Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

You may remember that we recently broke a story about a small company called Timelines Inc, which filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Facebook. According to the lawsuit documents, Timelines claims that Facebook’s recently announced Timeline feature could “quite possibly eliminate” its entire business.

The Chicago company operates a website called Timelines.com, which allows people to record and share personal or historic events, and contribute descriptions, links, photos and videos related to those events, people, companies, bands and whatnot. Understandably, they’re not too happy.

The lawsuit is still ongoing – although the U.S. District Court in Chicago recently rejected a temporary restraining order request from Timelines – so there isn’t all that much news to report.

Timelines, however, felt that the coverage the lawsuit has enjoyed so far has created some confusion, so now the company wants to set the record straight with an open letter.

In it, Timelines asserts that Facebook should have contacted the company before launching their Timeline feature, and subtly mocks the social networking giant for “[applying] for or [trademarking] the terms ‘Face’, ‘Wall’, and ‘Like’ as well as [suing] others for using ‘Book’ in their names”.

The company also says that it will defend its trademark ‘vigorously’.

We’ve received a copy of Timelines’ plea for support, and have pasted it here below.

Ironically, they’d like you to follow and support their case on Facebook.

Why we are suing Facebook and a request for help

Much has been written and said about our suit against Facebook for infringing upon our registered trademark “Timelines”, and we’ve heard from people who are understandably confused by the whole issue.

We’d like to let you know our reasons for doing this and ask for your help.

Why we are doing this

Our company owns a valid trademark on the term “Timelines” that is for a particular application, specifically for “providing a web site that gives users the ability to create customized web pages featuring user-defined information about historical, current and upcoming events.” We’ve spent years building this brand and using it in the above stated way on our site Timelines.com.

Facebook, a company that has applied for or trademarked the terms “Face”, “Wall”, and “Like” as well as sued others for using “Book” in their names, is using the name “Timeline” for a new product that is focused on how people express and share events and history online.

Facebook either knew (or should have known given their rigorous defense of their own intellectual property) that the US Patent and Trademark Office granted us this trademark. People at Facebook could have at least contacted us for permission to use or license the name. They did not.

We’re not trying to shut down innovation at Facebook

Let’s be clear: we aren’t against Facebook launching this new service. Our issue is that they’ve named and branded the service “Timeline”.

We are hoping that Facebook will realize that it made a mistake and that it needs to make things right. We’re very proud of the products and services we’ve built and cannot sit idly by and watch Facebook eliminate the goodwill we’ve developed.

We will vigorously defend our trademark.

How you can help

If you believe a small company has as much right as a big company to defend its intellectual property, then we are asking for your help in spreading the word about our cause:

* Please spread the word and post a link to this page on your site, blog, Facebook and Google+
* Tweet it out
* Follow this case on our Facebook page

Thank you for your support as we defend our trademark – we really appreciate it!

—The Timelines Team

If you remember from a teaser video posted a few days ago, today is a big day. Verizon and Motorola have finally announced the much-anticipated Droid RAZR, the next LTE beast to grace big red’s shelves. Here at the launch event in New York City, we’re hearing four words over and over again: faster, thinner, smarter, and stronger. And that’s exactly how we’d describe the new Droid RAZR.

The latest in Motorola’s line of Android smartphones takes heavily from its Droid brethren in terms of design, looking a lot like the Droid X/X2. It has that same “hump” along the upper back edge, likely making room for the camera and other goodies, but has dropped some weight with an even thinner waist line than its Bionic cousin. It’s also stronger, as promised in that teaser video, with a Kevlar fiber casing which, Motorola promises, will “withstand the back pocket test.”

Ready for specs? Of course you are.

The Droid RAZR touts a solid 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, Android 2.3 Gingerbread, 1GB of RAM, and of course, support for Verizon’s 4G LTE network. In fact, Verizon is claiming that this is its thinnest LTE-capable device to date, with a 7.1mm waist line.

That Kevlar fiber casing isn’t the only “rugged” quality on this phone — it also comes with Motorola’s new Splash Guard technology and a stainless steel core.

The new flagship also boasts an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with dual-LED flash and autofocus (capable of video capture in 1080p). Sanjay Jha claims the phone will offer 12.5 hours of talk time and 8.9 hours of video playback. It’ll also come with Moto’s web top desktop app, if you go ahead and grab a Motorola Lap Dock. The RAZR also packs a microUSB port for charging along with HDMI out, naturally.

Motorola has included support for its MotoCast application, which streams content (whether it be pictures, movies, or music) between the PC and the smartphone. Business users will also have corporate access to email, the ability to view/edit Word documents, Citrix Receiver for remote access to desktop, along with added password enforcement.

Another awesome software feature would be the ability to sync your new MotoACTV watch with the Droid RAZR. In other words, you’ll be able to check text messages and see phone calls while you’re out jogging or hitting the gym.

Pre-orders will start on October 27, and in-store/online availability begins in “November”. The Droid RAZR will cost $299 on-contract.

In a plot twist not many of us were expecting, Motorola took an opportunity at its NYC press event this morning (where we expect to see the Droid Spyder unveiling) to announce MotoACTV, a new smart watch.

CEO Sanjay Jha announced it has a 600MHz processor, and weighs in at just 35 grams. MotoACTV combines a GPS-enabled watch with a smart music player, which learns songs that make you work harder and plays them more often. The new watch also offers a built-in heart rate monitor (sans the chest strap), and relays every performance stat (including duration, distance, avg. pace, calories burned, and avg. heart rate) back to you through a bluetooth headphone set.

The MotoACTV watch tracks your running, walking and cycling stats outside, with treadmill and step machine stats recorded while you’re indoors. The watch also has an FM radio.

The watch also syncs with your PC, letting you access a dashboard of your performance stats at MotoACTV.com.

MotoACTV will be available nationwide on November 6, with an 8GB version going for $249.99, and a 16GB model going for $299.99.

Mike Lazaridis, CEO of Research in Motion, “The whole company is aligning behind this single vision. It combines the best of QNX and Blackberry.” Meet BBX.

BBX is the future of RIM. Dan Dodge, president of QNX, joined Mike Lazaridis and proudly co-announced BBX. This platform incorporates enterprise, NOC and cloud services into one system that can run on smartphones, tablets and embedded systems. As Lazaridis stated, BBX is about bringing together “people, devices, content, and services.”

RIM and QNX built BBX to be secure. The platform is IEEE POSIX certified and conforms to EAL4+ and IEC 61508 Safety (SIL3) standards. The POSIX cert should allow for easy porting of Linux/Unix apps while providing a good deal of security.

HTML 5 is a big part of BBX. RIM sees the protocol as a bridge to older BB OS systems. Since BB 5 and BB 6 runs HTML 5, developers can code in HTML 5 for future and older devices.

Details are still a bit light despite the company spending a good deal of time during the DEVCOM keynote. More info will come from the Tech Keynote address at a later time.

Mike Lazaridis, the belegaured co-head of RIM, took the stage at DevCon Americas to announce some strong numbers. First, RIM has just announced 1 billion App World downloads, which amounts to about 5 million downloads per day. The service is on pace to hit 2 billion this year. Mike went on to proudly state that on average, a BlackBerry app is downloaded 43% more than its iOS or Android counterpart. Part of this success is thanks to the smaller library amount but also because the BlackBerry App World is now available in 130 counties and supports 26 currencies with carrier billing in 10 countries.

The platform is still going strong with 165 million RIM smartphones in current circulation and there has been an 80% increase in BBM users this year, up to 50 million.

Lazaridis apologized for the recent outage and reiterated his promise to supply $100 in apps and services to every Blackberry user, thanking partners for their largesse. The initial statistics were fairly slim and RIM didn’t break out sales of phones vs. Playbook tablets.

Advise.me, the new and rapidly expanding startup accelerator and incubator, is working on its first startup. The company is still in stealth mode, and all we know about it is that it’s a social communication service of some sort, but definitely not another social network. It will, however, use existing social networks. And given the name and the landing page (chirping? mobile? the color blue?), our guess is that the new app has something to do with Twitter.

What’s perhaps more interesting than speculating on the app itself, is looking at the team behind it and the process by which it’s being built. Although normally Advise.me will be working with companies that apply to its accelerator program, in this case, the team decided to pass some ideas around and build something on their own. I guess that’s just what happens when you get this many successful entrepreneurs to come together.

Explains Advise.me CEO Solomon Engel, this is something that makes his group different from other programs out there. “Some folks on the team will act in an advisory capacity, others will act more operational and sometimes they could act as both,” he says. “So alongside working with companies that apply to our program, we’ll occasionally build something ourselves.”

Hence, Chirpr.

Specifically, the Advise.me team members working on the Chirpr app incude Advise.me Co-Founder and CEO Engel, Chief Scientist at Proximic (and previously Founder of AltaVista and Co-Founder at Qwiki) Louis Monier, VP of Product at SimpleGeo Jeffrey Kalmikoff, GM and Head of Product at Plaxo Preston Smalley, Principal at Galpin Industries Tyler Galpin, Senior iOS Lead Developer at Apple Geppy Parziale and Senior Cocoa Architect at Apple Eva Diaz-Santana. The only non-Advise.me team member on Chirpr is CEO at Audiobox.fm Claudio Poli.

Poli will serve as a lead engineer for Chirpr, while Apple’s Parziale and Diaz-Santana have the titles of Head of iOS Engineering and iOS Engineer, respectively. Galpin is Head of Design, Monier is the Data Scientist Advisor and Kalmikoff and Smalley are Product Advisors.