The smart phone war is being waged in the courts, and the Nokia-Apple battle is heating up.
The two phone manufacturers have been engaged in a patent dispute since 2009. Adding to the never-ending litigation, Nokia has added seven more allegedly infringed patents to its list this week.
The new complaints follow a ruling by a U.S. trade panel judge dismissing five others.
Appstore or App Store?
Let's first get this straight. Appstore (lowercase "s" and no space) is the name of Amazon's newly opened Android store. App Store belongs to iPhone and iPad behemoth, Apple. App Store clearly came first.
Now that that's out of the way, you may have heard that Apple filed suit last week charging that Amazon has violated its App Store trademark. The Battle of the Apps is going to be quite the spectacle.
FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet.
Pornography web sites have finally been given the green light to establish the .xxx suffix for their domain names, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Names (ICAAN) .
Thumbs up? Thumbs down?
Well, not surprisingly, the reception has been mixed.
You have that shiny new iPad and you want to put it to use in your law practice. As you pack your briefcase for work travel it dawns on you:
That 5-hour flight would be a perfect chance to review documents or pleadings for an upcoming meeting or hearing, especially if you won't have WiFi access during the flight.
But the number of documents required to consume five or more hours of flight time would take up a lot of room. What to do?
Enter the GoodReader app.
The Onion recently joked that Congress forgot how to pass a law, but to the contrary, "Do Not Track Me" legislation was introduced today by Rep. Jackie Speier. The bill is designed to allow consumers to block unwanted tracking of personal information online.
The "Do Not Track Me" legislation is intended to be analogous to the "Do Not Call" list for telemarketing. The bill is supported by the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog as well as a number of consumer advocates. 80% of Americans support a Do Not Track option, according to Consumer Watchdog.
A group of lawyers was recently talking about LinkedIn and the Facebook-like invitations for new "friends" they receive. Many attorneys said they ignored the invitations because they didn't know who they were.
Seriously?
LinkedIn, after all, is a professional networking site. Most attorneys who have a profile on LinkedIn are likely there to expand their network of professionals and potential clients. And since the site just announced they now have 100 million registered users in more than 200 countries, there are a lot of good reasons to be accepting those LinkedIn invitations.
It's that time of the year again: the 25th ABA TECHSHOW will going on at the Hilton Chicago from April 11 to 13.
The silver jubilee celebration of the legal technology event will feature over 50 programs on legal technology, including e-discovery, going paperless and social networking, with over 1,500 people expected to attend. The event will also have a number of experts and manufactures of legal technology on hand.
Ah yes, the Mac vs PC debate. It's a debate that never seems to die, and has filled up countless pages of comments from trolls.
But despite the hoopla, a debate still exists as to which makes for a better computer for a lawyer.
The truth is, there is not a consensus in this debate.
FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet.
Natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis, have occurred on this planet for many millennia. And such phenomena have become disasters where humans have populated in heavy concentrations in areas subject to such phenomena.
Lots of attorneys talk the talk about "going paperless," but if you want to walk the walk, you need a serious tool to get it done. For a growing number of attorneys, that tool is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, or its Mac brother, the S1500M.
The ScanSnap is a stand-alone scanner that is fast, comes with amazing software and makes going paperless super efficient and easy.
2010 was a big year for the iPad, and we found that it wasn't just for play. More and more attorneys are using the iPad at their office as well as in court. With the launch of the iPad 2 around the corner, we thought it would be an excellent time to briefly mention three iPad apps designed for jury selection, or voir dire.
The apps are Jury Duty, iJuror, and Jury Tracker. All three allow you to access and save juror information in one place, making jury selection easier than ever. Each app has different features and they come in at slightly different price points. Jury Duty is $39.99, while iJuror and Jury Tracker are $9.99 each.
FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet.
Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks are not creatures of the past. Indeed, they still are with us, as exemplified by the recent DDOS attack on WordPress, a blogging site.
According to recent press reports, this attack impacted connectivity for a large number of the 25 million WordPress bloggers.
The press reports indicate that the magnitude of this distributed denial of service attack was multiple gigabits and tens of millions of packets of information per second, impacting data centers in Chicago, San Antonio and Dallas. While WordPress reportedly is seeking to grapple with the attack, it is having some difficulty based on the sheer size of the attack.
So the iPad 2 is out and it's creating a big buzz. Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance, despite his health issues, at the unveiling yesterday. But the official release from Apple doesn't come until March 11 in the states and March 25 in Europe.
Still, consumers are already excited about the new tablet. Should attorneys be equally as excited? Will the iPad 2 help you bill more efficiently or streamline things at hearings or in court?
So what are the hottest products among attorneys right now? Sure you hear about the iPad, the ScanSnap and all kinds of other toys and gizmos.
But there is one piece of software that makes life easier for thousands of attorneys that you don't always hear much about: HotDocs.
Do you use your iPhone a lot? Do you have AT&T? Do you get a lot of dropped calls?
If you answered yes to these questions, AT&T is running an offer that you will definitely want to look out for. For select customers, they are offering the AT&T 3G MicroCell signal booster, which is designed to act like a mini cell tower.
According to the manufacturer the device provides:
FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet.
My, how the Internet has changed life as most of us know it.
It seems like only yesterday, in the 1990s, when I "upgraded" to a 56k "screaming" modem to gain faster Internet access. The modem would make that funky sound as my computer tried to log on, and then at times it literally would take more than a minute to simply load one static page.
