Category: Tech news

Back in Skype’s early days, it was adding users so fast that it liked to boast that it was “the fastest growing, globally available communications tool in history.” Well, by at least one measure (registered users 9 months after launch), mobile video chat service Tango is outpacing Skype. Tango now has 17 million registered users across both Apple and Android devices, only 9 months after it launched. By comparison, Skype celebrated 9 million users on its first birthday back in 2004.

Today, Skype has more than 600 million registered users, so Tango still has a long way to go. But the company wants to reach 100 million users over the next year. (Don’t we all?). If it does that, it will certainly earn the title of fastest growing communications tool.

But even getting to 17 million registered users in less than a year is quite an accomplishment. Tango took four months to get to 8 million, and another five months to add another 9 million. And all on mobile too. Tango is adding 2.5 million registered users per month.

The number of active users is 5.5 million in the last 30 days. Tango’s peer-to-peer service is handling 2.5 million minutes worth of calls every day, and the average call is 4 minutes.

Tango came out just as Apple was spending millions of marketing dollars promoting its own mobile video chat feature, FaceTime. Whereas FaceTime only works between Apple devices, Tango works across platforms on both iOS and Android. That cross-platform compatibility really helped drive growth. Downloads are split 50/50 between the two, and Tango is the No. 6 most popular free social networking app for the iPhone.

Tango already has 56 employees, and is building an engineering team in China, where it is also growing among users. The service is still free, but Tango will introduce premium paid features at some point in the future.

What is incredible about Tango’s growth is that it doesn’t even offer any desktop or Web software yet. Although, this seems like an obvious direction for new products, going mobile first certainly hasn’t hurt the company.

Back in Skype’s early days, it was adding users so fast that it liked to boast that it was “the fastest growing, globally available communications tool in history.” Well, by at least one measure (registered users 9 months after launch), mobile video chat service Tango is outpacing Skype. Tango now has 17 million registered users across both Apple and Android devices, only 9 months after it launched. By comparison, Skype celebrated 9 million users on its first birthday back in 2004.

Today, Skype has more than 600 million registered users, so Tango still has a long way to go. But the company wants to reach 100 million users over the next year. (Don’t we all?). If it does that, it will certainly earn the title of fastest growing communications tool.

But even getting to 17 million registered users in less than a year is quite an accomplishment. Tango took four months to get to 8 million, and another five months to add another 9 million. And all on mobile too. Tango is adding 2.5 million registered users per month.

The number of active users is 5.5 million in the last 30 days. Tango’s peer-to-peer service is handling 2.5 million minutes worth of calls every day, and the average call is 4 minutes.

Tango came out just as Apple was spending millions of marketing dollars promoting its own mobile video chat feature, FaceTime. Whereas FaceTime only works between Apple devices, Tango works across platforms on both iOS and Android. That cross-platform compatibility really helped drive growth. Downloads are split 50/50 between the two, and Tango is the No. 6 most popular free social networking app for the iPhone.

Tango already has 56 employees, and is building an engineering team in China, where it is also growing among users. The service is still free, but Tango will introduce premium paid features at some point in the future.

What is incredible about Tango’s growth is that it doesn’t even offer any desktop or Web software yet. Although, this seems like an obvious direction for new products, going mobile first certainly hasn’t hurt the company.

Exclusive: Professional social network LinkedIn has shut down API access to a number of developers for terms of service violations, according to the company. The six developers whose access to LinkedIn’s API include Facebook-focused professional network BranchOut, Monster’s social recruiting app Beknown, brand management app Visible.me, resume service Daxtra, professional reputation manager Mixtent and CRM-Gadget.

The shut down of access for BranchOut and Monster’s similar (and recently launched) app BeKnown are particularly surprising. According to LinkedIn, BranchOut, which has been compared to a LinkedIn for Facebook, violated the network’s API TOS with its plans for a premium enterprise recruiting search tool. Charging fees for access to LinkedIn’s content, is a no-no, says the network.

LinkedIn says that it cut off access to its API for BeKnown because the app was using the LinkedIn APIs to send messages to promote BeKnown (and thus profit from the API). LinkedIn is also concerned that BeKnown will be charging for enterprise services related to the API, similar to BranchOut. Mixtent and Visible.me were also shut down for the same reasons. And CRM-Gadget and Daxtra were both shut down for storing LinkedIn member data.

In the case of BranchOut and BeKnown, it’s hard not to think of the whole Twitter-UberMedia debacle, in which Twitter shut down API access to UberMedia for TOS violations, including trademarks, privacy and monetization violations. UberMedia is a direct competitor to Twitter, with it army of third-party clients.

Likewise, BranchOut (and now BeKnown) are competitors to LinkedIn in some ways. BranchOut, which is backed by Accel, Norwest, Floodgate, and Redpoint, allows you to network and find jobs through your friends on Facebook. The company also allows you to import skills, education, and job history from LinkedIn as well. And the company is allowing brands and organizations to post jobs to users. The startup has been growing in a territory that LinkedIn has not yet invaded—Facebook.

LinkedIn, which has 20,000 developers using its APIs, has been on fairly good terms with its developers minus a few stumbles. In January, LinkedIn shut down access to CubeDuel, a service that mixes the best (or worst) of Hot or Not with the professional social network. Apparently CubeDuel exceeded LinkedIn’s API limits, but it was actually the startup’s fault.

LinkedIn says it is open to reinstating its APIs to these developers and startups if they comply with the network’s TOS. LinkedIn has partnership deals with some developers where startups pay fees for the API (which they can monetize off of).

But LinkedIn could probably learn a thing or two from Twitter’s tenuous situation with its developers, and should definitely navigate these waters very carefully.

Update:

BranchOut issued this statement in response to LinkedIn’s move:

At BranchOut we consider the next generation platform for professional networking to be Facebook. Changes to the LinkedIn API have little impact on the BranchOut experience, as it was only being used by a small fraction of our users. That said, we believe user data should be owned by the user, and that people should be allowed to share their data with the new services and contexts that provide the most utility.

We’ve analyzed our statistics, and it has led to a pretty exciting discovery for us—namely that we are causing a groundswell within a much larger audience than that addressed by the prior generation of career services. BranchOut users encompass not only the professional networker, but also the far larger base of 700 million Facebook users worldwide who would like to use their social graph to help them in business, recruiting, sales, and job search. For example, in addition to white collar professionals, our users are college students, workers in retail, manufacturing, hospitality, military, government, and others who have yet to find a professional voice within a social network. We are excited to be the first to give this larger global audience a relevant professional networking solution.

And here’s Monster’s response:

We are surprised and disappointed by LinkedIn’s decision, which we believe not only goes against the interests of LinkedIn users, but also contradicts what LinkedIn claims to stand for – openness and connectivity. Professional networkers are social in nature and LinkedIn has just limited their ability to connect when and where they want. They’ve taken away users’ rights to control how and when they can share their own profile data and personal contacts. We also note that it was within days of Monster’s launch of BeKnown that LinkedIn decided to block the API when there have been other networking-oriented apps using the API for months.While this move by LinkedIn creates an inconvenience for their users, BeKnown members will continue to build their networks from all the largest online sites including Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Monster.

Here’s a good way to spend the last few hours of your work week as we head into the long holiday weekend: Google has just launched a new game called Nexus Contraptions. It’s full of slick graphics, physics, and gadgetry, and while I’m not entirely sure what it has to do with Android, it’s fun.

The game is similar to a handful of games you’ll find on Android and iOS (or, for your old-school gamers out there, The Incredible Machine). You’re tasked with getting a ball to a special funnel by constructing a Rube Goldberg-esque machine filled with bouncy things, fans, and magnets.

The balls are supposed to represent some of the Nexus S’s features, including Maps and Search —  as you complete each level, the ball gets pushed into the phone by a giant robotic arm. I haven’t finished the game yet, but I’m sure a stirring conclusion awaits those who do. Or maybe you’ll get to watch a Nexus S ad. Charge forth!

Google is Greek myth-level ambitious, trying to fight the war for web audience on all fronts.

And just as it’s officially begun the battle in social, reports today hold that the search company is trying to court streaming video service Hulu away from Yahoo, presumably for the potential licensing and advertising deals from major brands like Coca Cola and Disney. Microsoft is also reportedly in talks with the site, which is the 10th most popular video destination online.

Declining TV viewership has left tech behemoths scrambling to be first to capture the mindshare of web audiences. Hulu’s viewership numbers (28 million monthly viewers according to Comscore), licensing deals and the estimated $500 million in revenue that it will bring in this year from ads and Hulu Plus are a tempting proposition to web services like YouTube focused on dominating the video distribution space.

And it’d be a much better bargain than already public competitor Netflix, whose market cap is currently $14.17 billion.

Hulu also has the lure of premium content deals which Google has struggled with in the past, offering users access to popular shows like “The Daily Show” “Modern Family” and “Glee.” Google’s recent acquisition of Next New Networks and the creation of YouTube Next was in and of itself a premium content play, but for original and not studio-produced highly advertiser friendly fare. Google also continues to make television related acquisitions on the technology side as well, most recently SageTV and WideVine.

Hulu would be a good get for its advertising cache alone. Imagine the potential … Through its piecemeal efforts Google has already set up multiple distribution channels for video (Android), web (YouTube) and (less successfully) in the home with Google TV. Success is a matter of getting all these sundry interests, aligned.

Image: Divine Harvester

Here’s a good way to spend the last few hours of your work week as we head into the long holiday weekend: Google has just launched a new game called Nexus Contraptions. It’s full of slick graphics, physics, and gadgetry, and while I’m not entirely sure what it has to do with Android, it’s fun.

The game is similar to a handful of games you’ll find on Android and iOS (or, for your old-school gamers out there, The Incredible Machine). You’re tasked with getting a ball to a special funnel by constructing a Rube Goldberg-esque machine filled with bouncy things, fans, and magnets.

The balls are supposed to represent some of the Nexus S’s features, including Maps and Search —  as you complete each level, the ball gets pushed into the phone by a giant robotic arm. I haven’t finished the game yet, but I’m sure a stirring conclusion awaits those who do. Or maybe you’ll get to watch a Nexus S ad. Charge forth!

Late last night, it was revealed that Nortel had picked a winner for their patent portfolio. To the surprise of many, that winner was not Google, which had put up the initial “stalking horse” bid to get the ball rolling. Instead, the winner was a “consortium” of industry players — a consortium that includes Apple, RIM, Microsoft, Sony, and others. In other words, this sounds to us like the absolute worst possible scenario for Google. It’s not just that one of their major rivals won the rights to the over 6,000 patents. It’s that all of them did.

Unsurprisingly, Google is not happy.

“This outcome is disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition. We will keep working to reduce the current flood of patent litigation that hurts both innovators and consumers,” Kent Walker, Google’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel said in a statement that Google sent out to members of the press.

Okay, but come on, that’s a bit bland. If I were Google, I’d be more than “disappointed”, I’d be pissed off. Again, they’re the ones who got the ball rolling with a $900 million opening bid. Meanwhile, things weren’t looking too hot for Apple. While the DoJ quickly cleared Google to make a run on the patents, they weren’t so sure about Apple. And then Microsoft started complaining that if Google won the rights to the patents they could nullify the existing agreements Nortel had in place for licensing out those patents (which may or may not have even been true). It looked like Google was in the drivers seat.

But now it sure looks like that while all of this interference was going on, Google’s competitors were getting together behind the scenes to come up with a combined offer — $4.5 billion — that Nortel couldn’t refuse (and Google likely couldn’t in their right mind, match).

And the truth is that Google is pissed off. How do you we know? Because while they’re releasing muted statements, they’re also trying to have off-the-record conversations to further express their displeasure. And they’re pointing us to pieces like Mike Masnick’s which features wording like:

So, Microsoft apparently got together with Apple, EMC, Ericsson, RIM and Sony… and coughed up an insane $4.5 billion. It’s kind of brilliant in a nefarious way. With six companies together, they could each spend less than the $900 million initially pitched by Google… and then just all agree not to sue each other, but leave open the option to sue anyone else.

And they’re pointing out what they believe to be similarities between this situation and the one involving Novell patents, which the DoJ looked into and decided to force changes — pointing out that the open source community was not happy. Of course, this has nothing to do with the open source community. But it certainly is possible that the DoJ will not like this consortium bid on the Nortel patents one bit. The courts in both the U.S. and Canada still have to approve the bid for it to clear, and it certainly is possible that changes will be forced once again.

We’ve told Google we’re happy to have an on-the-record conversation about all of this. I’m just not sure what the point of venting off-the-record is at this point. Google is pissed off, and they should be! And they should express that openly!

I need to start with a warning. Depending on your work environment, this may not be safe for work. Especially if you don’t want to hear some a lot of four letter words. It may not be safe around small children either. But for everyone else, you might enjoy watching this video over and over again.

One of our popular TCTV shows is TC Cribs, where Jason Kincaid goes behind the scenes of a tech company to see what it’s like to work and play there. Of course, we edit it and don’t use all the material we shoot. Our editor John Murillo decided to edit together some of the outtakes.

We posted the video on our internal Yammer and it was quite a hit. Jason says “wow that was painful for me to watch.” Michael Arrington’s favorite part comes around 1:55 and he said this needs to be posted. So, check it out. You might not look at Jason the same way again.

For the regular Cribs episodes, check out TC Cribs at techcrunch.tv/show/tc-cribs

Google is Greek myth-level ambitious, trying to fight the war for web audience on all fronts.

And just as it’s officially begun the battle in social, reports today hold that the search company is trying to court streaming video service Hulu away from Yahoo, presumably for the potential licensing and advertising deals from major brands like Coca Cola and Disney. Microsoft is also reportedly in talks with the site, which is the 10th most popular video destination online.

Declining TV viewership has left tech behemoths scrambling to be first to capture the mindshare of web audiences. Hulu’s viewership numbers (28 million monthly viewers according to Comscore), licensing deals and the estimated $500 million in revenue that it will bring in this year from ads and Hulu Plus are a tempting proposition to web services like YouTube focused on dominating the video distribution space.

And it’d be a much better bargain than already public competitor Netflix, whose market cap is currently $14.17 billion.

Hulu also has the lure of premium content deals which Google has struggled with in the past, offering users access to popular shows like “The Daily Show” “Modern Family” and “Glee.” Google’s recent acquisition of Next New Networks and the creation of YouTube Next was in and of itself a premium content play, but for original and not studio-produced highly advertiser friendly fare. Google also continues to make television related acquisitions on the technology side as well, most recently SageTV and WideVine.

Hulu would be a good get for its advertising cache alone. Imagine the potential … Through its piecemeal efforts Google has already set up multiple distribution channels for video (Android), web (YouTube) and (less successfully) in the home with Google TV. Success is a matter of getting all these sundry interests, aligned.

Image: Divine Harvester

Google is Greek myth-level ambitious, trying to fight the war for web audience on all fronts.

And just as it’s officially begun the battle in social, reports today hold that the search company is trying to court streaming video service Hulu away from Yahoo, presumably for the potential licensing and advertising deals from major brands like Coca Cola and Disney. Microsoft is also reportedly in talks with the site, which is the 10th most popular video destination online.

Declining TV viewership has left tech behemoths scrambling to be first to capture the mindshare of web audiences. Hulu’s viewership numbers (28 million monthly viewers according to Comscore), licensing deals and the estimated $500 million in revenue that it will bring in this year from ads and Hulu Plus are a tempting proposition to web services like YouTube focused on dominating the video distribution space.

And it’d be a much better bargain than already public competitor Netflix, whose market cap is currently $14.17 billion.

Hulu also has the lure of premium content deals which Google has struggled with in the past, offering users access to popular shows like “The Daily Show” “Modern Family” and “Glee.” Google’s recent acquisition of Next New Networks and the creation of YouTube Next was in and of itself a premium content play, but for original and not studio-produced highly advertiser friendly fare. Google also continues to make television related acquisitions on the technology side as well, most recently SageTV and WideVine.

Hulu would be a good get for its advertising cache alone. Imagine the potential … Through its piecemeal efforts Google has already set up multiple distribution channels for video (Android), web (YouTube) and (less successfully) in the home with Google TV. Success is a matter of getting all these sundry interests, aligned.

Image: Divine Harvester

Exclusive: Professional social network LinkedIn has shut down API access to a number of developers for terms of service violations, according to the company. The six developers whose access to LinkedIn’s API include Facebook-focused professional network BranchOut, Monster’s social recruiting app Beknown, brand management app Visible.me, resume service Daxtra, professional reputation manager Mixtent and CRM-Gadget.

The shut down of access for BranchOut and Monster’s similar (and recently launched) app BeKnown are particularly surprising. According to LinkedIn, BranchOut, which has been compared to a LinkedIn for Facebook, violated the network’s API TOS with its plans for a premium enterprise recruiting search tool. Charging fees for access to LinkedIn’s content, is a no-no, says the network.

LinkedIn says that it cut off access to its API for BeKnown because the app was using the LinkedIn APIs to send messages to promote BeKnown (and thus profit from the API). LinkedIn is also concerned that BeKnown will be charging for enterprise services related to the API, similar to BranchOut. Mixtent and Visible.me were also shut down for the same reasons. And CRM-Gadget and Daxtra were both shut down for storing LinkedIn member data.

In the case of BranchOut and BeKnown, it’s hard not to think of the whole Twitter-UberMedia debacle, in which Twitter shut down API access to UberMedia for TOS violations, including trademarks, privacy and monetization violations. UberMedia is a direct competitor to Twitter, with it army of third-party clients.

Likewise, BranchOut (and now BeKnown) are competitors to LinkedIn in some ways. BranchOut, which is backed by Accel, Norwest, Floodgate, and Redpoint, allows you to network and find jobs through your friends on Facebook. The company also allows you to import skills, education, and job history from LinkedIn as well. And the company is allowing brands and organizations to post jobs to users. The startup has been growing in a territory that LinkedIn has not yet invaded—Facebook.

LinkedIn, which has 20,000 developers using its APIs, has been on fairly good terms with its developers minus a few stumbles. In January, LinkedIn shut down access to CubeDuel, a service that mixes the best (or worst) of Hot or Not with the professional social network. Apparently CubeDuel exceeded LinkedIn’s API limits, but it was actually the startup’s fault.

LinkedIn says it is open to reinstating its APIs to these developers and startups if they comply with the network’s TOS. LinkedIn has partnership deals with some developers where startups pay fees for the API (which they can monetize off of).

But LinkedIn could probably learn a thing or two from Twitter’s tenuous situation with its developers, and should definitely navigate these waters very carefully.

Update:

BranchOut issued this statement in response to LinkedIn’s move:

At BranchOut we consider the next generation platform for professional networking to be Facebook. Changes to the LinkedIn API have little impact on the BranchOut experience, as it was only being used by a small fraction of our users. That said, we believe user data should be owned by the user, and that people should be allowed to share their data with the new services and contexts that provide the most utility.

We’ve analyzed our statistics, and it has led to a pretty exciting discovery for us—namely that we are causing a groundswell within a much larger audience than that addressed by the prior generation of career services. BranchOut users encompass not only the professional networker, but also the far larger base of 700 million Facebook users worldwide who would like to use their social graph to help them in business, recruiting, sales, and job search. For example, in addition to white collar professionals, our users are college students, workers in retail, manufacturing, hospitality, military, government, and others who have yet to find a professional voice within a social network. We are excited to be the first to give this larger global audience a relevant professional networking solution.

And here’s Monster’s response:

We are surprised and disappointed by LinkedIn’s decision, which we believe not only goes against the interests of LinkedIn users, but also contradicts what LinkedIn claims to stand for – openness and connectivity. Professional networkers are social in nature and LinkedIn has just limited their ability to connect when and where they want. They’ve taken away users’ rights to control how and when they can share their own profile data and personal contacts. We also note that it was within days of Monster’s launch of BeKnown that LinkedIn decided to block the API when there have been other networking-oriented apps using the API for months.While this move by LinkedIn creates an inconvenience for their users, BeKnown members will continue to build their networks from all the largest online sites including Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Monster.

Earlier this week while visiting Seattle, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tipped off Seattle press that the company would be launching an “awesome” new product next week that has been built by Facebook’s Seattle team. The press invitations to that event went out today, saying nothing more than “Please join us for an event at Facebook” on July 6.

So what is the new product? MG Siegler speculates here that it might have a desktop component given all the desktop software hiring going on in Seattle.

And he’s right. This isn’t the main project that team is working on, but next week, says a source with knowledge of the partnership, Facebook will launch a new video chat product, powered by Skype, that works in browser. Suddenly those chat icons in the invitation have a lot more meaning.

The product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component. It’s not clear to me whether that means it will just work if a user has Skype already installed on the computer, or if additional software will need to be downloaded even if the user already uses Skype. But it’s clear that there’s very deep integration between the products, and from the user’s perspective, the product will be an in browser experience.

Facebook and Skype have already been working together, including integration of various Facebook features into the Skype service.

But this is something else entirely. The partnership could substantially increase Skype usage. Facebook has more than 750 million active users. Currently Skype has just 170 million. And it will certainly help Facebook become even stickier for users as they start to have voice and video chat as an option to communicate.

And this also brings Facebook even closer to Microsoft, which is a Facebook shareholder and has a pending acquisition of Skype. The guys in Redmond must be smiling today, something that happens far too infrequently at Microsoft HQ.

I need to start with a warning. Depending on your work environment, this may not be safe for work. Especially if you don’t want to hear some a lot of four letter words. It may not be safe around small children either. But for everyone else, you might enjoy watching this video over and over again.

One of our popular TCTV shows is TC Cribs, where Jason Kincaid goes behind the scenes of a tech company to see what it’s like to work and play there. Of course, we edit it and don’t use all the material we shoot. Our editor John Murillo decided to edit together some of the outtakes.

We posted the video on our internal Yammer and it was quite a hit. Jason says “wow that was painful for me to watch.” Michael Arrington’s favorite part comes around 1:55 and he said this needs to be posted. So, check it out. You might not look at Jason the same way again.

For the regular Cribs episodes, check out TC Cribs at techcrunch.tv/show/tc-cribs

I need to start with a warning. Depending on your work environment, this may not be safe for work. Especially if you don’t want to hear some a lot of four letter words. It may not be safe around small children either. But for everyone else, you might enjoy watching this video over and over again.

One of our popular TCTV shows is TC Cribs, where Jason Kincaid goes behind the scenes of a tech company to see what it’s like to work and play there. Of course, we edit it and don’t use all the material we shoot. Our editor John Murillo decided to edit together some of the outtakes.

We posted the video on our internal Yammer and it was quite a hit. Jason says “wow that was painful for me to watch.” Michael Arrington’s favorite part comes around 1:55 and he said this needs to be posted. So, check it out. You might not look at Jason the same way again.

For the regular Cribs episodes, check out TC Cribs at techcrunch.tv/show/tc-cribs

Late last night, it was revealed that Nortel had picked a winner for their patent portfolio. To the surprise of many, that winner was not Google, which had put up the initial “stalking horse” bid to get the ball rolling. Instead, the winner was a “consortium” of industry players — a consortium that includes Apple, RIM, Microsoft, Sony, and others. In other words, this sounds to us like the absolute worst possible scenario for Google. It’s not just that one of their major rivals won the rights to the over 6,000 patents. It’s that all of them did.

Unsurprisingly, Google is not happy.

“This outcome is disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition. We will keep working to reduce the current flood of patent litigation that hurts both innovators and consumers,” Kent Walker, Google’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel said in a statement that Google sent out to members of the press.

Okay, but come on, that’s a bit bland. If I were Google, I’d be more than “disappointed”, I’d be pissed off. Again, they’re the ones who got the ball rolling with a $900 million opening bid. Meanwhile, things weren’t looking too hot for Apple. While the DoJ quickly cleared Google to make a run on the patents, they weren’t so sure about Apple. And then Microsoft started complaining that if Google won the rights to the patents they could nullify the existing agreements Nortel had in place for licensing out those patents (which may or may not have even been true). It looked like Google was in the drivers seat.

But now it sure looks like that while all of this interference was going on, Google’s competitors were getting together behind the scenes to come up with a combined offer — $4.5 billion — that Nortel couldn’t refuse (and Google likely couldn’t in their right mind, match).

And the truth is that Google is pissed off. How do you we know? Because while they’re releasing muted statements, they’re also trying to have off-the-record conversations to further express their displeasure. And they’re pointing us to pieces like Mike Masnick’s which features wording like:

So, Microsoft apparently got together with Apple, EMC, Ericsson, RIM and Sony… and coughed up an insane $4.5 billion. It’s kind of brilliant in a nefarious way. With six companies together, they could each spend less than the $900 million initially pitched by Google… and then just all agree not to sue each other, but leave open the option to sue anyone else.

And they’re pointing out what they believe to be similarities between this situation and the one involving Novell patents, which the DoJ looked into and decided to force changes — pointing out that the open source community was not happy. Of course, this has nothing to do with the open source community. But it certainly is possible that the DoJ will not like this consortium bid on the Nortel patents one bit. The courts in both the U.S. and Canada still have to approve the bid for it to clear, and it certainly is possible that changes will be forced once again.

We’ve told Google we’re happy to have an on-the-record conversation about all of this. I’m just not sure what the point of venting off-the-record is at this point. Google is pissed off, and they should be! And they should express that openly!