Microsoft Sells 650 AOL Patents To Facebook For $550 Million

It has been revealed this week that Microsoft has sold a majority of its AOL patent portfolio to Facebook for $550 Million. The deal included 650 patents in total, but in its initial AOL Auction Microsoft secured around 925 U.S. patents and patent applications plus a license to AOL’s remaining patent portfolio.

The remaining patents in AOL’s portfolio, contains around 300 additional patents that were not for sale. As a result of today’s agreement, Facebook will obtain ownership of approximately 650 AOL patents and patent applications, plus a license to the AOL patents and applications that Microsoft will purchase and own. Brad Smith, executive vice president and general counsel, Microsoft explains:

“Today’s agreement with Facebook enables us to recoup over half of our costs while achieving our goals from the AOL auction,”-“As we said earlier this month, we had submitted the winning AOL bid in order to obtain a durable license to the full AOL portfolio and ownership of certain patents that complement our existing portfolio.”

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Samsung Galaxy S III Confirmed By Samsung Unpacked 2012 App

Samsung has be teasing us with details of their new Galaxy smartphone, which the company has been calling the ‘next Galaxy’, and now we have some confirmation that the device will be called the Galaxy S III.

Samsung has released a new app on Google Play, called the Samsung mobile Unpacked 2012 app, and as you can see from the screenshot below, the description of the app has a reference to the ‘galaxy s3′.

We are expecting the device to be officially announced by Samsung on the 3rd of May, so we don’t have much longer to wait to see what Samsung’s new flagship Android handset is like.

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Skype For Windows Phone Working On Lower End Devices Like Nokia Lumia 610

Microsoft recently released Skype 1.0 for Windows Phone, and along with the release came the news that the app would only support devices with 512MB of RAM or more, this ruled out some of the newer budget handsets which come with 256 MB of RAM like the Nokia Lumia 610.

According to Nokia, the latest version of Skype will work with the Nokia Lumia 610 even though the device only comes with 256MB of RAM, and the app is available for the Lumia 610 in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

The guys from The Verge spoke to Nokia, and Nokia said that they has been testing the Skype for Windows Phone app on the Lumia 610 internally, and the app is working well.

We wonder if Microsoft will update the app in the future to support other devices which have 256MB of RAM, as soon as we get some more information we will let you guys know.

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Google Drive To Offer Up To 100GB Of Online Storage

We are expecting to hear something official from Google on their new cloud based Google Drive service some time today, and now it looks like we may have some more information on the service.

According to the guys over at Reuters, Google Drive will offer up to 100GB of online storage, of course this 100GB of storage will cost you some sort of monthly or annual fee, we have no idea how much as yet.

Google Drive will apparently come with 5GB of storage free for everyone, and then you will be able to pay a fee for more storage, with the maximum available storage being 100GB.

The 5GB of storage ties in with the recently increased 5GB of storage that is free from Google Doc’s, this was increased recently from 1GB, hopefully we should have some more information on Google Drive later today.

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Mozilla Removes Favicons From Firefox URL’s

Within the latest nightly build released by Mozilla for their Firefox browser, the age-old favicon used by many sites in their URL’s has been removed and will no longer be supported in the URL address bar within Firefox. The favicon has long been used to provide an extra enhancement to websites allowing them to add a small image to the left side of their website URL.

The reason for the removal of the favicon after all this time, is due to a security issue says Mozilla. After unscrupulous websites have published the favicon as a padlock, making the site look secure to visitors, at first glance. However being far from secure in reality. Mozilla explains:

“Websites that use SSL certificates with Extended Validation will now have a green padlock next to the certificate owner’s organisation name.

Websites that use SSL certificates without Extended Validation will now have a grey padlock. The effective hostname will no longer appear next to the padlock. This information is redundant with our darkening of the effective hostname in the website address.

Websites that do not use SSL certificates or have mixed-content will fallback to a globe icon.”

The favicon is also used in bookmark lists to help users differentiate between different websites. Google removed the favicons from their Chrome browser some time back, but still allows them still to be used in bookmark lists and in the tabs used to separating pages within their browser. Lets hope that Mozilla follows a similar line with Firefox.

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Google Increases Google Docs Storage To 5GB Before Google Drive Launch

Yesterday we saw a leaked photo of Google Drive running on an Android developers device, and now we have some more evidence that Google are getting ready to launch their new Google Drive cloud service.

Google has increased to storage on their Google Docs to 5GB, the service previously offered 1GB of storage, and this is apparently been increased ahead of the launch of Google Drive.

There is even a rumor that Google may launch their Google Drive service some time today, and with more and more details on Google Drive being revealed over the last week we suspect we are pretty close to the launch.

As soon as we get some more details on when Google intends to launch their new cloud based Google Drive service we will let you guys know.

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