To compete in both the U.S. and Chinese markets, says Ken Zweibel, director of the George Washington Solar Institute, the company will need to increase the efficiency of the solar cells that can be made using its equipment. “Amorphous silicon has a relatively low cost, but its efficiency is the lowest of all the thin-film solar cells,” says Zweibel. Cells made of cadmium telluride that are sold by U.S. thin-film company First Solar have an efficiency of around 11 percent. The amorphous-silicon solar cells made on Applied Materials’s equipment are at just over 8 percent. “The 3 percent difference in efficiency is a 30 percent difference in terms of overall cost,” Zweibel notes.

Pinto says research at the Xi’an center will focus on products suited to the way that country’s population is concentrated, in cities with tall buildings. “Cities in China don’t have very much rooftop” on which to place solar cells, says Pinto. The company plans to develop technologies such as electrochromic windows, which save heating and cooling costs by changing color with the weather. Solar cells embedded in windows might act both as a shade and an energy source. The company is also researching LED lighting and plans to work on thin-film batteries.

The world’s biggest supplier of solar-manufacturing equipment has opened a research and development center in China, and its chief technology officer will relocate from Silicon Valley to that country next month. Applied Materials, founded in 1967 as a semiconductor company, has manufactured in China for 25 years, but is expanding its presence to be closer to its customers and develop products suited to the country’s urban population.

“We’re doing R&D in China because they’re becoming a big market whose needs are different from those in the U.S.,” says Mark Pinto, Applied Materials’s CTO. Going forward, he says, “energy will become the biggest business for the company,” and China, not the U.S., “will be the biggest solar market in the world.”

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The big head at Cupertino fire back. Apple countersues Nokia saying that “other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours”. Apple is suing Nokia for infringing 13 Apple patents. According to the press release “Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone”.

The iPhone has been the device of choice for nearly half of the Indaba Music employees. Meanwhile, unwilling to switch mobile carriers to get an iPhone, the other half of the Indaba Music team waited for a comparable phone to be available through their service. On November 6th, Motorola Droid arrived and was immediately procured by many others of the Indaba Music team. The staff gathered, comparing and contrasting it to the iPhone. Sides were taken. To settle the ongoing (and seemed like never-ending) interoffice smack talk, they put it to their community of 325,000. To participate members were to create an original ringtone using (or covering) at least one audio sample from their chosen phone’s audio files. The winning phone will be the phone whose ringtones get the most votes.. You can find the ringtone remixes after the break…

Some top contenders for your listening pleasure…

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Now that Apple has responded to Nokia’s patent lawsuit filed last October with its own countersuit today, we have a clearer picture of what the dispute is all about. As suspected, it is about money, specifically the patent licensing fees Nokia is trying to get out of Apple for wireless patents it holds and it alleges are infringed by the iPhone.

But more broadly, it is about Nokia missing the boat on the shift from conventional phones to mobile computers where the phone functionality is relegated to one of many features, and not the most important one at that. Apple lays this argument out in its countersuit, saying that Nokia tried to overcharge it on patent fees because it missed the boat on the shift to smartphones.

In Apple’s countersuit today, it accuses Nokia of attempting a “patent hold-up.” The patents in question are part of industry standards, and as such Nokia must license them under fair and reasonable terms, argues Apple. But instead, Nokia tried to put the squeeze on Apple. Apple states in its countersuit: Continue Reading »

There’s just something about Apple that makes people go crazy whenever the company’s lawyers do even the simplest things — whether it’s filing routine trademark oppositions, getting patents granted, or, uh, defending allegations that the company is in league with the Mafia, Steve and friends just seem to inspire some strong reactions whenever they end up in the courtroom. So of course things got a little wild last Thursday when Nokia announced it was suing Apple over ten patents related to GSM, UMTS (what you know as 3G) and WiFi — the pundit class immediately set upon the idea that the lawsuit was some sort of reaction to Nokia’s diminishing cellphone marketshare and the perceived dominance of the iPhone, perhaps best exemplified by John Gruber’s flippant “If you can’t beat ‘em, sue ‘em.” Nokia can’t compete against Apple, so obviously it’s abusing the hopelessly-broken patent system get a little payback, Espoo-style — right?

Well, wrong. As usual, the race to hype this dispute as a bitter standoff between two tech giants desperate to destroy one another has all but ignored the reality of how patents — especially wireless patents — are licensed, what Nokia’s actually asking for, and how it might go about getting it. And as you know, we just don’t do things that way, so we’ve asked our old friend Mathew Gavronski, a patent attorney in the Chicago office of Michael Best & Friedrich, to help us sort things out and figure out what’s really going on here — read on for more.
First, a preliminary note: we’re just not going to get into the specifics of Nokia’s ten patents, whether they should have been granted, whether they’re valid, or whether the patent system itself is a good thing. Each of the ten patents in question covers a highly technical part of wireless communications, and we simply don’t have the time to judge them on their merits — and even if we did, we have no way of knowing how the iPhone’s code and chipsets make use of the patented technology. As for the patent system, well, it’s what we’ve got, this case isn’t going to change it, and we’re not going to begrudge Nokia for taking advantage of the primary means available to protect its billions in R&D. We doubt Steve Jobs feels any differently about things.
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Page Rank is considered very important by many Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts, though it does not place an important role in Google search results. But, still having a good page rank determines the importance of a link or web page. Google too gives the Page rank a Preference when multiple factors are considered.

Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) though Page Rank says nothing about the content or size of a page.

Google PageRank is displayed in Google Toolbar ranging from 0 – 10 whereas the actual Page rank differs in Floating point numbers shown below.

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