In Wisconsin, Apple Scores An Early Victory Against Motorola

A recent summary judgement in the Wisconsin chapter of Apple vs. Motorola could set a precedent for patent disputes across the country. On Friday, before Google announced its decision to cut 4,000 jobs at the phone maker, the judge in Wisconsin ruled in a summary judgement that Motorola cannot sue to stop the sale of Apple's patent-flouting devices. Rather, the technology in question ought to be licensable to folks like Apple and Microsoft under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory, otherwise known as FRAND, terms. Holding Motorola to FRAND terms would also cut down the price that Apple has to pay to license those patents. As Foss Patent explains, this could have an impact on FRAND-related disputes in other places, including the California chapter of Apple vs. Samsung.

Klout Gets An Algorithm And Interface Overhaul

Klout, that score-keeper of online activity, has announced changes to the way it calculates and displays scores and rankings. For one, it will take into account 4 times as many signals, AllThingsD explains, picking up 400 cues like list memberships and Facebook subscriptions before assigning a person a score. Klout's controvertial assigned scores and areas of "influence" have sometimes baffled users in the past, but Klout hopes to make their workings a little more transparent in this update. For one, Klout will indicate in a user's timeline when their influenc-o-meter spikes.

Google+ Joins The Vanity URL Game

Google's revealed that its social network system Google+ is going to allow users to adopt vanity URLs. The move will start with verified people and pages that are mainly celebrities or brands, and then eventually roll out to more users. Currently Google+ user pages are identified by a long string of numbers as an identifier, which is practical but hardly memorable.

Google is following a trail blazed by its more established rivals Twitter and Facebook, which have already adopted a more text-based identifier--Facebook more recently. The use of a simpler user ID allows both brands and named users to stand out a little and may also facilitate discovery of new users and content.

Google's blog posting about the news notes that it will expand to include "many more" users, but doesn't conclusively say that all of the users of the service will be able to choose a short, memorable URL.