Newegg has won the fight against patent trolls before, but it loses this round. Next up will be the appeal.

Jury: Newegg infringes Spangenberg patent, must pay $2.3 million

TQP’s single patent is tied to a failed modem business run by Michael Jones, formerly president of Telequip. The company has acquired more than $45 million in patent licensing fees by getting settlements from a total of 139 companies. TQP argues that the patent covers SSL or TLS combined with the RC4 cipher, a common Internet security system used by retailers like Newegg.

The $2,400 Porsche Design BlackBerry P’9982 is a repackaged BlackBerry Z10 for the rich.

There are many status symbols but this is probably a bad idea unless you only need a simple phone for texting and calling.

This is a great article. All I can say is that you should read it.

Software Is Reorganizing the World

And this global technology cloud truly stretches over the whole earth, touching down at various locales both in the U.S. — at Sendgrid in Boulder, Tumblr in New York, Rackspace in Austin, Snapchat in L.A., Zipcar in Boston, Opscode in Seattle — and outside it — at Skype in Estonia, Tencent in Shenzhen, Soundcloud in Germany, Flipkart in India, Spotify in Sweden, Line in Tokyo, and Waze in Israel. Cultural connections forming between people in this cloud are becoming stronger than the connections between their geographic neighbors. Palo Alto’s Accel invests in India’s Flipkart, Estonia’s Skype is folded into Seattle’s Microsoft, Israel’s Waze is merged into Mountain View’s Google, and the SoundCloud engineer on a laptop in Berlin builds a deeper relationship with the VC in New York than the nearby Bavarian bank.

Today, the geocenter of the global technology cloud is still hovering over Silicon Valley. But in a world where technology is making location increasingly less important, tomorrow the reverse diaspora may well assemble somewhere else.

WIRED.com writes about Stereopublic, a crowd-sourced app to find peace and quiet.

Stereopublic’s creator, Jason Sweeney, explains Stereopublic as an app that navigates users through a city based on noise—in this case the lack thereof. “It was very personal desire to think of future cities as having dedicated quiet spaces that were either built into them or to nurture those spaces that already existed,” he says. “So the idea for the app came about when thinking of a way to make a ‘quiet-seeking’ tool that the public could freely access to participate in this quest for quiet.”

The idea is that as users walk around a city, they geo-tag their favorite quiet spots. You can add a picture, record an audio file and file the spot under different mood categories depending on how you’re feeling, essentially creating an interactive map of the most peaceful spots in a city.

TechCrunch reports on Apple filing a patent application for Touch ID.

The patent describes a system that not only siloes data on the Touch ID “enclave” section of the A7 processor, but that also encrypts the fingerprint maps registered on the device to make it that much more difficult for any thieves to even attempt to pull the data off in any kind of usable form. The enclave is a one-way street, too: the system can check new fingerprints against the stored ones, but there’s no way to check or call up the stored fingerprints at all for external examination once they’re registered.

Engadget reports that Waze is partnering with Universal Pictures to use celebrity voices to give driving directions.

Waze wants to give us what we really want, which is, quite naturally, driving directions delivered with the gravitas only Hollywood actors can bring. To that end, the social navigation company has partnered up with Universal Pictures to deliver some cross-promotional synergy that’ll have actors in forthcoming films acting as your virtual co-pilot.

If it included Benedict Cumberbatch or Chris Hemsworth it would definitely pique my interest.