Apple's pinch-to-zoom patent dismissed by US Patent Office

Apple’s patent on pinching to zoom, a key issue in its battle against Samsung, has reportedly been declared ‘invalid’ by the US Patent Office, who claim that the patent should never have been granted. The rejection comes as a blow to Apple’s 1 billion dollar lawsuit against rival Samsung, and is the second such occurrence in just a few months. The ‘pinch to zoom’ feature is one of six patents that Samsung was found to have infringed earlier this year, and formed a key feature of Apple’s iPhone as well as all subsequent smartphones, The Telegraph reports.

According to the paper, the feature allows users to zoom in and out of almost anything on a smartphone screen simply by moving two fingers together or apart. Apple's claims were rejected on the grounds that prior patents covered the inventions. The US Patent Office ruling was revealed in court documents filed by Samsung in San Jose, where the two technology giants are battling over the patent infringement claims, the paper said. Apple, however, is likely to appeal the ruling so the patent is still technically in force, the paper added. Earlier, the US Patent Office also threw out Apple’s “bounce” feature, also known as “rubber-banding”, which governs the visual effect to indicate when a user has hit the bottom of a web page, the paper concluded. -ANI

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ASUS release mobo for AMD 760G chipset

ASUS has released a motherboard for AMD processors that are designed to work with the 760G chipset. Priced at Rs.3,350, the M5A78L-M/USB3 motherboard has 4 DIMMs to support 16GB of DDR3 RAM, factory-clocked at 1333MHz, and can be overclocked to run at 2000Mhz. For graphics, the motherboard has an ATI Radeon 3000 processor with an HDMI-out option. For good measure, ASUS has also thrown in a couple of USB3.0 ports, alongside its own licks to power distribution and BIOS technology.

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WD release 7mm thick hard-drive for laptops

Western Digital has released a slimmed-down model of 2.5-inch hard drives that are small enough to fit inside a regular sized laptop and an ultrabook, using the standard 9.5mm slot. Western Digital is calling this range WD Blue, which has been designed to shocks up to 400G. The 500 GB model (WD5000LPVT) is selling for Rs.3,600; whereas the 320 GB model (WD3200LPVT) is going for Rs.3,150

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Zuckerberg donates $500mln to charity

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of social networking giant Facebook has said that he is donating nearly 500 million dollars in stock to a Silicon Valley charity to fund health and education issues. Zuckerberg donated 18 million Facebook shares, valued at 498.8 million dollars based on their Tuesday closing price. The beneficiary is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a nonprofit that works with donors to allocate their gifts, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. According to the paper, this is Zuckerberg's largest donation to date.

He pledged 100 million dollars in Facebook stock to Newark, New Jersey, public schools in 2010, before his company went public earlier this year. In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg, 28, said he is ‘proud of the work’ done by the foundation that his Newark donation launched, called Startup: Education, which has helped open charter schools, high schools and others, the report said. -ANI Photo: Reuters

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Instagram denies changing privacy policy to sell users' photos to advertisers

Popular photo-sharing service Instagram, that has been acquired by Facebook, has denied that it has changed its privacy policy to give it the right to sell users’ photos to advertisers without notification. It said instead that users had incorrectly interpreted its revised terms of serviced, which it blamed on its ‘confusing’ choice of language. “To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos,” the firm said. According to the BBC, Instagram chief executive Kevin Systrom said in a blog post that it is the firm’s ‘mistake that this language is confusing.’

“We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear,” he said. According to the report, compulsory changes to Instagram''s terms of service are due to come into effect on January 16. The originally proposed new wording that caused the controversy included, ‘You hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the content that you post on or through the service.’ The terms also stated that ‘a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos, and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.’ -ANI

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Apple iOS upgrades increase following availability of Google Maps

Upgrades to Apple's iOS 6 have increased by 29 per cent after Google Maps were made available on the operating system, it has been claimed. Mobile advertising service MoPub said that adoption of iOS 6 increased by around 13 per cent last week, but there was a bigger increase at the weekend. MoPub monitors 12,000 iOS apps and said that the percentage of users running those apps on iOS 6 increased by 29 per cent in the five days after Google released Google Maps for iPhone, the Telegraph reports.

Google had provided the default maps application for Apple's iPhone since the device first went on sale in 2007. However, the release of iOS 6 in September saw Apple replace Google Maps with its own maps app. But Apple Maps was quickly revealed to be unreliable, filled with errors and omissions. -ANI

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Twitter tops 200 mln active users mark

The number of active users on Twitter has topped 200 million mark, the micro blogging site has announced. Twitter revealed the news via tweet on the firm’s official account. “There are now more than 200M monthly active @twitter users. You are the pulse of the planet. We're grateful for your ongoing support!” it said.

According to Gulf News, the number was the first official estimate from Twitter since it claimed 140 million active users. Twitter offered no details on the latest update, but in the past has said the majority of active users were in the United States. According to the report, earlier this year, a French-based research firm said over 500 million people are on the micro-blogging site, with Americans and Brazilians the most connected. Another group, Sys-Con media, estimated last month that Twitter had over 465 million accounts and that the number of daily tweets had topped 175 million, the report added. -ANI

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Apple loses bid to ban Samsung products in US

A US judge has denied a legal request by Apple to ban sales of Samsung smartphones that the American tech giant said illegally used its technology. The decision is part of a series of rulings that US Judge Lucy Koh said she is releasing over a period of several weeks to address the many legal issues raised in the case. Her ruling comes after Apple was awarded 1.05 billion dollars in damages this year, the Daily Express reports.

Apple had urged the judge to permanently ban the US sales of eight Samsung smartphone models that a jury said in August illegally used Apple technology, while also seeking to add millions more to the award. Earlier this month Judge Koh appeared ready to trim the billion-dollar jury verdict Apple won over Samsung Electronics, but gave no indication as to by how much. Adding to the legal tangle, Apple filed a second lawsuit earlier this year, alleging that Samsung''s newer products are unfairly using Apple's technology. According to the report, Apple lawyer Harold McElhinny claimed earlier this year that Samsung wilfully made a business decision to copy Apple''s iPad and iPhone, and he called the jury''s 1.05 billion-dollar award a ‘slap in the wrist’.

Samsung lawyer Charles Verhoeven has argued that Apple was trying to tie up Samsung in courts around the world rather than competing with it head-on, the report said. The Korean mobile maker has also claimed that it was deprived of a fair trial in a court about 12 miles from Apple''s California, headquarters, the report added. -ANI

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