Apple: Samsung seeks 'excessive' price for patents

Samsung is reportedly looking to exact a hefty price on Apple in their patent dispute.

Samsung wants to charge Apple 2.4 percent of its chip price for every patent, according to Andreas Udo de Haes, an editor at Dutch publication Webwereld, who was tweeting today from one battleground: a courtroom in the Netherlands where Samsung is demanding a ban on the iPhone and iPad in that country due to 3G patents held by Samsung that Apple allegedly is infringing upon.

The demands were supposed to be confidential, Haes tweeted, but were revealed by Apple's counsel. In addition, Apple said that it had purchased chips from Infineon, which was acquired by Intel last year, and as a result doesn't have to pay a royalty to Samsung.

Haes also tweeted that Apple called Samsung's demands "simply excessive."

The revelation of the demands is just the latest in an ever-expanding conflict between the two technology titans. Patent infringement lawsuits span courts in the U.S., Australia, Asia, and Europe, and underscore the growing friction between Apple and the coalition of companies that use Google's Android platform.

A Samsung representative wasn't immediately available to confir

the 2.4 percent figure. An Apple representative wasn't immediately available to comment.

Apple has sued various Android partners as it looks to maintain its leadership in the smartphone business. Android has since overtaken Apple in total market share, but the iPhone remains the top-selling single smartphone and continues to be the leader among high-end handsets.

Tumblr raises $85 million as growth continues

Microblogging provider Tumblr has raised $85 million in a new round of financing.

Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners led the financing round,
Virgin Group chief Richard Branson, along with Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital, also contributed to the round. Tumblr did not disclose its valuation, but the company said that it plans to use the cash to "continue to scale our business and give real focus to the further development of Tumblr."

Tumblr's $85 million in new cash is a major step up in investment for the company. Prior to this round, the firm had raised about $40 million in several different rounds of financing. Its last major round came last November when it raised $30 million From Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, among others.

Since its launch over four years ago, Tumblr has watched its growth rates soar.

Tumblr generates 13 billion page views each month. What's more, the company is closing in on 30 million blogs, and has seen over 45 million posts added to the site today alone. Recently, Tumblr announced that it reached 10 billion posts since its inception.

Nielsen earlier this month helped shed even more light on Tumblr's growth, saying that the company is an "emerging player in social media." In the past year alone, Nielsen said, Tumblr has nearly tripled its "audience."

Android use surges on mobile ad network

Android continued to scoop up a healthy share of users on Millennial Media's mobile ad network in August, while growth for Apple's iOS was relatively flat.

For the month, Android ad impressions jumped 48 percent over July, giving Google's mobile OS a 54 percent slice of the ad network

In contrast, Apple's iOS failed to gain much ground from July, leaving it with a 28 percent share.

The new market share figures actually showed a decline for Google and a gain for iOS from July. However, the August numbers included both smartphones and connected devices, such as tablets, whereas past rankings covered only smartphones. So the strong demand for the iPad and the lackluster sales for Android tablets certainly played a role in the latest results.

Looking at other mobile platforms, ad impressions for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion grew 10 percent from July, while those for Nokia's Symbian were relatively flat. And though Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 still grabbed only 1 percent overall share from Millennial Media, its ad impressions grew 48 percent from July.

From the hardware side, Apple continued to retain its top perch as the leading mobile device maker with 23 percent of all impressions. The iPhone was also by far the leading mobile phone with a 13 percent share.

HTC shot up to second place in August from fourth place the prior month with more than 16 percent of all impressions. The company saw 5 of its mobile phones on the top 20 list, including the Desire, Evo, Droid Incredible, MyTouch 4G Glacier, and Thunderbolt.

Altogether, Android devices accounted for 15 of the top 20 mobile phones, capturing a collective share of 32 percent among all 20 phones last month.

Smartphones in general continued to inch up in popularity, as measured by the report. Growing 6 percent from July, smartphones grabbed 72 percent of all ad impressions last month, compared with 14 percent for connected devices and 14 percent for feature phones. Those numbers show a dramatic difference from August 2010 when smartphones held 51 percent of the market and feature phones 33 percent.

Google+ officially tops 10 million users

Google's latest social-networking experiment is officially 10 million users strong.

That number, which appeared earlier this week as a third-party estimate, was confirmed today by Google CEO Larry Page, who spent the first few minutes of the company's second-quarter earnings call talking up Google+ and its features.

"I'm super excited about the amazing response to Google+ which lets you share just like in real life," Page said in a statement ahead of the call. Page then kicked off the call by talking up the new property, saying that it's a good representation of the kind of clean and easy to use products he wants the company to be making. Page also noted how features like circles and hangouts mimic real-life human interactions.

Google launched Google+ late last month not even in beta, letting in only a handful of users, who could later invite their friends and family. Page noted that the service remains in a "field trial" mode, and with "a lot of barriers" to use it right now, but that the company is continuing to expand how many have access to it. Page referred to the 10 million benchmark as "a great achievement" for the team that worked on the product.

Beyond raw user numbers, Page said the service has received "a ton of activity" with more than 1 billion items shared and received each day. That's been bolstered by the +1 button, which Page said is now being served up around the Web 2.3 billion times a day.

"We want to make products that everybody uses twice a day, like their toothbrush," Page said during the earnings call. "We certainly think about Plus that way, and just generally having a shared identity experience across Google and its products."

Page is currently the second most followed user on the new service
a third-party analytics tool that's currently tracking more than 28,000 profiles on the service. Page is second only to Facebook's CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has approximately twice as many followers.

Google+ users up 30 percent since going public?

After opening its doors to the public last Tuesday, Google+ may now have more than as 43 million users.So says Ancestry.com co-founder and Google+ unofficial statistician Paul Allen, who's been keeping a running tally of how big the social network is growing.

Compiling his regular series of stats based on surnames used around the world, Allen said last Thursday that Google+ witnessed a 30 percent jump in users in the two days following its official opening to all users on September 20.

In just those two days, the growth rate skyrocketed to that only seen during the first week of the network's "field test" in late June, according to Allen, who's unrelated to the Microsoft co-founder of the same name.

Projecting the figures over the past few weeks, Allen's model came up with 28.7 million users on September 9. Last Thursday morning, that number had swelled to 37.8 million, with most of the growth coming from the prior two days. And accounting for a fudge factor and other elements, the unofficial statistician came up with an estimate as of last Thursday of 43.4 million users.

Over the past couple of months, Allen has been busy projecting the ongoing growth of the social network. From 1.7 million users on July 4, about a week after Google+ kicked off, Allen's estimate rose to 4.5 million on July 9, 10 million on July 12, and 18 million on July 20.

Google itself has generally been mum about user counts as its social network has grown, though it did cite 10 million users on July 14, not too far off from Allen's projection at the time.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for more current figures or a comment on Allen's estimate.

Despite the ongoing growth in overall users for Google+, a report from Experian Hitwise earlier this month claimed that the number of weekly visits to the service has been dropping since mid July.

Facebook unfriending 'bug' gets quick fix

Facebook users who were spying on their Timeline to see who had unfriended them in the past will no longer be able to do so.

Late last week, Facebook users discovered that when accessing the social network's new Timeline feature and choosing a year, they could find out which former friends had unfriended them. When viewing their friends list in a particular year, users who saw an "Add Friend" icon next to a person's name knew that that particular user had unfriended them since that time.

As expected, folks who have access to Timeline rushed to the new feature to see who had decided against keeping in contact. Meanwhile, some privacy advocates complained that the feature was a violation of user privacy, since it was made abundantly clear to de-friended people who no longer wanted contact with them. After just a couple days of outcry, Facebook nixed the feature, telling some reporters it had been a bug.

Over the years, Facebook has shied away from allowing users to find out when they're unfriended by a person. That said, it isn't all that difficult to determine. If users sift through their friends list looking for someone who used to be there and now isn't, they're no longer a friend. And when they view that person's profile page, they'll be given the "Add Friend" option.

So, while the Timeline bug was by no means groundbreaking, it was notable, since it made it much easier for folks to determine who had unfriended them.

Timeline was announced last week during Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's keynote address at the F8 conference. The feature, which will be rolled out to the entire Facebook community in the coming weeks, allows users to take a glimpse into their lives on the social network over the years by viewing updates they posted, friends they had, and other content shared with the site. During his address, Zuckerberg said Timeline is "the story of your life."

Microsoft addresses Windows 8 secure boot issue

Microsoft is trying to shed light on the new secure boot process in Windows 8 to address concerns from people who may want to dual-boot a non-Windows OS, such as Linux.

In an update posted Thursday to the Building Windows 8 blog , Tony Mangefeste, a member of Microsoft's Ecosystem team, discussed how secure boot attempts to protect the PC against boot loader attacks, which can compromise a system before the OS even loads.

Secure boot is actually a feature of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), a new type of boot environment that has gradually been replacing the standard BIOS process. As Mangefeste explained, Windows 8 taps into UEFI's secure boot to ensure that the pre-OS environment is safe and secure.

The concern raised by some--in particular, Matthew Garrett, a Linux developer at Red Hat--is that the security certificates used by Microsoft to authenticate the boot environment will support only a Microsoft operating system.

"A system that ships with only OEM [original equipment manufacturer] and Microsoft keys will not boot a generic copy of Linux," Garrett said.

The problem may also stretch beyond just the OS, according to Garrett. Since any hardware in the PC also needs to be authenticated, installing new components in a Windows 8 PC may pose a challenge.

"A hardware vendor cannot run their hardware inside the EFI environment unless their drivers are signed with a key that's included in the system firmware," wrote Garrett. "If you install a new graphics card that either has unsigned drivers, or drivers that are signed with a key that's not in your system firmware, you'll get no graphics support in the firmware."

In his blog, Mangefeste countered such a position by saying that PC makers will have the option of giving customers the ability to disable secure boot and manage the security certificates if they wish to run other systems or potentially change the hardware.

"Microsoft supports OEMs having the flexibility to decide who manages security certificates and how to allow customers to import and manage those certificates, and manage secure boot," wrote Mangefeste. "We believe it is important to support this flexibility to the OEMs and to allow our customers to decide how they want to manage their systems."

Specifically, hardware makers would be able to customize how users can manage the security certificates and policies. Mangefeste also pointed out that people who want to run "older operating systems" would then have the flexibility to disable secure boot or otherwise modify the certificates if they chose to do so.

However, the blog did state that "Microsoft does not mandate or control the settings on PC firmware that control or enable secured boot from any operating system other than Windows," which again goes back to the issue of dual-booting an OS such as Linux.

Microsoft's blog prompted a response from Garrett, who labeled the company's explanation as "factually accurate" but "misleading." Since Microsoft is working with the OEMs, the company can require that PCs include the necessary security certificates for Windows, something that other OS vendors, such as Red Hat, cannot do. As a result, the user would not be able to run a secure boot on a non-Microsoft operating system, argued Garrett.

"The truth is that Microsoft's move removes control from the end user and places it in the hands of Microsoft and the hardware vendors," Garrett wrote. "The truth is that it makes it more difficult to run anything other than Windows. The truth is that UEFI secure boot is a valuable and worthwhile feature that Microsoft are misusing to gain tighter control over the market."