Tag: billion

Microsoft makes a billion dollars a year from Samsung

Posted on October 6, 2014 by - News

Scrooge-PorpoiseMicrosoft made a billion dollars from Samsung from its patents on Android.

According to a Samsung court case, Microsoft collected $1 billion in patent-licensing royalties last year. Samsung originally signed two contracts, a cross-licensing agreement and a business collaboration agreement, with Microsoft in 2011.

This was before Samsung started selling  so many  Android phones and late last year Samsung decided it was tired of paying on time, or paying interest when a late payment was finally made.

Microsoft took Samsung to court and the Korean company insists it wants to walk away from the original deal because of Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s phone business.

Samsung claims the acquisition invalidates the business collaboration agreement, but Microsoft doesn’t agree and wants the company to pay $6.9 million in unpaid interest from last year.

Samsung continues to build Windows-based smartphones, tablets, and PCs, so Microsoft is biting the hand which feeds it to some extent.

Microsoft is sure it will win and insists that Microsoft values and respects its long partnership with Samsung.  After all, a billion here, a billion there and soon you are talking about big money.

 

There’s a billion websites on the internet

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

sir timThe number of websites has gone above one billion for the first time and is still growing.

According to figures updated in real time by online tracker Internet Live Stats and tweeted by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the World Wide Web, more than a billion companies and individuals have their own page.

The news comes as the agency responsible for managing addresses on the internet expands choices far beyond “.com” and “.net” to provide more online real estate for the booming ranks of websites.

That sort of growth is not back for a technology which turned 25 in April this year.  The WWW was born from a technical paper from Sir Tim, then an obscure, young computer scientist at a CERN lab in Switzerland. Sir Tim outlined a way to easily access files on linked computers.

More than 40 percent of the world’s population now has an Internet connection, and the number of Internet users in the world is quickly approaching three billion with almost 50 percent of them coming from Asia.

This means 2,334,479 emails are sent in one second, some of them are not for get rich schemes, or penis enlargement.

More than 75 percent of websites today aren’t active but are “parked domains or similar.” More than 88,670 YouTube videos are viewed in a second. It is not clear how many of these are cat related.

The number of new websites more than doubled between 2011 and 2012, but it decreased by more than 20 million in 2013.

On the downside more than 25,000 websites have been hacked and are probably serving up some of the emails we mentioned earlier.