patent

Photos: Lego celebrates 50 years

News Yesterday, Lego celebrated the 50th anniversary of the day it filed its first patent for the iconic plastic brick. The Lego system was first unveiled in 1955, before the patent for the now-iconic plastic brick was filed.

Tags: elements, europe, plan, plastic

29 January 2008, 8:52

BlackBerry saved by last-minute deal

News RIM and NTP have agreed to settle their patent dispute over the former's BlackBerry device for $612.5m, the companies announced in a press release on Friday. A US federal appeals court lifted the injunction and sent the case back to a lower court...

6 March 2006, 9:26

News.blog: Apple to design clamshell iPhone?

News Unwiredview.com found an Apple patent application for a "dual-sided trackpad device", which resembles the current iPhone redesigned into the clamshell format so popular with many mobile phones. Apple's patent application describes how you could use...

Tags: iphone, touchscreen, patent, clamshell

18 March 2008, 9:17

News.blog: Perish the Click Wheel?

News Apple has filed a patent for an iPod-like device that has a touch-sensitive bezel around the display and can toggle between several different operating states. Check out the filing, in all its headache-inducing wordiness, on the US Patent and...

27 October 2006, 10:12

News.blog: Is Apple making a UMPC?

News A new patent application filed on behalf of Apple suggests the company might be planning its own implementation of the UltraMobile PC concept. A patent filing spotted by UMPC News covers a touch-screen keyboard on a product that resembles the UMPC...

21 April 2006, 10:15

News.blog: Motorola going green?

News Motorola is up to new tricks with its recent patent for a mobile phone display that doubles as a solar cell. We have no idea which phone model Motorola would outfit with the technology but it appears a Razr Maxx Ve showed up in the patent filing.

24 May 2007, 9:41

News.blog: Apple to strike a new multitouch chord?

News A recent Apple patent filing spotted by Macsimum News, among others, covers technology described as a "multitouch gesture dictionary". It's basically a way of assigning certain tasks, such as opening an application, to a series of gestures and...

3 August 2007, 9:06

News.blog: Will Apple make a touch-screen iPod?

News Around seven patents have recently been filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office on behalf of Apple for touch-sensitive screens. In particular, US Patent Application No.from 9 March 2006 is for "operation of a computer with touch screen...

16 March 2006, 10:34

Apple countersues Creative over patents

News Faced with a patent infringement suit against the iPod and iPod nano, Apple countered this week with its own complaint against Creative, which holds a distant second place in the personal media player market.

22 May 2006, 9:10

News.blog: Apple working on clickless Click Wheel?

News Red Herring has spotted an Apple patent filing that appears to cover a method for operating an iPod Click Wheel without actually having to touch the device. It's not totally clear how the "proximity detector in [a] handheld device" works, but the...

28 July 2006, 9:03

Microsoft has Linux-related patents rejected

News The US Patent Office has rejected two Microsoft patents over the FAT file format, but the software maker said on Wednesday that it's not ready to give up its battle to protect its widely used method for storing data.

6 October 2005, 8:51

Google seeks all the news that's fit to search

News Google is seeking to patent a technology meant to help its Google News section sort stories based on their overall quality, which could augment the current methods of ranking results by date and relevance to search terms.

3 May 2005, 9:05

Apple patents touch-screen keyboard

News One recently published patent covers a new method for "activating virtual keys of a touch-screen virtual keyboard". Another patent essentially turns an iPod (referred to as a "personal media device" within the patent) into a remote control for...

2 May 2006, 9:30

Iomega looking to make 800GB DVDs

News The company announced on Tuesday that it had been issued a patent that covers a method of encoding data on the surface of a DVD so more data -- to the order of 40 to 100 times that of current capacities -- can be stored.

27 May 2005, 9:06

Philips invents TV ad enforcer

News According to a recently published patent, the apparatus could work inside a set-top box. But according to Philips' US Patent No.the apparatus would do just that. Within the patent itself, there is a paragraph recognising that the feature may anger...

20 April 2006, 10:20