G, the Dream/G1, the Hero, and the Droid Eris. And in fact, with the Nexus One, Google worked closely with HTC to make the device, and is completely in control of selling it.

Still, for whatever reason, Google is not named in the suit — at least not yet. You’ll recall that exactly one month ago, Google decided to turn on multi-touch support for Android users with Nexus Ones. As we noted at the time, Apple was probably not going to be too happy about that. After all, it had been previously reported that the reason Android phones in the U.S. didn’t support multi-touch up until that point was a gentleman’s agreement between Apple and Google when the two were still all buddy-buddy. And now we’re starting to see the fall-out.

What’s odd is that these HTC phones have actually supported multi-touch (only one of the many patents Apple is disputing here), but it’s only now after Google just enabled it (specifically pinch-to-zoom) in the software that we’re seeing the lawsuit — of the hardware company involved. Still, this looks to be Apple multi-punching back. And Google doesn’t sound like it will back down.

[image: warner brothers pictures]

Two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by local business review and rating website operator Yelp.

The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.

Sounds familiar, you say?

You may be thinking of last year, when East Bay Express ran an explosive story, basically accusing Yelp of being in the ‘Business of Extortion 2.0′, which covered similar ground. Shortly after reporter Kathleen Richards published the article, Yelp vehemently denied everything and called her piece inaccurate.

Now, the company will have to defend itself in court rather than on its company blog.

The lawsuit essentially alleges that the heavily funded startup runs an “extortion scheme” and has “unscrupulous sales practices” in place to generate revenue, in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews.

The case, which is styled Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc., was filed on February 23, 2010, and is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. We have an e-mail in with Yelp and are awaiting a response.

Update: a Yelp representative commented as follows:

Yelp provides a valuable service to millions of consumers and businesses, based on trusted content. This is evidenced by advertisers and non-advertisers, who each have negative and positive reviews. While we haven’t seen the suit yet, anyone can file one, and since the allegations are false we will dispute them aggressively.”

The class action lawsuit comes mere weeks after Yelp took a large investment from Elevation Partners, and months after we reported the company walked away from a $550 million Google acquisition deal.

(Image via Gawker)

On Monday, ngmoco released worldwide its latest game for the iPhone and iPod Touch: Eliminate Pro. It’s been downloaded 500,000 times so far at a rate of about 25,000 an hour, currently making it the top free app in iTunes. The top paid app, Skeeball, also happens to be affiliated with ngmoco through its Plus+ social game network. ngmoco has had it’s own top paid apps as well, like Rolando, but CEO Neil Young says that Eliminate Pro is more “representive of where we have been moving our business—free applications, that we monetize with in-app purchases.”

Ever since Apple opened up in-app purchases for free apps two weeks ago, it’s been catching on. In general, free apps are downloaded 10 to 20 times as much as comparable paid apps. Now, says Young, the payments can be “built into the compulsion loop of the game.” In other words, developers will get consumers to try their apps and then ask them to pay only once they are hooked.

This model works particularly well for games. Eliminate Pro easily could have been a paid app for which ngmoco could have charged $7.99 or $9.99. It is the first multiplayer first-person-shooter for the iphone. You play against other people on their iPhones around the world, and can connect to the server-based game via WiFi or the 3G cellular data network.

In order to advance or level up, your battle suit needs to be powered, and you need to buy power cells to charge up your suit. Power cells are the currency of the game. The game comes with 30 free power cells, and then you can buy them in increments going from $0.99 to $39.99. You can still play the game without buying power cells, and your suit gets trickle-charged, but some people are really impatient and they’d rather pay to play.

It only takes a small percentage of hardcore gamers who opt to pay for their power-ups to exceed the revenues ngmoco could have made with an all-paid app being bought by fewer people. Ngmoco has three more games it is planning to release before Christmas, and they will all follow the same freemium model. “We think at the end of the day this is the best way to build a big business on the iPhone,” says Young.

Both Eliminate and Skeeball are also part of ngmoco’s Plus+ social gaming network, which allows players to send out game challenges to their friends via push notifications on the iPhone 9the most effective method), as well as Facebook and Twitter. Add the multiplayer aspect to Eliminate, and what we’ve got here is a realtime game on the iPhone. No wonder it’s so popular.

Ngmoco is part of Kleiner Perkins’ iFund portfolio of iPhone startups. The company also announced today that back in July it acquired another iPhone game developer, Miraphonic, creator of the Epic Pet Wars game.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.

The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.

When Twitter was still a young service, it used to auto-update with new tweets as they came in, in realtime. That was one of the first features killed off as the service began to explode in size and was having trouble scaling. FriendFeed implemented a similar live-updating stream before the Facebook acquisition, and that seemed to help boost engagement. Twitter currently offers live updating stream with its widgets.

There has always been some debate as to whether a constantly updating stream is better than notifications. Twitter is clearly now choosing the latter. When FriendFeed first launched it, plenty of users complained that the live updating was moving too fast. Seeing as Twitter is much larger than FriendFeed ever was, that could be an issue. The notification method is probably easier on server load than the constantly moving stream, as well.

As you can see in the screenshot below, these notifications shows up in the titlebar as well (just like with Twitter Search).

[photo via stephromanski]

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Disclaimer : Jeremy Kessel has a J.D., but is still waiting for his (July 2009) California Bar Exam results. Thus, he is not (yet) a licensed attorney

Go here to read the rest: 
LawCrunch: Some (more) ideas on why Nokia sued Apple

Nicholas here, fresh off freaking out over Shogun Rua’s loss last night.

Read the original post:
The Internet balancing act between wasting time and striving for greatness

Live video streaming service Ustream is being sued by Square Ring, Inc, a boxing promotional company owned by professional boxer Roy Jones, Jr. The suit alleges that Ustream has committed “massive and blatant copyright infringement” by allowing 2,377 users to view a broadcast of the fight Roy Jones Jr. vs Omar Sheika free of charge. Furthermore, the suit says that Ustream has ignored repeated requests by Square Ring Inc. to gather more information about the infringement. From the suit:

Following the illegal exhibition of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Broadcast on USTREAM’s website on March 21, 2009, notifying Defendants of the copyright and trademark infringements and, in a good faith effort to avoid litigation, requested information pursuant to Rules 26 and 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Plaintiff’s letter further advised Defendants that, to Plaintiff’s knowledge, they permitted approximately 2,377 users to view Plaintiff’s pay-per-view program completely free of charge, in violation of Plaintiff’s rights. To date, Defendants have neither complied with Plaintiff’s request nor responded to Plaintiff’s letter…

The court document, embedded below, also details Square Ring’s attempts to proactively prevent the event from being pirated. According to the suit, Square Ring sent Ustream four notices in the week leading up to the fight, asking that the service either provide a ‘take down tool’, or that it have staff actively monitor and delete any streams of the fight. The document says that while some other sites did provide take-down tools, Ustream did not cooperate.

Ustream has given us the following statement regarding the suit:

Ustream is serious about complying with the copyright laws and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and we’re aggressively taking short- and long-term steps to work with the content industry to meet their needs. We believe the Square Ring lawsuit does not have merit and that we’re fully protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Safe Harbor provisions.

Piracy is a problem that has long plagued live video sites like Ustream and its competitors, which include Justin.tv. Because content is being streamed by users, it can be difficult for the services to monitor and prevent copyrighted material from being streamed. But while they’d never admit it, piracy can also help these sites establish sizable user bases — one need only look to YouTube for proof, which was a hotbed for pirated material in its early days and was later acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.

Ustream Sued by Square Ring Productions -

Image via Wikimedia

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Leisure Suit Larry was one of those game franchises I always saw on the shelf at the local computer games store but never bought. I picked up the box and oggled at the titilating pictures on the back, but I never traded my hard-earned cash for the soft-core bonanza that the games offered. I like to think I’m a better man, as a result.

Continued here:
8-bit porn: the women of Leisure Suit Larry

Offerpal Media, an advertising platform concentrated on helping developers monetize social networks by offering virtual currency in exchange for participating in ‘offers’ like online surveys, has filed suit against Kickflip, the company behind the Gambit payment engine.

As first reported in GigaOm, the suit alleges that Kickflip temporarily used Offerpal’s services for the purpose of stealing knowledge of how the service worked, which it then used to start a competitor. From the suit:

[Kickflip] misrepresented its intentions in forming a relationship with Offerpal, and then used the information and trade secrets learned in the course of the relationship to develop and improve Defendant’s own competing service.

Kickflip responds that the suit has “absolutely no merit”. The company originally started off as a game developer in 2007 (you can see a list of their old games here). The company says that during that time it has tried to use OfferPal and SuperRewards (an OfferPal competitor) to monetize their games but that both were unable to meet their needs, so they built their own service. The company’s ‘about’ page offers a similar background:

In 2007, we formed kickflip inc. to build online games, eventually reaching over 7 million users. We had the same problem you have…making money. So we built all the tools we needed to help users pay for our games. Our users loved it. We loved it. So we thought we’d allow a few friends to use it. Surprisingly, the developers and their users liked it too. Since then we’ve been focused on providing the easiest payment solution for online games and communities.

Kickflip has issued the following statement regarding the suit:

We were game makers long before we built Gambit. As game makers, we used the services of both OfferPal and SuperRewards. We noticed these services couldn’t keep up with our needs, so we decided to build our own, which turned into Gambit. Since then we have been building partnerships with game developers. We have a lot of respect for the business OfferPal has developed, and it is unfortunate that they feel it necessary to sue a former customer and game developer. We are confident that this lawsuit has absolutely no merit, and we plan to fully defend ourselves. If you have further questions, feel free to contact our lawyer:

Eric Benisek
Vasquez, Benisek & Lindgren LLP
925-627-4250

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard is suing CEO Elon Musk, citing allegations of slander, libel and breach of contract. Eberhard’s lawsuit, which is 22-pages long, was filed on May 26 in San Mateo County, Calif. Superior Court and seeks unspecified damages.

The suit surrounds Musk’s treatment of Eberhard as well as the CEO’s handling of Tesla, alleging that Musk “compromised Tesla Motors’ financial health.” Eberhard says that Musk began a smear campaign against Eberhard on media outlets, attaching pages of news articles where Musk made negative comments about Eberhard. Eberhard says Musk essentially pushed him out of the company that he founded and consequently took full credit for developing the first electric car the company produced, the Roadster.

Eberhard also claims that Musk not only falsely said that he was the founder of the company, but has also misrepresented his past roles, including the extent of his involvement with the company he founded, PayPal. The suit also says that Tesla didn’t pay him severance or issue stock options, which was part of his contract upon his separation from the company in November of 2007. Some of the accusations border on hilarity, with Eberhard accusing Tesla of destroying his customized Roadster before the car was given to him.

The lawsuit is embedded below.According to Wired’s report, Tesla calls the suit a “fictionalized account of Tesla’s early years.” Tesla has also said that they plan to counter sure Eberhard. While some of the suit seems like sour grapes, the breach of contract accusations take on a more serious tone. It’s unclear how much Eberhard is seeking in damages.

Daimler recently took a 10% (or $50 million) stake in Tesla, putting the company’s valuation at $500 million. You can see our full coverage of Tesla and Elon Musk here.

Tesla lawsuit -

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.