S NAGA MALLESWARA REDDY

SAN JOSE: A US jury on Friday ordered Samsung Electronics to pay $119.6 million to Apple, a big loss for the iPhone maker in the latest round of their globe-spanning mobile patent litigation.

During the month-long trial in a San Jose, California, federal court, Apple accused Samsung of violating patents on smartphone features including universal search, while Samsung denied wrongdoing. On Friday, the jury found the South Korean smartphone maker had infringed two Apple patents.

Apple and Samsung have been litigating around the world for three years. Jurors awarded the iPhone maker about $930 million after a 2012 trial in San Jose, but Apple failed to persuade US District Judge Lucy Koh to issue a permanent injunction against the sale of Samsung phones.

Some industry observers see the ongoing legal dispute as Apple's attempt to curtail the rapid growth of phones based on Google's rival Android software, because Samsung was by far the largest adopter of the operating platform.

"Though this verdict is large by normal standards, it is hard to view this outcome as much of a victory for Apple. This amount is less than 10 percent of the amount Apple requested, and probably doesn't surpass by too much the amount Apple spent litigating this case," said Brian Love, assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

"Apple launched this litigation campaign years ago with aspirations of slowing the meteoric rise of Android phone manufacturers. It has so far failed to do so, and this case won't get it any closer."

The current case involves five Apple patents that were not in the 2012 trial and that cover iPhone features like slide-to-unlock and search technology. Apple is seeking to ban sales of several Samsung phones, including the Galaxy S III, and sought just over $2 billion in damages.

It will now be up to Judge Koh to decide if a sales ban is warranted, though legal experts deem that unlikely.

"An injunction is extremely unlikely," argued Michael Carrier, a professor at Rutgers Law School. "The Federal Circuit sets a high bar."

To and fro
During the trial, Samsung argued that Apple had vastly exaggerated the importance of its patented iPhone features, while Apple said the South Korean company could not have competed in the smartphone market without unfairly copying its flagship product.

The two tech leaders also sparred over how Google's work on the software used in Samsung phones affects Apple's patent claims. Samsung's phones run on the Android mobile operating system developed by Google.

Google was not a defendant in the case, but during the trial Samsung pointed out that some of the features Apple claims to own were actually invented by Google, and called a handful of executives from the internet search giant to testify on its behalf.

Apple said Google shouldn't affect how jurors analyzed Samsung's liability, partly because Google had agreed to reimburse some of Samsung's costs.

Samsung also claims that Apple violated two patents on streaming video. It is seeking to ban the iPhone 5, and asserted a $6 million damages claim. On Friday, the jury ordered Apple to pay Samsung $158,400.

The case in US District Court, Northern District of California is Apple vs Samsung Electronics, 12-630.

NEW DELHI: A Mumbai firm founded by three former IIT graduates is giving the smartphone a desi makeover. Firstouch, their made-for-India device, allows users to translate text written in English to Indian languages and vice versa by swiping across the 4-inch screen. Not just that, it has a 48-key virtual keyboard that's designed to accommodate Indian alphabets. 

Rakesh Deshmukh, Akash Dongre and Sudhir Bangarambandi, who have developed and patented the virtual keyboard and the predictive text engine that goes along with it, are aiming to break the language barrier with the phone. The target customers are likely rural folks, who may not be comfortable with English or even Hindi, but offer a big growth market for telecom operators and device makers. 

The first batch of Firstouch phones will be for Gujarati users and will hit stores in Rajkot this month, priced at Rs 6,000, which is roughly what an entrylevel smartphone costs. Hindi and Marathi are next on the cards, set for a June release, and the three partners want to get the phone to support all Indian languages within a year. If they succeed, Firstouch will be the first device capable of such a feat. Why Gujarat first? "Gujjus are far more experimenting," said 31-year-old Deshmukh. 

Deshmukh is the CEO and co-founder of MoFirst Solutions Ltd, the company behind Firstouch. Deshmukh, who graduated from IIT in 2006, founded the company two years after that with 30-year-old Dongre, who finished in 2005, and Sudhir, 27, who did so in 2008. 

MoFirst has been making iPhone apps since its launch. It developed the country's first mobile trading platform for Motilal OswalBSE 1.49 % Securities in 2012. Other products include m-commerce and m-ticketing solutions besides apps for Android and BlackBerry operating systems. 

Even so, the predictive text and swipe technology that it has developed for Firstouch is far more complex and advanced than anything the company has done before. It's capable of translating messages written in a local language to English with a left swipe, and transliterating it by swiping right. 

So, if you want to type the message 'How are you?' in Gujarati, it can be done without changing the overall setting from English to Gujarati — because the default keypad has Gujarati alphabets. This message can be translated into English by swiping right. Swiping left will transliterate the message in English into 'Tame kem cho?' 

The phone can also translate messages received in English to Gujarati, again with a finger swipe. "This is something new that I've heard," said Gartner Principal Analyst Vishal Tripathi. 

"It's very interesting and will be popular among people who are not comfortable with Hindi (the most common non-English language supported by smartphones in India), even among old people whose kids are overseas. I feel the real target market for this device will be tier-3 and tier-4 cities, or villages," he added. 

Other phone makers also offer devices that can support local languages — Samsung recently launched products supporting nine Indian languages, while Sony smartphones support 15. However, their settings need to be changed to switch languages, something that users may not be comfortable doing. 

However, no current smartphone allows users to translate a message from English to an Indian language. The company wants to extend its translation technology to email and social networking applications in a year or so, allowing a user to translate an email in Hindi or Marathi to English and vice versa with a single swipe. 

The ease of this patented technology, the makers feel, will help people who do not know English, especially in rural India, to use smartphones far more easily. The commercial implications could be substantial, and telecom operators are likely to be interested because they are looking at rural markets to grow at a time user additions in cities have flattened or are expanding at a slower pace than before. That's exactly what the company is looking for with its predictive matra keyboard and swipe technology. 

"Firstouch is the first regional smartphone which brings millions of rural and semi-urban customer a perfect smartphone, made in their language," Deshmukh said. In Hindi, or the Devanagiri script, matra symbols are used when consonants and vowels are to be written together, something that doesn't apply to English. 

Therefore, creating a vernacular keyboard for mobile phones has always been considered a technological challenge. The company has hired Vaibhav Shastri, former head of mobile phones at Micromax and chief executive of Zen Mobiles, as it gets set to market the device. 

With his decadelong experience in mobile handset procurement, supply-chain management and production, Shastri is aiding MoFirst in commercially launching the product. Deshmukh is hopeful about the product's prospects with the smartphone market expected to double over this year from 41 million last year. 

For now, the company will have to rely on telecom carriers to sell its devices along with bundled data services. It's talking to two top carriers in India with large customer bases in small cities and towns to sell the device bundled with mobile services. 

Talks are also ongoing to link its indigenous App Bazaar with operator billing, so that money will be debited from a customer's prepaid or postpaid account when an application is bought.

Customers can access App Bazaar without having to register on the company's website. Users can also access the Google Play store on Firstouch for downloading apps they may be using already. The company has even created a tool for app translation, allowing those in English to run in Gujarati. 

Firstouch is exploring tie-ups with online retailers while simultaneously asking developers to create more apps for App Bazaar. More than 200 apps have so far been built for the store.

NEW YORK: Disappointed at less number of 'likes' on your selfie or a photo from your latest vacation on Facebook or Twitter? Now, there is a formula that can win more 'likes' online.

An Indian-American student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, has devised a formula that tells how the contents of a photograph may predict its popularity online.

Computer student Aditya Khosla and his team scanned through 2.3 million Flickr photos to see which got the most views.

They then looked for correlations between the colour, composition and subject of an image and that picture's likelihood of missing 'likes'.

They found that "brassieres", "revolvers", "miniskirts", "bikinis" and "cups" have a strong positive impact on a photo's popularity.

"Some people have 10 friends, some have a thousand. Despite all these differences, it is interesting to see that the content of the image itself can be used to predict how popular an image is going to be," Khosla was quoted as saying in a Huffington Post report.

While underwear and dinnerware get more 'likes', objects like laptops, golf carts and space heaters had no takers.

Khosla suggested while posting a photo on social media, junk greenish and blue-gray hues as these colours "tend to be less popular".

The researchers' algorithm suggests colours like aqua, bright red, navy and chartreuse. "Open scenes with little activity tend to be unpopular," he said.

The new findings can help create software that would let users edit their photos to make them more appealing, the report added.

Most people are dimly aware that Facebook has a way of tracking what you read in the news. If you "like" a story in The New York Times or on Fox News, then Facebook records that like and uses it to gauge how prominently in your friends' news feeds your recommendation of that story should be. 

But most people probably don't know that Facebook watches what happens after you leave Facebook to read that story on the news site, and what you do when you come back. The enormous number of "like" buttons that exist on virtually every website, all of which send signals about Facebook users as they surf the Internet, make this task easier for Facebook. 

Will Oremus at Slate wrote a nice, detailed explanation of the rationale for Facebook's reorganization of its News Feed priorities. You've probably seen in your own Facebook account that there are a lot fewer pictures of cats showing up and a lot more headline-driven content in its place. 

This happened because although people frequently click "like" on pictures of cats, even more people dislike those pictures. But because there is no "dislike" button, only the likes counted. And so the cats rose to the top. So Facebook decided to give extra weight to news stories, which people actually find useful. Now, your news feed is full of news, and you're seeing a lot less spam to do with cats. 

Oremus hits on a detail of that change that will be surprising for most people. Facebook watches what you do after you leave the site to read the news, and it monitors what you do when you come back in order to see how important your "like" for the story actually is: 

When users click on a link in their news feed, [news feed product manager Will Cathcart] says, Facebook looks very carefully at what happens next. "If you're someone who, every time you see an article from The New York Times, you not only click on it, but go offsite and stay offsite for a while before you come back, we can probably infer that you in particular find articles from the New York Times more relevant"-even if you don't actually hit "like" on them. 

At the same time, Facebook has begun more carefully differentiating between the likes that a post gets before users click on it and the ones it gets after they've clicked. A lot of people might be quick to hit the like button on a post based solely on a headline or teaser that panders to their political sensibilities. But if very few of them go on to like or share the article after they've read it, that might indicate to Facebook that the story didn't deliver. 

Facebook is likely not doing this because it wants to monitor your political opinions like Big Brother. (Although the tin-foil hat crowd will take this as evidence of the opposite.) Really, it appears to be a genuine attempt by Facebook to figure out how it can be most useful to you. Facebook doesn't care whether you read the Times or Fox, as long as you're getting what you want to see. 

But note why this process has become so cumbersome, why Facebook had to resort to old school surveys to find out what its users actually liked, and why Facebook had to take these extra steps to reorder your news feed: Because Facebook has no "dislike" button. 

If there had been one, Facebook would have had a better idea that for every liker of cats, there was a greater number of dislikers.

Being active on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is kind of like having a basement in the suburbs. These accounts can quickly become so cluttered that you might as well shut the door and say goodbye - you're never finding anything you need again.

But like your basement, social accounts can be kept tidy with some occasional attention. And what better time for cleansing and renewal than spring? Here are some tips for cleaning out your feeds and timelines and making social platforms more useful.

Prioritize your friends
To fill your news feed with more photographs and status updates from people you truly care about, separate your Facebook friends into two groups: "friends" and "acquaintances." Facebook will feature your close friends' posts more prominently in your news feed.

Unfollow the ranters
If you would rather skip the endless dog photos a former roommate posts on Facebook, you don't need to go as far as removing him from your list of friends. Instead, when you see your friend's name appear in your news feed, pull down the arrow on the right side of the post and click "Unfollow."

Cut out annoying ads
You can also hide specific advertisements on Facebook. Don't want to see ads for "officeappropriate yoga pants" ? Pull down the arrow next to the post in your news feed and choose the option to hide all ads from that brand.

Control past Posts
You can make all of your past posts viewable only to your friends and anyone tagged in a post and their friends. Go to your Facebook privacy settings, and under "Who can see my stuff?" click on "Limit Past Posts."

Call it the latest technological 'tadka' to big fat Indian weddings — websites as marriage invites. They chronicle a couple's romantic journey, with photo galleries, and provide details like venue, schedule of events, guest list, contact point, travel arrangements, appropriate attire for various ceremonies, gift registries, and more. When Pune-based techie Debojyoti Kar took his 10-year-old courtship with sweetheart Nibedita to the next level, he did it in style. For Debojyoti, a software developer, creating a website was simple. "I always had the idea. You have a number of templates to choose from online. You can also personalize the site." 

Vantage points 
With friends and family scattered across the globe, it's one of the best ways to create a reference point for guests to seek information about the wedding. It also makes for a good prop for bonding between couples set to take their vows. As Anuradha Ramkrishnan, a housewife who got into this role only a month-and-a-half back, puts it, "When the internet plays such a pivotal role in almost everyone's life, why should a wedding announcement, probably the biggest event of one's life, stay behind?" Anuradha's husband Balakrishnan Subramanian, who works in Kolkata, says, "People are generally used to seeing a wedding invite in the form of a card or an e-mail. But creating a website to invite your loved ones is an innovative way of making your D-day special." 

Take your pick 
You can improvise on the basic templates. Anuradha says, "Once we registered ourselves with mywedding .com we started working on how our site should look and what the contents should be. We worked to bring together contents like our photos, 'about us' section , background music, the main invitation etc." Adds Debojyoti, "The one I chose provides a free account which would expire after the wedding. There's also an option of purchasing the website for an additional 90 days (which I opted for). You also have the option to maintain it for a longer term, which comes for a higher price." 

Depending on your budget, you can have features like a couple's gallery, a blog and a live chat feature for travelling guests to post queries (manned by personnel equipped with the relevant information). Sudeep Ranjan, a faculty member with Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics, Bangalore, says lots of links are available online from where we can download site templates. "But to access these or make changes to them one has to have basic knowledge of the softwares in which they can be edited. Subsequently, one can buy a webspace and get the site hosted or uploaded on the server," he says. 

Wedding planner's perspective 
Wedding planners too swear by the effectiveness of websites. Chennai-based wedding planner Vidya Gajapati Raj Singh says, "Such sites inform us about the couples' plans. With NRI clients, we meet when we begin to work with them, then the next we see of them would be just a couple of weeks before the wedding. The time leading up to this is when we do all our work and the website becomes a help." Wedding planner Lakshmi Rammohan, owner of Dreamweaver Weddings, Bangalore, says websites score high on the 'go green' front. "Wedding cards are certainly the least 'green' of all practices ," she says. But wedding cards aren't disappearing yet. Lakshmi says, "The essence of a wedding is a keepsake, something that can be preserved for posterity and wedding cards have no rival there. Wedding cards have textures, colours and certain physicality about them that no digital media can quite capture." 

Adds Rajesh Bysani, who works with a Bangalore-based internet firm, "Elders still have some reservations. They believe in certain traditional practices and those can't be avoided. Distributing wedding cards is one such practice. Though setting up a website and e-invite did reduce the number of friends I had to give an invitation card to, family and relatives still had to be sent an invite the traditional way." Rajesh had 250 friends logging onto his website on the day, to witness the wedding live. "That was truly an amazing feeling. Friends and family from all over the world were a part of the wedding without being physically present there." 

Scoring points 
Websites make for a good reference point for friends and family attending a wedding Unlike paper cards, these make for a more interactive forum No scope of postal goof ups. It's all at the click of a mouse A lot more information can be fed into a website, as compared to an invitation card A great tool for wedding planners