While Apple is busy fighting Proview over the iPad trademark in China, it has lost a separate trademark battle in Europe: Wapple, the mobile web developers, have won a suit filed by Apple over its name.

The suit, originally filed in 2007, claimed that Wapple was trading on Apple’s brand association and name, although Wapple had filed for a trademark on “Wapple” in 2006.

Wapple, which has been around since 2003, and incorporated in 2004 – well before the smartphone explosion – has long said that its name was wordplay on the WAP protocol, which was the main format for delivering mobile content before the rise of 3G networks and other protocols like HTML5.

The case went right up to the Intellectual Property Office in the UK, which today made the ruling in Wapple’s favor in three separate filings, numbers 95786, 95787 and 95890.

Wapple’s words on the decision are ironic, going as they do against as iconic and groundbreaking a company as Apple:

“The case is a victory for truth over tactics. Self-belief is always critical when establishing and growing any technology business and even more so when you are early to market as we were,” noted Anne Thomas, co-founder and COO of Wapple. “The action taken by Apple Inc. to oppose our trade mark [sic] has tested our resolve and we are delighted with this outcome.”

Wapple works with a number of third parties on mobile web services and its customers include two of Apple’s big competitors, Microsoft and Google. No one in Wapple’s experience, the company notes, has ever confused the two companies.

Although Apple has asserted intellectual property rights over some of the industry’s biggest players — including numerous lawsuits against Android-based developers Samsung, HTC and Motorola — it has also gone after much smaller companies, but not always with a successful effect. One case in Spain last year saw Apple losing a design patent suit against NT-K, a small Android tablet maker.

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More news from Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, that highlight the opportunity for more growth in digital in Russia and adjacent markets. One day after announcing a new real-time search partnership with Twitter, the company is reporting Q4 earnings: sales were at $200 million with net income of $71.3 million, both representing growth respectively of 56 percent and 51 percent on the same quarter a year ago.

But although Yandex says the figures were at the high end of its guidance, revenues fell short of average analyst expectations of $207.6 million, as polled by Yahoo Finance.

Yandex noted that its share of the Russian search market is now at 60.8 percent, according to LiveInternet. That still makes it the biggest search portal in Russia, although this represents a decline on last quarter, when the company reported a 62.7 percent share of the market.

That underscores Yandex’s move to search for new platforms and mediums, and markets, to serve ads.

Those include services like adding Twitter’s real-time search. But also, like its rival Google, Yandex is putting a lot of effort into its mobile business, and has in the last several months inked search deals with Samsung for its bada devices and Microsoft for Windows Phone — where Yandex will now become the default search window for the CIS and Russia, respectively.

It has also bought its own mobile developer, SPB Software, for a price believed to be around $38 million. SPB has developed mobile payment services, games, and other mobile apps. It’s probably a big leap to think that Yandex will go the whole hog and look at making its own mobile OS, as Google has done with Android (although never discount the possibility). But in any case, SPB already works in enough areas where Yandex could potentially insert ads and power other functions, for its own services and those for third parties.

Added to that, the company is also expanding outside of its traditional base of Russia the CIS: it has launched new services like maps in Turkey, where it is currently making a big push.

While those efforts have yet to bear significant fruit for Yandex — at least not enough worth mentioning in today’s results — the company continues to see growth in its existing online advertising business:

Search engine result pages were up by 36 percent on last year; and advertisers now number at 173,000 — a 43 percent rise on last year and 10 percent up on Q3. For the full year, advertisers were up by 44 percent to 270,000. The bulk of Yandex’s ad revenues are coming from its own search-based text ads, which account for 68 percent of Yandex’s revenues. But just in terms of actual growth, revenues from third-party sites actually saw bigger gains last quarter. Text based ads altogether accounted for over 80 percent of Yandex’s revenues:

Yandex said it expects that overall, ruble-based revenue growth for 2012 will be in the range of 40 percent – 45 percent.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

Googlighting, Microsoft’s Latest Viral Attack On Google Docs [Video]

Samsung Galaxy Note Review: Who Do You Think You Are? Mr. Big Stuff?

Tokyoflash Releases The (Readable) Kisai Stencil Watch

This Kit Lets You Print Out The Internet

This Twin-Lens Reflex Camera Is Built Out Of LEGO

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Suite anticipation, said The Daily. The News Corp iPad mag broke the news this morning that Microsoft was about to submit its productivity suite to Apple for review. They even had a photo of the app running on an iPad to back up their claim — which they triple watermarked for some reason. The outlet specluated that the app could launch in the “coming weeks.” But then Microsoft responded, telling ZDNet that “The Daily’s story is not a picture of a real Microsoft software product.”

I reached out to The Daily’s Apps & Tech Editor Peter Ha for confirmation. Having personally worked with him for a couple of years here at TechCrunch, I knew he was not one to run a story of this magnitude without plenty of fact checking. Sure enough, they did their homework and Ha stands by the story and pic.

We’ve been chasing this story down for weeks. We did not fabricate the image and Microsoft isn’t denying the existence of Office for iPad. All this fuss over a photo is nonsense. The story is real.

We also got confirmation from local sources in Seattle, who assure us that the software is real and being developed in-house. However, as the build in the picture is far from final, Microsoft can deny (in its overly specific way) that it’s not a real product.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Wait, you want us to be your lab rats?” “Pioneers”

If you need more proof that Microsoft and Google hate each other, just watch the video above. It’s a direct message from Microsoft to businesses everywhere. And it raises some very valid points.

Change is hard for everyone. Switching from Office to Google Docs isn’t an easy switch. Many features are still missing from Google’s productivity suite. It’s not a direct replacement. Typing in the cloud is fantastic but so is a reliable auto-spell check and fool-proof offline editing. Microsoft Office might be disappearing from some shops but others rely it as much as the office’s coffeepot.

Google will no doubt fire back with its own quirky advert. You can always count on Microsoft and Google’s marketing department for a good show.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You may not know this, but Turkey has a fever. And the only prescription is more games. That’s right. Sifting through some of Pando Networks’ recent numbers on international gaming, we found that Turkey owns an increasing share of the global downloads of free-to-play games. Over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free games climbed to over 5 million, a 534 percent increase since 2010 — and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population.

Not only that, but Turkey has a growing appetite for social games, which is precisely the reason Peak Games has parked its headquarters in Istanbul. In case you’re not familiar, Peak Games is a social gaming company that produces titles specifically for emerging markets — specifically in Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, and South America.

In conversation with the gaming company’s Chief of Strategy, Rina Onur, she made it abundantly clear that the company is aware of the huge lead Zynga has built in social games in the U.S. (its titles have over 55 million daily active users, compared with Microsoft in second at 22 million), and that there is stiff competition among Zynga, EA, wooga, and others for the Western markets. But Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa (MENA) have increasingly connected populations, their young people are coming online in droves, and they love to play games.

So, while Zynga, EA, and wooga focus their efforts in Europe and North America, largely lacking a presence in MENA, Peak Games has been busy acquiring studios or creating their own games like Okey, Umaykut Online, Akvaryum, Erlikhan Günlük Falınız, which Onur says now have over 7 million daily active users. (Although AppData puts that closer to 4 million.) These games are all built around popular Turkish and Arabic card/board games that are native to the region, so the titles are tailored towards their specific local markets, in their native tongue.

Peak Games’ MENA focus has caught the attention of top tier VCs in Europe, as the company closed a $11.5 million series B funding round in September from Earlybird Venture Capital and Hummingbird Ventures, among others, bringing the startup’s total investment to just under $20 million. At the time, Turkey was the fourth largest Facebook market, with some 30 million+ using the social network, and those numbers continue to grow across the Middle East and North Africa.

With this high rate of adoption, the startup has been eager to acquire studios with strong development talent and established titles and help bring those to the Facebook platform, make them more social, and expose them to its multi-million-strong existing user base. Last summer, it acquired two hardcore strategy game studios, Umaykut and Erlikhan, (both of which are Turkish) in an effort to continue bringing these emerging markets to social gaming.

And today, Peak Games is announcing the acquisition of Saudi Arabian social games giant, Kammelna Games, as it looks to further expand its reach into underserved markets with localized, culturally-specific games. The startup already has a popular Arabic-language title with Happy Farm (at some 2.2 million daily active users), which it will now complement with Kammelna’s “Baloot,” a popular Saudi trick card game.

Onur tells us that Kammelna founder Essam Alzamel will now run Peak Games’ new studio in Damman, Saudi Arabia, keeping the company’s 15-odd employees in their home country, and successfully adding another location to Peak Games’ already existing offices in Istanbul, Ankara, Amman, Barcelona and Berlin.

The Chief of Strategy says that more than two-thirds of Internet users in Saudi Arabia play games online, and the country has one of the highest average revenue per user (ARPU) rates in social gaming. Capitalizing on what they see as a massive regional opportunity (that is only going to get bigger), Peak will now set about launching Baloot across platforms, including Facebook and mobile, as well as using Kammelna to develop (and launch) more Arabic card, board, and table-top games.

Peak Games now claims to have over 20 million active players worldwide, with 150 employees (40 of whom are in MENA), and you can be sure that this is not even close to the end of the startup’s near-term M&A strategy, as we hear that Peak is in the process of acquiring yet another studio. It’s not clear which studio yet (and the company would not divulge the price of its Kammelna acquisition), but you can be sure that the acquisition will be another stepping stone in its mission for MENA dominance. More to come as we learn more.

Check out Peak Games at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We heard all the way back in November that Microsoft would launch an Office app for the iPad, and it would seem that the big day draws even closer. According to an unverified image captured by The Daily, a version of Microsoft Office for iPad was caught running on one of Apple’s tablets.

Now, we still don’t have an official launch date but the report claims that Redmond is about ready to submit this thing for approval from Apple. The image seems to reveal what we’ve been expecting — a metro-style UI that should fit in swimmingly with all the other metro UIs MS is sending out into the world, like Windows Phone, its other iPad apps like MSN and Bing, Xbox 360 and the forthcoming Windows 8 OS.

As you can see, there are tiles for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, along with a button to create a new document. You’ll also notice, if you look close enough, that there are search and Messenger icons, which will presumably send you to Bing and Windows Live Messenger respectively.

There’s no word on an Android version of the Suite, but the Daily reports that MS’s OneNote iOS app will get a revamp to reflect Microsoft’s decidedly metro direction.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft and Apple should hate one another right now. I mean, really hate each other. After decades of domination, Microsoft has watched their rival move from death’s door to become the most valuable company in the world — over $200 billion more valuable than Microsoft itself. And it was Microsoft who helped get Apple there, remember, with a timely cash infusion in 1997.

Steve Ballmer laughed off the iPhone, which eventually helped kill off Windows Mobile — and it’s now bigger than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined. And the company shrugged off the iPad, even as it established a category, tablets, which Microsoft itself had been trying to establish for years.

Now Apple’s iOS ecosystem threatens the very fabric of Microsoft. Given the rise of the iPhone and iPad, and the halo-effect they’re having on the Mac, products like Windows and Office don’t hold the same importance that they once did in the computing world. And their shine is ever-diminishing. People are realizing that they just don’t need them anymore. Apple’s rise is slowly killing the Microsoft we’ve all known for years.

And yet, Microsoft rarely bashes Apple publicly anymore. In fact, they often take their side on arguments or come to their defense on issues. Again, these were once bitter rivals. And these times should be the battleground for their bloodiest battles yet. Instead, it’s all holding hands, s’mores, and Kumbaya.

Why? Because Microsoft has an enemy they hate much worse than Apple. And Apple has the same enemy. Google.

This is nothing new, but the animosity continues to build between the parties. Look at the news today, for example. Following last week’s headlines that Google was bypassing privacy settings in Apple’s mobile Safari browser, Microsoft today says that Google is doing the same thing to their own IE browser. Meanwhile, Google says that Microsoft is full of shit, while Apple is probably off in the corner smiling.

It wasn’t long ago that Apple and Google were aligned against Microsoft. Remember, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple’s board and the two sides worked closely on projects like the original iPhone. Then Android came along and destroyed that relationship. While Google probably didn’t consider it at the time, this set the stage for Microsoft and Apple to align on things like the Nortel patents.

Microsoft should probably be going all-in to combat the rise of iOS, but instead they seem far more concerned with spending obscene amounts of money to bolster Bing as a Google competitor. And they seem to truly enjoy undermining Android by way of licensing agreements with key OEM partners.

Meanwhile, Apple seems downright bored if you ask them about Microsoft as a competitor. But ask about Google (Android in particular) and the knives come out.

Maybe this all just means that Google is doing something right. They have all the biggest technology companies in the world pointing guns right at them. You don’t get to the top without pissing off people along the way. But the way Google has managed to unify all of these main rivals against them should at the very least give them pause. Microsoft and Apple are the two biggest examples. But Facebook and Twitter are finding common ground against Google as well thanks to the search giant’s foray into the social realm.

All of this makes for a fascinating situation in the tech world. On one side there’s Google. On the other side there’s basically everyone else, with new members seemingly joining on a daily basis. And this side is filled with rivals that under any other circumstance would hate each other. But here they’re allied. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

[image: New Line Cinemas]

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Microsoft’s SkyDrive is an adequate cloud storage service (and one that boasts 17 million customers to boot), but it’s not something that the folks at Redmond can afford to leave in its current state. With Apple playing up their iCloud integration in their forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion update, SkyDrive program managers Mike Torres and Omar Shahine took to the Building Windows 8 blog to outline what’s next for their own cloud service.

At first glance, the changes seem incremental. SkyDrive will look prettier than it has before thanks to a handsome new Metro-styled app for Windows 8. It’s exactly what you would expect — users can swipe through their remotely-stored files, while third-party applications are able to access those SkyDrive files without any extra work needed from their developers. Expect to see this launch right alongside the Windows 8 consumer preview next week.

A new desktop app is also in the works, and will allow users to drag and drop files into their SkyDrive without the need for firing up a browser and navigating to the SkyDrive site. Frankly, it’s a feature that’s long overdue — the old process could be clumsy and time-consuming, and while it got the job done, nothing about it made it worth writing home about. Files as large as 2GB can be dragged into the SkyDrive, and the effect on overall performance is expected to be minimal.

That’s all well and good — Microsoft is taking steps to ease the friction that comes with storing and interacting with files in the cloud. But the last of their new features could put SkyDrive over the top for some users.

As it stands, the SkyDrive site offers very few frills, but users will soon be able to access files stored on their PCs remotely from the SkyDrive site. Internally called the “Forgot something?” feature (a name that I hope makes its way into the consumer release), users can access their devices while on the run so long as they’re running the SkyDrive desktop service. Microsoft doesn’t mention to what extent users will be able to dig through their own files — whether it’s just certain shared folders or the entirety of the filesystem — but it could be a real life-saver if it works as well as it looks in their demo video.

To offset the potential security risk this sort of access poses, Microsoft has set up a two-factor authentication scheme that requires the user to have both their device password, and access to a connected email account or mobile device. Though the authentication proces seems like a (necessary) hassle, the payoff is substantial — in addition to moving files back and forth, users can also stream video and view photo slideshows remotely. Windows Vista and 7 users will be able to join in the fun too, as the necessary SkyDrive desktop app will be made available for them in due course.

With these new tweaks and additions, SkyDrive has the potential to shift from purely serviceable to downright great. It’s about time too — from Dropbox to iCloud, there’s no shortage of contenders in the cloud storage space and Microsoft could use every advantage they can come up with.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Still using Windows Vista? XP? Why? Well, whatever the reason, Microsoft has clarified some of their end-of-life dates for older versions of Windows, including XP. This is mostly about support on the business side but it could be useful if you’ve got an old machine that’s acting up (or you refuse to upgrade).

Ed Bott found the actual dates in a Japanese Microsoft blog post:

As he explains, this doesn’t mean you can buy a copy of XP right now for any money but you can get “Mainstream and Extended” support for implementations of the OS. Good to know if you have something mission critical running on an old Compaq.

photo credit: @Doug88888 via photopin cc

Article courtesy of TechCrunch