Wi-Lan, a Canadian technology licensing company, has filed patent infringement lawsuits against Research in Motion (RIM), Motorola and UTStarcom. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, and alleges that the companies’ mobile devices and other equipment infringe patents held by Wi-Lan. Specific damages or remedies were not included in the filing.

Like many lawsuits of this type, it is impossible to determine an outcome at the start of the suit. Patent infringement cases are often very technical and can take years to litigate. Even more time can incur when the losing side decides to appeal the decision. Lower court judges, like federal district judges, will press for the sides to come to a settlement.

Wi-Lan recently announced it has cash reserves of nearly $92 million to litigate patent suits and negotiate settlements. Some in the industry have accused Wi-Lan of being a patent troll. A troll is a company that doesn’t make anything but holds patents for the sole purpose of suing others in the industry.

Wi-Lan

Alcatel-Lucent and SpeedCast Limited have announced today that they plan to jointly market, deploy and operate a shared, hosted DVB-H platform for mobile TV operators in Asia. The objective of the collaboration is to enable delivery of video content to operators for transmission to devices supporting the DVB-H mobile TV standard. The service will enable mobile TV service providers to deliver more than 20 TV channels via satellite to their transmission towers for terrestrial broadcast (in the UHF band) to DVB-H handheld devices.

A hosted managed service allows operators to reduce the capital and operational expenditures associated with mobile TV service. It also ensures a faster time-to-market.

“This hosted mobile TV broadcast offering will help lower the risk to service providers associated with introducing a new service, while at the same time giving them the opportunity to provide their customers with attractively priced services and richer content offerings,” said
Pierre-Jean Beylier, Chief Executive Officer of SpeedCast Limited.

SpeedCast
Alcatel-Lucent

According to legend, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) always gets their man. This time, instead of a lone mounted officer in a rocky and snow filled landscape catching the criminals, the market enforcement team of the RCMP caught three former executives from the telephone equipment company Nortel.

Former CEO Frank Dunn, Chief Financial Officer Douglas Beatty and corporate controller Michael Gollogy were charged today with fraudulently misstating financial results as Nortel attempted to right itself after the tech bubble burst of 2001.

The three were also accused of making false entries and omitting materials in Nortel’s books. The alleged illegalities date back to the start of 2002 and follow through to June 30 of 2003. It is believe the fraud was conducted to paper over the decline of company stock prices. Nortel eventually posted billions in losses and was forced to layoff thousands of employees.

Nortel reacted to the news of the criminal charges by issuing a statement saying the company wasn’t a target of the investigation and that the former executives were dismissed for cause in 2004.

In 2007, Nortel settled civil charges filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC claimed Nortel’s business practices let it meet “unrealistic” revenue and earnings forecasts it had provided to Wall Street. Nortel paid $35 million to settle the charges.

The RCMP said it received co-operation from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. and Ontario securities regulators, and Nortel.

The U.S. 9th Circuit appeals court ruled yesterday on the privacy of employees’ text messages and e-mails. The ruling makes it more difficult for employers to read correspondence sent by workers on company accounts. The ruling makes it illegal for employers that contract an outside business to transmit text messages to read them unless the worker agrees. Employee e-mails can only be read by employers if they are kept on an internal server.

The appellate ruling springs from a lawsuit filed by Ontario police Sgt. Jeff Quon and three other officers. They sued after wireless provider Arch Wireless turned over transcripts of Quon’s text messages to the Ontario police department. Police administrators read them to determine whether department-issued pagers were being used solely for work purposes.

A lawyer for the city of Ontario and its police department says his clients will probably appeal the ruling, which means the case could go before a six judge panel of the 9th Circuit or the Supreme Court of the United States.

In 2005, EarthLink began an ambitious project that would bring free Wi-Fi to the citizens of Philadelphia. EarthLink quit its effort in May because of complaints about signal service. In a city of over a million people, only 6,000 signed up for the EarthLink service. A new group of investors announced that they would finish the project.

Network Acquisition Company, a group made up of local investors, plans to finish the network, which is about 80% complete. Philadelphia is an American city that covers 135 square miles and has a citizenship of 1.4 million.

Mayor Michael Nutter, quick to point out no public money is being used for the Wi-Fi project, hopes the city will see economic opportunities flow from increased Internet access.

“We now have the potential to reach more people with this network than in any other city in America,” he said.

Network Acquisition Company has no plans to optimize the network for indoor users nor to provide customer service assistance. A device called a repeater can be bought for $200. A repeater will bring the Wi-Fi signal inside building but the goal of the company is to provide service for outside use. EarthLink had trouble sending signals into homes, and was therefore unpopular.

Network Acquisition Company plans to pay for the free Wi-Fi by selling businesses technology that allows employees to access corporate networks from remote locations. It is also considering location-based advertising, sponsorships and revenue sharing with specialized consumer application providers. This revenue will pay to complete the network, notably in low-income areas where many people don’t have Internet access.

Carrier Sprint Nextel announced today that its smart phone, the Samsung Instinct, will sell for $129.99 when it goes on sale Friday. The cheapest iPhone model, which reaches the public on July 11, sells for $199. It looks as though Sprint is hoping to compete with AT&T in the smart phone market by being cheaper and quicker to market.

The Instinct is similar to the new iPhone. It includes access to a fast wireless data network and a GPS receiver. Sprint worked closely with Samsung to develop the Instinct, and the carrier plans to spend quite a bit of money to promote the handset in the United States.

Earlier this year, Sprint hinted that the Instinct would cost over $200. Once Apple announced the price of the new iPhone, Sprint said it would match pricing. Today’s announcement, undercutting the iPhone by nearly $70, indicates that Sprint is willing to intensify the smart-phone competition.

Like the iPhone, a two year contract is required to buy the Instinct in the United States. The cheapest monthly plan has a cost close to $80 a month after taxes and fees. This makes the total contract price come in at about $1,900.

Samsung Instinct from Sprint

Joining the list of other products announced by Sony Ericsson at their press event in Singapore are three Bluetooth headsets: the HBH-PV715, 720, and 740. No pricing announced, hittin’ the shelves in Q4 08.

From left to right, below:

• “No-Fuss” headset
• 10 hours of talk time, 700 hours of standby
• Available in black or white.

• 3 “Style-up” faceplate options
• 11 hours of talk time, 800 hours of standby

• Desk stand and USB charger
• Status display
• 11 hours of talk time, 800 hours of standby

I’m in Singapore for CommunicAsia, and would love to do a meet-and-greet with any MobileCrunch/TechCrunch/CrunchGear readers while I’m here. If you’re in the area, drop me a line at greg@crunchgear.com or call +1 201-951-6516.

Update: We are meeting at Zouk at 8 pm, contact me for further details

YMax Corp. isn’t a well known name when it comes to telecommunications in the United States. And MagicJack sounds like the product in an infomercial that helps you change a tire. But the two names may become synonymous with cheap broadband calling.

MagicJack is a device about the size of a matchbox that plugs into a PC. A regular phone can then be plugged into MagicJack so the user can make and receive calls much like using a regular landline. And it is cheap. This miracle of technology costs $39.95 and comes with one year of unlimited free calls to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. A second year’s service costs $19.95.

In January YMax was selling a few hundred units per pay. The company started a broad advertising campaign that month and now it is selling 8,000 to 9,000 MagicJacks per day. If the trend continues, YMax will have half a million subscribers by the end of June.

Unlike most voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers, YMax is licensed as a phone company in the continental U.S. and operates a wide network of servers to carry its calls. Most VoIP providers outsource that side of the business.

According to YMax Chief Executive Don Burns, many customers buy MagicJack as a complement to a cell phone, compensating for poor cell coverage at home. When the computer is off, the service can be set to forward incoming calls to a cell phone number.

YMax’s business plan doesn’t allow for much profit from MagicJack. It charges about as much for a year of service as its rivals do for a month. To boost income, YMax plans to sell advertising that shows up on the PC screen while calls are being placed. Ads would target users based on the location of the PC.

To boost sales even more, MagicJack will go on sale through the shopping channel QVC and big-box retailers.

MagicJack

Following Sony Ericsson’s C905 announcement this morning, we had a bit of time to poke and prod at this 8.1 megapixel beast. Things were a bit chaotic, with just about every reporter in Singapore itchin’ to fondle it, so there wasn’t an opportunity to get an on-video hands on. Fortunately, we’ve got pics a’plenty.

As it’s obviously the phone’s key selling point, I spent most of my time toying with the 8.1 megapixel camera. The handset I handled wasn’t on the network, so anything that required voice or data wasn’t available.

Photo quality was far, far above the average camera phone’s clunker cam. For day-to-day and informal use, it’ll get the job done. There were a few times where camera quality was inconsistent, with a few shots appearing a bit washed out or exhibiting the standard camera phone blue-ish tinge. However, with Sony Ericsson having at least 3 more months to polish up the color management before the Q4 launch, they might be able to knock these issues out. For the most part, however, photo quality seemed just fine.

Unfortunately, the testing environment was far too bright to test low-light shooting. As a note, the shot Sony Ericsson chose to show as a low-light example wasn’t exactly flattering — so don’t get too excited about taking artsy shots next time you hit the club.

Jumping into the photo configuration menu was simple and straight forward. The automatic brightness balance toggle was all of 4 clicks away(Menu, down, check, confirm), and seemed to work quite well — as did the rest of the photo enhancement features.

Presumably because of the combination of a slider form factor and the hefty amount of optics, the handset is pretty deep in the chunky zone. That said, it felt incredibly solid. The weight was well distributed, and the slide mechanism was nice and buttery.

It won’t go and dethrone your digital SLR, but it could quite easily nix the need to carry a point-and-shoot for those spur of the moment shots. Though the price and regional availability are unknown, expect the C905 to launch in Q4 of 2008.

Sony Ericsson showed off its new gaming phone, the F305, today. The handset has a built-in motion sensor that lets users play games much like games are played on the popular Wii console. It won’t be long before you see people whipping their arms around like they are throwing invisible bowling balls or practicing their fly-fishing technique.

“This is our first foray into motion gaming,” Howard Lewis, vice president and head of the product business unit, said of the F305 mobile phone launch held in conjunction with CommunicAsia, an industry convention and exhibition.
“We see gaming as a way to interact with our young customers… it’s a new area of the market that Sony Ericsson is entering into,” he said.

The phone comes pre-loaded with 11 games, all of which will have arms swinging to active the motion sensor just right. The games include, Bowling, Bass fishing, Jockey, Johnny Crash™ Stuntman Does Texas, Tropical Madness™, Racing Fever™ GT, The Sims™ 2, Jewel Quest™ 2, Lumines™, Asteroids™ and Quadrapop™ Robotics.

Nintendo’s Wii console is wildly popular, so the F305 may be too. I used to be hooked on bass fishing games, so a device that lets me play on the go would make this angler jump for joy like a large mouth hooked with crank bait. Did I mention you can make calls with the F305? When you haul in the big one there is nothing like calling friends for bragging rights.

Sony Ericsson

As expected, Sony Ericsson has given their 8.1 megapixel C905 the official treatment at a press conference in Singapore.

Not too surprisingly, everything that leaked out last week turned out true: face recognition, a big ol’ lot of photo fix features, Xenon flash, a-GPS, Geotagging, WiFi, and DLNA support.

Its got a 2.4″ inch 240×320 screen, with up to 380 hours of standby time and 9/4 hours of GSM/UMTS talk time respectively. It’ll be available available in Q4 of 2008 – but where? Sony Ericsson is keepin’ it to “selected markets”, but with both 2100 mhz and 850/1900 mhz flavors offered, it’s safe to assume we’ll see it in North America and parts of Europe and Asia. No word yet on pricing.

A day before the doors to CommunicAsia open, Samsung has started the festivities off with a bang by unveiling the Samsung Omnia. I had the opportunity to put my greasy hands all over it — check out the hands on video below. More details and impressions coming soon.

PlayPhone, operator of the largest network of mobile content destinations in North America, has formed a marketing partnership with Cellufun, the world’s largest mobile gaming portal. PlayPhone now has access to over 5.5 million monthly unique visitors, nearly 75 million monthly page views and a large catalog of ad-supported free mobile games from its partner Cellufun.

“This agreement is a win-win for PlayPhone and Cellufun,” said Ron Czerny, Founder and CEO of PlayPhone. “Both companies have very similar customer market segments and cross-promoting mobile entertainment in this manner brings both of our strengths to the table. It is already proving to be successful and because of that, we will continue to pursue similar partnerships with other interested parties.”

Cellufun’s free ad-supported games are now available at www.playphone.com. The collaboration includes run-of-site advertising and contextual integration of the PlayPhone catalog on the Cellufun WAP portal.

“Having our free, award-winning games distributed through PlayPhone’s vast network is a great opportunity,” said Arthur Goikhman, CEO and Co-founder of Cellufun. “The combination of our unique mobile offerings and PlayPhone’s great mix of branded content has proven to be a real boon for both companies.”

Cellufun

Glu Mobile, the mobile game company, has partnered with Sony Pictures Television International (SPTI) to distribute Glu titles on behalf of SPTI in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Commenting on the agreement, Mike Wald, senior vice president, pay television and new media distribution, SPTI said: “This agreement with Glu is strategically important to us as we build our digital distribution business. Mobile content, including mobile games, is a core part of our business and we’re delighted to leverage Glu’s distribution expertise to extend the reach of our titles to mobile carriers around the world.”

One of the first games to launch under the agreement will be based on the upcoming movie, Hancock. The game was produced by SPTI and will be available this June. Glu will also distribute new versions of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, which are also produced by Sony. SPTI will continue to manage the development and production of mobile games in line with signature Sony Pictures franchises.

Glu

If there was ever any doubt that Mozilla could pull off something amazing with Firefox Mobile, this video pretty much stomps all over it.

Aza Raskin, head of user experience for Mozilla Labs, put this user interface concept demo on his blog this morning. Simply put: it rocks my face off. Their idea for how to handle tabs just about annihilates everything we’ve seen from other mobile browsers thus far, and the idea of tying nav controls/tab access to horizontal panning as a means of maximizing screen real estate usage is ingenious.

If they’re putting this much thought into the other aspects of Firefox Mobile, WebKit oughtta be shakin’ in its boots.

Almost certainly a result of the 3G iPhone’s $199.99 price tag, Sprint has been passing the word around internally that the Samsung Instinct will go for $199.99 (after contract rebates, that is) when it launches in just a few weeks.

The full retail price will be $449.99. A two-year contract will drop $150 bucks off that price via instant rebate, with Sprint throwing in an extra $100 dollars off via mail-in rebate. That takes it down to $199.99, matching it cent for cent with the new iPhone.

Unlike the AT&T and the iPhone, however, Sprint will sell the Instinct at full price to those who don’t want to renew their contracts.

[Via PhoneNews]

Addicted to Twitter, but want to get a bit more creative with your tweets? Cellspin, a free mobile blogging application which allows users to blog text, video, audio, and photos to a big ol’ list of sites, has now added support for Twitter and Pownce.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Cellspin to work at all on my S60 N78. I signed up for an account, added Twitter to my list of sites, and installed the application – all of which went perfectly smooth. From there, I couldn’t get it to actually post anything. The camera button behaved as expected (taking me to the photo snapping application) but regardless of what I did (snap photo and back out, snap photo and save, snap photo and upload to web, etc) I found myself back at the main menu rather than the posting screen. Same story for video and audio recording.

This could very well just be an issue with this specific handset. They also offer support for Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and a ton of other devices — Check’em out, and let us know how it works for you.

Hot on the tail of the C905 detail leak, some fine gent going by the name “PhonerX” has pushed a demo video of the handset up to the internets. With all of these demo videos leaking out, SE is either doing a reaaally bad job at keeping things under wraps, or leaking these intentionally.

Besides the stuff we know from the details leaked earlier, the video indicates that there will be upload support for Flickr, Picasa, Blogger, Youtube, and Facebook.

[Via Se-nse]

Starbucks announced today that it has settled a lawsuit brought against it and AT&T by service provider T-Mobile. The suit claimed that Starbucks colluded with AT&T to offer Wi-Fi Internet access in its cafes even though the coffee chain had an exclusive agreement with T-Mobile that allowed T-Mobile to sell Wi-Fi in the cafes. The lawsuit alleged that AT&T and Starbucks were not abiding by an agreement the three companies reached over how Starbucks would compensate T-Mobile so Starbucks could form an exclusive partnership with AT&T to provide Wi-Fi access.

“T-Mobile, AT&T and Starbucks have entered into a memorandum of understanding to resolve their disputes and are committed to providing a high quality Wi-Fi experience for customers,” Starbucks spokeswoman Stacey Krum said in the statement.

The terms of the settlement haven’t been disclosed.

For more information about the agreement between Starbucks and AT&T, see MobileCrunch story: Starbucks to offer Wi-Fi with AT&T.