Microsoft and Facebook on Monday announced a $550 million patent agreement in which the social networking giant will purchase a portion of the patent portfolio Microsoft recently acquired recently from Aol. Facebook will take ownership of approximately 650 former Aol patents, and it will license the remaining patents owned by the software giant. Microsoft will retain ownership of approximately 275 Aol patents and will license the additional 650 Aol patents to be transferred to Facebook. “Today’s agre...

AOL and Microsoft on Monday announced an agreement in which the software giant will purchase 800 patents from AOL in a $1.056 billion cash deal. Microsoft will also license more than 300 additional patents from AOL as part of the agreement. “The agreement with Microsoft represents the culmination of a robust auction process for our patent portfolio,” said Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chairman and CEO. “We continue to hold a valuable patent portfolio as highlighted by the license we entered into wi...

Reuters is reporting that AOL, Inc. is contemplating a breakup through “a complicated series of transactions” that could end in a merger with search giant Yahoo!. The publication is citing “sources close to the plans” and adds that “the latest discussions derive from plans contemplated in 2008 and 2009 before Time Warner spun off AOL to Time Warner shareholders.” Both AOL and Yahoo! declined to comment on the report when contacted by Reuters; AOL’s stock price rose sl...

Analytics company ComScore has released its October search engine market share numbers and… instead of making you fire up your search-site of choice and finding the information yourself, we thought we would just put it right there for you. October’s search numbers are as follows: Google 66.3%, up from 66.1% in September; Bing 11.5%, up from 11.2% in September; Yahoo 16.5%, down from 16.7% the month prior; Ask.com 3.6% down 0.1% from the previous month; and AOL 2.1%, down from 2.3%. We are curious...

Remember when you could download all of the MP3s you wanted from peer-to-peer site Napster and not get sued by the RIAA? Remember trying to find an audio player that would play all of those pesky MP3s? Remember Winamp?!? Initially monikered WinAMP, the audio player was first released on April 21, 1997. Winamp gained popularity among audiophiles for being feature-rich, small, free, and compatible. Winamp also won fans over with its skinable interface, allowing you to inflict your personal steez on your media p...

Google, Inc. has purchased internet VoIP company Global IP Solutions for a cool $68.2 million; a 27.5% premium over the company’s current stock price. While Global IP may not be a household name, you might be familiar with what they provide and to whom they provide it: the back-end VoIP engine used by the Yahoo!, AIM, WebEx, Baidu, and Lotus chat systems. Google continues to bolster its portfolio of acquired companies that supplement its Google Voice and Google Talk services — you may recall Googl...

Today, ComScore released its search engine market share numbers for February 2010, and to be honest, there wasn’t much movement. Google and Bing both gained a little ground: Google’s market share rose 0.1 percentage point from 65.4% to 65.5% while Bing’s share gained 0.2% rising from 11.3% to 11.5%. Yahoo and Ask both gave up a little bit of the search pie: Yahoo declined from 17% to 16.8% and Ask fell slightly from 3.8% to 3.7% market share.  AOL’s slice of search remained unchanged ...

AOL introduced on Thursday a new sync application, AOL Sync, that will sync your AOL address book and calendar with Outlook and mobile phones. AOL has partnered with Funambol to deliver this bidirectional, over-the-air sync client. Funambol, for those who don’t know, is a popular open source synchronization solution that uses SyncML to push PIM data to mobile devices and desktop applications. Basically, it’s the poor man’s Exchange / BES. The AOL sync client supports Outlook, Outlook Express...

By now you all have heard that BlackBerry BIS 2.5 is rolling out to U.S. carriers on June 29th. Heck, there’s even going to be some downtime. But, maybe that isn’t enough? Maybe you’d like more information. We’ve definitely got you covered in that area. We just got a hold of this presentation outlining BIS 2.5 and all the various features. The sad part? As some of you know, all the sexy stuff requires BlackBerry OS 4.5 which according to the presentation will not be available until Sep...

This is a happy, happy day for any AIM addicts toting around a Windows Mobile device. There are 3rd party solutions (JiveTalk, what up!), but it’s always comforting to get a piece of software directly from the source. AOL has finally released an updated AIM client, and boy does it look sexy! We’re giving it a go right now but sadly, it doesn’t look as if we’ll get file transfers at the moment. Let’s hope this feature makes it way into the final build as it is still in beta. It al...