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...

Intel and RealNetworks announced on Thursday that Intel will purchase video codec software, 190 patents and 170 patent applications from RealNetworks for a total of $120 million. “We believe this agreement enhances our ability to continue to offer richer experiences and innovative solutions to end users across a wide spectrum of devices, including through Ultrabook devices, smartphones and digital media,” said Renee James, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Servi...

The European Union will decide on February 13th whether or not to give its blessing to Google’s planned purchase of Motorola Mobility. Google recently provided European courts with more information in support of the merger, Reuters said. The European Union suspended its review of the merger on December 12th pending Google’s submission of documents that are considered “essential to its evaluation of the transaction.” Google announced on August 15th its intentions to purchase Motorola M...

Poor sales of the Nokia Lumia 800 and 710 may have prompted Nokia to resume acquisition talks with Microsoft during November, according to a recent Forbes interview with influential Russian tech blogger Eldar Murtazin. Rumors that Nokia was considering selling off its smartphone business to Microsoft first surfaced in June but were quickly shot down by both companies. Murtazin said, however, that the talks resumed again this past November and that it’s possible Nokia could be interested in selling i...

Google recently purchased 217 patents from IBM, including 28 published patents and 188 of IBM’s granted patents. The transaction was posted in the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s assignment database on Tuesday. SEO by the Sea said the patents are related to email administration, IM apps, video conferencing, presentation software and more. It remains unclear how much Google paid for the patents, but the company also purchased 1,000 patents from IBM in July of last year and another 1,023...

Samsung will purchase Sony’s 50% share of S-LCD, a joint venture created by both companies in 2004, for $939.6 million. Both companies will continue to cooperate on the development of new LCD panel technology, however, and Sony says it hopes to “secure a flexible and steady supply” of LCD panels from Samsung moving forward. “With whole ownership of S-LCD, Samsung anticipates heightened flexibility, speed and efficiency in both panel production and business operations,” Samsung sa...

Mediatech Capital managing partner Porter Bibb believes Verizon Communications is seriously considering making a bid for Netflix. Rumors swirled around recently suggesting that Verizon may team up with the kiosk movie rental service Redbox in 2012 to create its own streaming service to compete head-to-head with Netflix, although perhaps Verizon Communications is considering a different strategy. “I am hearing rumblings from inside Verizon that they are very serious about either Netflix or something sim...

Apple may be preparing to purchase Anobit, an fabless Israeli firm that specializes in flash storage solutions for mobile and enterprise markets. The Cupertino-based company could be willing to spend between $400 million and $500 million on Anobit, Calcalist reported Tuesday. Anobit’s website says its memory signal processing (MSP) technology “significantly improves endurance, performance and cost of flash storage products and systems.” Apple is reportedly already an Anobit customer for it...

Google on Wednesday took the wraps off a new and improved music service. Building onto “Music Beta by Google,” Google has launched Google Music, a publicly available cloud-based music services that will be free to users in the United States. Google Music users can add up to 20,000 songs from their local libraries to the cloud and stream them to any number of supported devices over the Internet. “Pinned” albums and songs are downloaded to devices and cached for local playback without th...

Huawei announced on Monday its intentions to purchase Symantec’s 49% stake in Huawei Symantec, a joint venture between the two companies that was originally formed in 2008, giving Huawei full control of the company. “The integration of Huawei Symantec’s innovative security and storage technology with Huawei’s enterprise products will reinforce Huawei’s leading position in cloud computing,” said Guo Ping, deputy chairman of Huawei.” The $530 million purchase is still pending regulato...

Amazon recently quietly purchased Yap, a Charlotte-based company that specializes in voice-to-text technology. CLTBlog, a Charlotte-focused website, discovered a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that doesn’t actually name Amazon as the purchaser of Yap, but it does attribute the acquisition to a company called “Dion Acquisition Sub,” and the “Surviving Corporation” listed by the SEC has the same address as an Amazon.com office located on 410 Terry ...

AT&T has pushed back the date it expects to close the books on its planned merger with T-Mobile and spectrum purchase from Qualcomm, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The carrier had originally planned to close both acquisitions by March of 2012, although it now expects the required approvals to take as much as three months longer to gain. The carrier now says the deal should be approved by the end of the first half next year. AT&T recently ran into speed bumps with both deals. In August th...

MetroPCS is interested in purchasing spectrum and subscribers from AT&T and T-Mobile, Bloomberg said Friday. Leap Wireless and Dish Network were also approached and Leap may still be interested in making an offer. The deal with MetroPCS would likely amount to less than $4 billion. In August, The Wall Street Journal revealed AT&T had hired Bank of America’s Merill Lynch to advise it on selling as much as $8 billion in assets. Later that month, the United States government sued to block the planne...

Rumor has it Microsoft is again toying with the idea of purchasing Yahoo. The Redmond, Washington-based company may partner with another unnamed firm in an effort to make a bid, an anonymous Microsoft executive told Reuters on Wednesday. However, Reuters noted that other divisions inside Microsoft are still not sold on making an offer on the troubled search engine. AllThingsD said rumors about Microsoft’s interest are not true and that the company is not currently interested in acquiring Yahoo. Several ...