And when it comes to the company’s major markets in Western Europe, Maitre said things are in pretty good shape. Windows Phone, Android and iOS have paved the way for a solid set of options for both high-end devices and even midrange ones, often sold prepaid and, in some cases, under the Orange brand name.

But when it comes to serving the next 6 billion potential smartphone customers, Maitre said that none of the major operating systems is really lightweight enough from either a cost perspective or from the amount of bandwidth consumed.

In an interview Thursday, Maitre likened it to when he was growing up in France and his family had a two-cylinder Citroen. He idolized the huge eight-cylinder cars coming out of Detroit in the 1970s. And while those cars did enjoy a moment in the sun, the world realized that with more cars out there, gas wasn’t unlimited.

In the end, the car makers like Toyota that created fuel-efficient vehicles fared better.

While conventional wisdom is that low-cost Android devices will bring smartphones to the developing world, Maitre says even Google’s OS is too resource intensive. It may have started out as a four-cylinder or six-cylinder car, he says, but with the latest Ice Cream Sandwich release it is every bit the gas guzzler that iOS and Windows Phone are.

Maitre said that Orange is committed to building 3G networks in all of its markets, but that it needs more energy efficient vehicles, if you will.

“I cannot run an eight-cylinder car because it is too expensive,” said Maitre, a senior vice president at France Telecom’s Orange unit. The average selling price of phones in Orange’s developing markets is $54. And while customers might be willing to spend an extra $30 to get a smartphone, they can’t spend another $100.

“If we are not in a position to give them a smartphone at $80, we will miss the six billion,” Maitre said, adding that Orange is committed to having smartphones that hit that price. “If I cannot have Microsoft on it, if I cannot have Android, if I cannot have iOS, then I will look somewhere else, mostly likely in China,” Maitre said.

Already the company is looking at a variety of options including Mozilla’s Boot-to-Gecko project and mobile Linux options like Tizen, in addition to low-cost Android variants coming out of China.

Phones also must become more bandwidth-efficient, Maitre said, because, like gas for cars, bandwidth is a limited commodity.

Today, he said, there are about a billion people crowding the airwaves, most of whom use less than one gigabyte of data per month.

“Tomorrow, seven billion people will use bandwidth and all use [in the range of] five or six gigabits,” he said. “The bandwidth will start to become a very valuable resource.”

Cook is forgoing $75 million in dividends to which he’s entitled.

In a Thursday SEC filing, Apple announced plans to award a $2.65-a-share quarterly dividend on restricted stock units held by its employees. It’s a nice — and unusual — perk to offer (and one certain to cement employee loyalty in a very competitive talent arena), but Cook is passing it up.

From Apple’s 8-K:

At Mr. Cook’s request, none of his restricted stock units will participate in dividend equivalents. Assuming a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share over the vesting periods of his 1.125 million outstanding restricted stock units, Mr. Cook will forego approximately $75 million in dividend equivalent value.

That’s a lot of money to turn down. True, Cook is very well compensated — deservedly so, considering Apple’s performance — so he can obviously afford to forgo it. But, as best I can tell, he didn’t have to. 

So Cook truly did just walk away from $75 million. Which is remarkable for an executive of his standing in an era when entitlement, greed and arrogance are so often part of the job description. Which is not to say that he’s not reaping some benefits here. There’s a lot of mileage for Apple in a symbolic gesture like this, and Cook profits when Apple’s overall value increases.

Say what you will, but this was a classy gesture up and down. When was the last time you saw headlines about a successful CEO of a wildly successful company walking away from millions of dollars that he could have just as easily pocketed?

Clearly, Cook is focused on more important and interesting things than having the biggest yacht in the harbor.

Le Figaro reports that Cagni, who joined Apple in 2000, tendered his resignation Wednesday. Sources close to the company confirmed to AllThingsD that this is indeed the case, though they had no explanation for Cagni’s sudden departure.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

SimpleAir said that the agreement was confidential and did not announce terms of the deal.

The Marshall, Texas-based company sued Apple back in September 2009. A trial had been set for April, but the two companies reached a tentative deal at the courthouse just before the case began, SimpleAir said.

The firm has also sued a number of other companies in the mobile space, including Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson (now a part of Sony), Samsung, LG, Huawei and HTC.

SimpleAir bills itself as “an inventor-owned technology licensing company with interests and intellectual property in the wireless content delivery, mobile application, and push notification market spaces.”

What we didn’t know, however, is that Facebook was essentially building its own version of a standalone mobile photo-sharing application, ostensibly to compete with Instagram before it took over the mobile photo-sharing world completely.

How do I know that? Because Facebook will launch the product this afternoon in Apple’s App Store.

It’s called Facebook Camera, and it’s essentially Instagram redux. One, it’s a standalone Facebook application, separate from the Facebook app proper, much like the company’s Facebook Messages app. Facebook Photos product manager Dirk Stoop told me in an interview this morning that it’s an instant portal to one of Facebook’s largest use cases: Photo sharing.

Secondly — and I cannot stress this point enough — Facebook seems to have learned a heck of a lot from Instagram. Photos in Facebook Camera are full-bleed, spanning the entire width of the iPhone’s screen (which was probably tested when Facebook tweaked the photo experience for mobile last week). You’re able to comment and “Like” photos directly from the stream. And, of course, there are filters (albeit ones with names nowhere near as fun as Toaster or Valencia).

More than this, it’s very lightweight. The app moves much faster than browsing photos within Facebook. And by introducing a separate camera app, it’s another way of bypassing the cumbersome, clicky process of adding pictures via the main Facebook app.

It would be nice if the main Facebook app could just work this well, but Stoop said that this app was the brainchild of the dedicated Photos team he spearheads. That means moving faster, and breaking — then repairing — things quicker.

“Having separate teams focus on their area of expertise allows us to innovate faster,” Stoop told me. “Which, eventually, helps to integrate features into the mainline product.” There’s hope, then, that Facebook’s main app will actually get better.

There is, of course, a way around all of this photo-sharing friction: If Facebook were to integrate with iOS just as Twitter has, iPhone users could instantly upload photos to Facebook, straight from the iOS camera app. Stoop didn’t comment when I mentioned as much in our conversation.

So yes, the app is slick. And yes, it’s a fast portal into mobile photo-sharing, the likes of which Facebook needs. But it’s skirting the billion-dollar elephant in the room: Why build another camera app when you just dropped a ton of cash on one last month?

Two things: One, the Instagram deal hasn’t actually closed yet. It’s still purportedly being probed by the FTC, and that could take time to finish. And two, Stoop’s team was most likely working on this product long before buying Instagram was ever a real possibility. Stoop confirmed to me that Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and his team had nothing to do with building Facebook Camera.

But now that Facebook Camera is finally coming to the App Store a month after the Instagram purchase, the whole deal is starting to make a lot more sense. With Instagram’s rapid rise to prominence in quickly garnering a strong user base, Facebook had to have seen the writing on the wall. Tens of millions of users signed up in the span of two years. And the app surpassed 50 million downloads after finally being released on Android earlier this year.

In essence, Instagram was taking over mobile photos, and Facebook couldn’t wait around and watch the company snap up every user while still working on perfecting the Facebook Camera app.

It’ll be interesting to see just how Facebook integrates Instagram’s user base into Facebook over time. It’s odd, too, that Facebook would launch a standalone Camera app, especially when it’s likely that the acquisition will go through. Still, perhaps a mashup of the two apps is on the road map eventually, despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s protestations that Instagram will maintain its autonomy.

Or perhaps Facebook itself doesn’t even know quite yet.

The bad news, if you’re an Apple fan: Just like Apple’s other recent Siri ads, these don’t make Siri seem very cool.

In the first one, there’s at least the suggestion that Siri will help Malkovich find a restaurant where he can get some sausage. So that’s something, at least.

But the second one, where Malkovich is sitting around by himself, just killing time with his iPhone, without any discernible purpose?

That’s pretty realistic, actually. But it’s not fun to watch:

But, like I said, Malkovich really is cool. There are a gazillion furniture-chewing scenes I could pick to illustrate this, but for some reason I’ve always been partial to his preposterous Russian poker heavy, from “Rounders”:

Seagate has offered $186 million, or about 4.05 euros per share, for 64.5 percent of the shares of LaCie controlled by Philippe Spruch, the company’s chief executive. The offer amounts to a premium of almost 30 percent.

Anecdotally, I can also say that LaCie’s drives are probably the most popular among people who own Apple Macs. I see its orange-encased ruggedized external drives everywhere Macs are used, and I own about a half-dozen of them myself. From a consumer retail perspective, Seagate has generally struggled to penetrate the Mac-owning market. And as we all know, the size of the Mac market is growing faster than the rest of the PC-owning world.

There’s also LaCie’s considerable retail and distribution footprint to consider. Under terms of the deal, Spruch would join Seagate.

Seagate is approaching the deal from a position of renewed strength. It weathered the flooding in Thailand, which hammered the hard drive industry’s supply chain and caused a shortage last year, better than rival Western Digital.

Image by Joy of Tech

Samsung officials tell the Korea Times that the two companies were unable to come to a clear agreement resolving their differences. Sources close to Samsung confirmed to AllThingsD that this was indeed the case.

Evidently the talks — which ran for about 16 hours over Monday and Tuesday — began and ended at an impasse, with Apple continuing to insist that Samsung “slavishly” copied the design of its iPhone and iPad, and Samsung demanding that Apple pay royalties on the wireless patents it believes the company infringed.

Given the level of animosity between the two companies at this point, it was really hard to imagine any other outcome. Locking Apple CEO Tim Cook and Samsung CEO Choi Gee-sung into a room for two days and hoping they’d emerge bosom buddies brandishing a settlement was always a bit of a pipe dream. Note that Apple last Friday filed a motion for injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, angling to have the device yanked from U.S. shelves as soon as early June. And the week before that, it accused Samsung of destroying email evidence.

Not really the behavior of a company that’s looking for two days of easygoing mediation talks and an amicable resolution to the legal issues at hand.

As FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller recently told Reuters, “This dispute isn’t ripe for settlement. Under the present circumstances, the two companies’ delegations should spend a couple of fun days in Yosemite Park or Napa Valley, rather than meet in court only to pretend they’re being constructive.”

Apple declined comment on the outcome of the talks.

The case heads to trial on July 30.

(Image courtesy of Joy of Tech)

According to NPD, Apple shipped 17.2 million mobile PCs* worldwide during the first quarter of 2012, enough to capture a 22.5 percent share of the market — more than double that of its closest rival, Hewlett-Packard. During the same period, HP shipped just 8.9 million mobile PCs for an 11.6 percent market share.

How did Apple manage to dominate PC leader HP in the mobile PC market? The iPad.

Of the 17.2 million “mobile PCs” Apple shipped, 13.6 million were iPads. And in that particular segment of the market — tablets — Apple’s domination is unrelenting. In the first quarter, Apple claimed a stunning 62.8 percent share of the tablet market, dwarfing every single one of its rivals. Samsung, its next closest rival, shipped just 1.6 million tablets during the quarter, for a share of 7.5 percent. Amazon followed with 900,000 tablets shipped and a 4 percent share. Bringing up the rear: Research In Motion and Asus, which sold 500,000 tablets each, for a 2.3 percent market share.

*NPD defines mobile PCs as tablets and laptops.

At $183 billion, Apple is the world’s most valuable brand, a title it claimed last year as well, though at that time the brand was worth $153.3 billion. In the ensuing year, it has grown another 19 percent. IBM ranked second with $116 billion in value. Google, which ranked second last year, this year swapped places with IBM, after its brand value slipped 3 percent year over year. With a $76.7 billion brand, Microsoft claimed fifth place, ranking below McDonalds — the only non-tech company in the top five.

The biggest year-over-year gain also went to a tech company: Facebook, which rose from No. 35 in 2011 to No. 19 in 2012. A meteoric rise, and one that spiked the company’s brand value 74 percent to $33.2 billion.

Nokia, which ranked 81st in brand value in Millward Brown’s 2011 study after a 28 percent year-over-year decline in value, fell even further in 2012. So far, in fact, that it seems to have fallen right off the chart. Not a surprise, really, given the company’s current situation. But worth noting just the same; as recently as 2008, Nokia was the world’s ninth most valuable brand.

So says Samsung design VP Chang Dong-hoon, who today took exception with claims that the Galaxy S III is “the first smartphone designed entirely by lawyers.” According to Dong-hoon, the Galaxy S III boasts a design that has gone through hundreds of iterations, all quarterbacked by Samsung’s market-leading design team. “Our change in smartphone design is part of a five-year plan, not a sudden turnaround,” he told reporters at the 2012 Seoul Digital Forum.

So the aesthetics of the S III are the result of a natural evolution and not the intervention of Samsung’s legal team. If you’ve got an issue with its design, blame Samsung’s designers, not its lawyers. Or, better yet, buy a different phone.

On Monday, a U.S. International Trade Commission judge ruled one of Kodak’s key patents invalid, undermining the photography pioneer’s efforts to assert it against Apple and Research In Motion. In his decision, ITC Judge Thomas Pender wrote that while some Apple and RIM products did indeed violate some claims of Kodak’s 6,292,218 patent, the patent itself, which covers the ability for a digital camera to preview images on an LCD screen, is invalid.

The ’218 patent is referred to by some as the “crown jewel” of Kodak’s portfolio, so Pender’s ruling is potentially a major blow to the company, which is looking to maximize the value of its IP ahead of a bankruptcy auction. Indeed, just last week Kodak accused Apple of attempting to undermine its efforts by asserting ownership claims over the ’218 patent.

“Apple’s decision to press its ownership claims now … should be seen for what it is, namely, a ploy calculated to prevent the debtors from using the [bankruptcy] sale process to obtain a fair price for Kodak’s digital capture portfolio (or to enable Apple to buy it on the cheap and extinguish its infringement exposure),” Kodak said in court documents filed last week.

It seems now that the ploy was a wasted effort. There are few better ways of extinguishing a company’s infringement exposure than having the patent asserted against it ruled invalid. And, as RIM noted in a statement issued Monday afternoon, Pender is the second ITC judge to rule the ’218 patent invalid.

That said, Apple and RIM aren’t entirely out of the woods yet. Kodak plans to appeal Pender’s ruling to the full commission. And it says it’s confident it will prevail in the end, since the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirmed ’218’s validity in 2010.

Regardless, Pender’s ruling couldn’t come at a worse time. Sources say that Kodak has been looking to attract a stalking-horse bidder who would put down an initial offer for its patent portfolio as it gears up for its bankruptcy auction. Having the patent that’s at the center of its high-profile battle with Apple and RIM tossed aside by the ITC isn’t going to aid that effort.

As long as they keep paying for TV.

But even if consumers go for that deal, the TV guys need to make sure that advertisers buy in, too.

And that won’t happen until the TV guys can get some basic stuff right. Like counting eyeballs, no matter where they watch a show.

That could still take a while. Witness Comcast’s announcement yesterday, made at the cable industry’s annual convention in Boston, that it has been working with Nielsen on a plan to count viewers when they watched video on an iPad*, using Comcast’s Xfinity app.

For various technical reasons, this is much harder than you’d think, and the two companies have already been beavering away at this for 18 months. Now they’re launching a trial, and Comcast executive Matt Strauss is optimistic that they can work the kinks out by 2013, and advertisers could have true “multiplatform measurement.”

But that only works if all of the big pay-TV providers sign on to the new technology. And the media-measurement business is full of different tests and initiatives, all shooting off in different directions.

Last week, for instance, Spanish-language powerhouse Univision announced a “video neutral” deal with media-buying agency Starcom, which is supposed to mean Univision gets credit for its stuff no matter where anyone watches it. But the announcement describing the deal doesn’t explain how Univision or Starcom will track those eyeballs.

Meanwhile, Nielsen’s rival eyeball-counter comScore recently announced that it had its own technology in place to measure mobile devices like phones and tablets. And earlier this year it announced its own “multiscreen research initiative,” where it paired up with AT&T.

But comScore isn’t tracking any traffic on connected devices, like Google TVs, Apple TVs or Microsoft Xboxes. So if any of that really is taking off, that’s yet another headache.

Shouldn’t this stuff be easier? After all, we’ve figured out how to get the video all of these places — why can’t we count it, too?

On the other hand, recall that the iPhone is still a mere five years old, and the iPad is only two. That’s a blink of an eye for the measurement guys, who move deliberately because there’s billions of ad dollars at stake, no matter what they do. But they may still have to speed things up.

*Or, theoretically, on another tablet.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Liewluck)

If you love a celebrity getting all self-righteous on the world, especially the tech world, then here’s a big plate of Richard Dreyfuss for you.

He tsk-tsks all over the stage in this video of highlights from the 16th Annual Webby Awards, which took place last night in New York.

That includes calling out Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s “Eric” Brin — which I am assuming is a mutant mash-up of Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin — for some sort of clickety-click-clack Internet crimes against humanity.

Thankfully, there is a very lovely tribute to Apple legend Steve Jobs at the end that includes President Barack Obama.

Enjoy:

That is the value of the annual pay package Mr. Cook was awarded when he was named Apple chief executive last August, about two months before Mr. Jobs died. Nearly all of the compensation stems from a grant of one million shares of restricted stock, valued at $376.2 million, based on Apple’s stock price at the time.

Mr. Cook’s 2011 compensation is the highest recorded in The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay survey since at least 2006, when the Securities and Exchange Commission changed its rules for reporting executive pay.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

With the rise of so-called “crowdfunding,” game makers are finding fans online who are willing to pledge a few bucks toward a game they’d like to see produced.

The primary site where these connections are being made is Kickstarter, a three-year old company. Since Kickstarter got off the ground, the games category has garnered $29 million in pledges, according to the New York Times. Other popular categories include film/video, music and design.

Further, it was reported that 854 game developers successfully reached their fundraising goals, raising an average of $29,409 apiece.

Most impressively, three game companies have raised more than $1.5 million each since the beginning of this year: Double Fine raised $3.3 million from 87,000 backers; Wasteland 2 raised $2.9 million; and Shadowrun Returns secured $1.8 million.

Another site, Gambitious, which will be exclusively dedicated to helping game companies raise money, is preparing to launch on June 5 in Los Angeles as part of E3, the industry’s big annual conference.

The shift to nontraditional fundraising is now even catching the eye of megapublishers like Electronic Arts. Last week, EA said developers who crowdsourced funding will be able to sell their games on Origin at no cost for three months.

Origin is the company’s online game store, which allows users to download PC games electronically and counts up to 12 million users worldwide.

“The public support for crowdfunding creative game ideas coming from small developers today is nothing short of phenomenal,” said David DeMartini, EA’s SVP of Origin, in a release. “It’s also incredibly healthy for the gaming industry. Gamers around the world deserve a chance to play every great new game.”

EA doesn’t disclose how much it charges because it says fees can vary, but through this program, developers will now receive 100 percent of sales during the 90-day window plus any pre-sales that are generated before the title officially launches, a spokesman confirmed.

It’s unclear whether crowdfunding is a fad and consumers will tire of it quickly, and to be clear, not every company that requests money is able to get it.

But it pairs nicely with a broader trend in the industry that AllThingsD’s Eric Johnson wrote about last week. He explained that game developers are increasingly finding it advantageous to stay small, rejecting the notion that productions need big budgets in order to create blockbusters.

The evolution has been aided by the rise of three new distribution platforms, Apple’s App Store, Facebook and Valve’s Steam Store (and to a lesser extent, EA’s Origin, which is catching up). With these digital platforms, developers can reach customers without having to package up their software and sell it at retail, saving thousands of dollars.

With the crowdfunding phenomenon completely under way, Videogame Analyst and Consultant Scott Steinberg saw the opportunity to write an e-book on the subject called “Crowdfunding Your Business: A How-To Guide.” In the recently released book, he argues that crowdfunding helps developers identify projects that consumers are willing to pay for, before they’ve wasted the money and time on developing them.

He writes that by “requesting feedback or recruiting help from public donors via open calls for assistance — you can gauge demand for and create bankable products from day one.”

The scrutiny is the result of an exclusion order obtained by Apple in its patent dispute with HTC. As a result of the International Trade Commission order, HTC is prohibited from importing certain products found to infringe on an Apple patent.

U.S. Customs is responsible for inspecting HTC’s shipments to the U.S., and the company said last week that the inspections would delay the launch of Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G LTE and also slow shipments of the HTC One X, a phone already on sale through AT&T.

“Each imported HTC model must be reviewed by customs and will be released once customs officials have completed the inspection,” HTC said in a statement on Sunday that was posted on its investor relations site. “Some models have gone through inspection and been released to our carriers customers. We don’t have the status of each specific device model at this time, but we are working closely with customs. We remain confident that this issue will be resolved soon.”

The question, however, is what impact the holdup will have, both in terms of lost sales and as a potential blow to HTC’s momentum. The company had been counting on the HTC One and its variants to help it return to growth.

After seeing its quarterly sales double year-over-year levels through the first half of last year, HTC sales hit a wall in the second half, amid heightened competition from Samsung and others.

At least that’s the arc their employers at Discovery Communications have planned for them.

The cable heavyweight has watched the pair progress from bloggers on its “How Stuff Works” site to a duo whose twice-weekly “Stuff You Should Know” audio shows generate more than a million downloads a week.

Now it’s trying to transform them into on-camera talent, by giving them their own series on its Science Channel. And if that works, it wants to repeat the process with other digital natives.

“I think it’s a template,” says Conal Byrne, who oversees editorial operations for Discovery’s digital properties. “We can do more of this.”

Discovery isn’t the only cable network trying to mount TV shows on the backs of popular podcasts. Next month, IFC will start airing “Comedy Bang Bang,” a sketch series based on the (great) weekly improv show of the same name, hosted by writer and actor Scott Aukerman. Next year, the network will do the same thing with Marc Maron, a veteran comedian who revived his career by  interviewing other comedians in his garage.

Those shows revolve around professional entertainers who have been at it for a long time. Clark and Bryant, meanwhile, are writers who can carry on an entertaining conversation. Their podcasts work — the show makes consistent appearances on iTunes’ Top 10 podcast rankings — because they’ve got a gift for turning arcana into an hour of laconic banter. (Recent topics: What Interpol actually does; why your body odor is so unpleasant.)

But they’ve only spent a few minutes in front of the camera, mostly for a couple dozen short clips they shot for Science in the last year or so.

“We started out being terrified by TV,” says Clark. “If you go back and watch our first cable appearance, it’s hilarious. I hadn’t been that scared before in my entire life, and you can see it. I was looking off camera all the time. Chuck was rocking back and forth.”

Adds Bryant: “We’re both really comfortable in that podcast booth, with no windows and no one watching.”

Discovery isn’t rushing them. It has only committed to making 10 30-minute episodes, which are in preproduction now and slated to run early in 2013.

The network won’t talk about the money it’s spending on the project, but based on the pilot it created earlier this year, they won’t be drowning it in cash. The concept is pretty straightforward — the two guys tape a podcast, just like they always do, and the camera goes behind the scenes to illustrate its “fictional life.”

The risk is that what makes podcasts work in general — that sense of conversational intimacy  – will go away. But everyone involved seems aware of that pitfall, and insist they’ll avoid it by making a new show, not a video version of the old one.

“I think one of the mistakes that people do is that they try a television show out of something that exists online, and we never wanted to do that with Chuck and Josh,” says Debbie Myers, Science Channel’s general manager. Discovery wouldn’t provide an embeddable clip of the pilot, but you can get a sense of what they’re up to with some of the interstitials they’ve already shown on Science (see below).

The notion of taking someone who’s popular on the Web and trying to turn them into “real” media stars isn’t new. But while we’ve been talking about the idea since the mid 90s, we still don’t have that many examples. And it’s even rarer for big media conglomerates to harvest their own digital talent — usually because they don’t have much on hand to begin with.

But Discovery plans to keep Clark and Bryant generating podcasts twice a week, even as they start producing TV. For starters, Discovery is hoping that they’re able to bring some of the 500,000-plus fans who listen to the podcasts over to the new shows. Even adding 20 percent of that fan base would be a big deal for Science.

And finding talent that can work on multiple platforms is part of the reason Discovery plunked down some $30 million for Revision 3, the Web network/studio.

I’m not sure the gut-busting dudes from “Epic Meal Time” are going to be on a Discovery channel anytime soon. But if they do, they’ll already be working for the network.

At issue here is a patent covering the ability for a digital camera to preview images on an LCD screen. Apple sued Kodak over the technology, claiming that Kodak “misappropriated” it when the two companies were working together years ago. Kodak — which filed for bankruptcy in January and is looking to sell off this patent, along with a host of others, to pay off its creditors — insists that Apple’s ownership claim is “baseless.” And now it’s arguing that Apple’s intent, by alleging misappropriation, is simply to avoid paying royalty payments on it, or to drive the patent’s value down so it can purchase it at a lower price.

“Apple’s decision to press its ownership claims now … should be seen for what it is, namely, a ploy calculated to prevent the debtors from using the [bankruptcy] sale process to obtain a fair price for Kodak’s digital capture portfolio (or to enable Apple to buy it on the cheap and extinguish its infringement exposure),” Kodak said in court documents filed earlier this week, adding that Apple’s ownership claim has already been “squarely rejected” by an International Trade Commission judge.

And, to some extent, it does have a point. Apple didn’t file suit against Kodak until nine years after the patent was first issued, and decades after the two companies worked together on exploring how best to commercialize Apple’s digital camera technologies.

But then, Kodak didn’t sue Apple until 2010, amid the collapse of its finances and a looming Chapter 11 filing. So if Apple’s decision to press ownership claims nine years after the fact is a ploy, then what is Kodak’s decision to assert this patent against Apple a year ealier? A ploy to drive up the patent’s price in advance of a sale?

Just another business negotiation being carried out in the courts …

Big video games like Mass Effect 3 and Halo 4 aren’t going away anytime soon. But a growing cadre of independent games developers is taking the road less traveled — keeping teams tiny and visions narrow.

In fact, they say they don’t want to grow. And despite that unorthodox philosophy, they’re reaching big audiences, making some impressive money and shaking up the games industry as a whole.

These independent developers, or “indie devs,” fill a huge spectrum of opinions about what video games can and should be. But, as with their counterparts in music and movies, it’s not always easy to nail down which games are indie and which aren’t.

Up-and-coming publishers like Zynga and Rovio started out small and indie, of course. In the loosest sense, the term applies to pretty much anyone who’s not one of the big legacy game companies, such as Nintendo, Sega or Electronic Arts.

However, after they put out a hit or two, a few independents peel off from the pack by continually hiring and growing. Contrast Zynga, which has nearly 3,000 employees at 21 offices around the world, with unconventional companies such as San Francisco-based Bolt Creative, where the two co-founders pointedly avoided hiring anyone but themselves.

“We made a decision to stay small,” said Dave Castlenuovo, Bolt’s only programmer. “To me, I get the most enjoyment working out of my home, getting to see my wife.”

Castlenuovo and his design partner Allan Dye eschewed the new-normal start-up song-and-dance: Securing VC funding, finding office space and building a company on the idea of scaling bigger and bigger.

Instead, they found huge success, despite staying small, with their flagship game Pocket God. The game lets sadistic smartphone owners punish an island of perennially doomed cartoon pygmies.

Pocket God was a one-off project started in late 2008, which went from idea to a first version on the iPhone App Store in about a week, Castlenuovo said.

But it has outperformed most one-week larks. The 99-cent app and its downloadable extras have earned about $7.5 million so far.

And the game’s pygmy characters have racked up an additional $600,000 through a spinoff comic book series, which is not bad for a two-man team.

So, how does a little operation such as Bolt Creative thrive while a company like Nintendo, with access to some of the world’s top talent and most beloved video game characters, is reporting to investors its first annual loss since 1981?

Part of it, of course, is the conventional wisdom that smaller start-ups are just nimbler on their feet. But to get at the real answer, you have to look primarily at three big companies: Valve, Apple and Facebook.

On PCs, Valve’s Steam Store eliminated the need for developers to get their games distributed in brick-and-mortar stores in order to find a mass paying audience of gamers. Mobile app marketplaces, starting with Apple’s on iOS, similarly leveled the playing ground for smartphone game developers.

And games have also infiltrated social networking sites, especially Facebook, although the spoils are decidedly lopsided: Zynga alone was responsible for 15 percent of the company’s revenue in the first quarter of 2012.

To raise the money to make new games, new avenues are also springing up fast. In March, San Francisco-based Double Fine Productions solicited donations on Kickstarter for a new point-and-click adventure game in the style of the classic games made by its founder, Tim Schafer. They met their $400,000 goal in about eight hours and ultimately raised $3.3 million from Kickstarter users.

These sorts of developers don’t always have it easy: They have to do more with less, taking on more responsibilities than they might have to in much larger teams. And they can’t bank on legacy pieces of intellectual property for success.

Not that this is an equally bad fate for everyone. For his part, Castlenuovo compares himself to Robert Rodriguez, an independent filmmaker who famously produces, writes, directs, shoots and edits most of his movies solo.

“I enjoy wearing many hats,” Castlenuovo said.

Plus, indie devs can now focus more on making the games they’re most passionate about and less on how they’re going to sell them, at least initially.

Derek van Vliet, co-founder of a Toronto-based indie shop called Get Set Games, seems to be in a good place. His company’s casual iPhone/Android game Mega Jump, initially developed by just three people (now upped to four), has racked up 24 million downloads since May of 2010.

But van Vliet grumbled that bigger companies like Electronic Arts can temporarily take over app store charts by throwing around the weight of some of their biggest properties, including Madden, Tetris and Scrabble.

“That’s getting a lot from very little work for them,” he said.

For better or for worse, the business of games is not a meritocracy. But it might be a mistake to assume it’s all one big, cohesive business in the first place. After all, the devs say, isn’t at least some of what we’re doing art?

Art vs. entertainment?

If you want to quickly start a fight on the Internet, you should follow Roger Ebert’s lead and assert in broad strokes that video games are not and will never be art. Even among the game developer community, the dividing line between art and entertainment is fuzzy at best and may be impossible to place outright.

After all, some games are just casual fun. But others are deeply personal for their creators and, if you believe their many fans, are more meaningful and higher-quality as a result.

George Fan, co-creator of Plants vs. Zombies, said he knows his game is a piece of entertainment, which he developed independently and later distributed through PopCap before EA bought the company in 2011. But he questioned whether art and indie projects even have a chance amid the business pressures at EA.

“It’s pretty much as far as you could get from indie in any company,” Fan said.

Castlenuovo echoed the sentiment, noting big companies are best able to serve their investors when they focus on making top-10 hits.

“I’m going to stick with the creativity,” he said.

Even if you accept that some developers are making artful games, getting others to appreciate them in that way is an uphill battle. In the delightful new documentary “Indie Game: The Movie,” developer Jonathan Blow explains how his indie mega-hit Braid explores the concept of trying to reverse past mistakes by giving players the ability to rewind time.

However, the directors then cut to an online video reaction to the game from Soulja Boy. The young rapper enthusiastically tells his fans that Braid “ain’t got no point … you just walking around, jumpin’ on shit.”

Still, when developers can work by themselves or on very small teams, rather than as part of a publicly traded company, they’re freer to pursue “passion projects” that mean more to them. On the surface, that’s good, but it can also be a sort of psychological poison.

For Leo Alterman, a hobbyist indie dev and senior at Stanford University, making games is about recreating a sense of wonder he felt as a child playing Nintendo 64. And he’s not just talk: A game he built from scratch starting in high school, Tasty Static, has racked up 100,000 free downloads online in the past two years.

But Alterman said he could never make games his profession — the personal stakes are just too high.

“If you’re doing that as a job, and you fuck it up, then yeah, you’re kind of in trouble,” he said.

Indie devs straddle the stressful line between living to work and working to live. Despite his quest for childlike wonder, Alterman describes himself as morbid, and he’s in good company: In “Indie Game: The Movie,” one developer compares his work to being in a concentration camp as a major deadline approaches. Another earnestly threatens to kill himself if he can’t finish his game as planned.

“So, that’s my incentive,” he deadpans.

It seems unlikely that gamers would look at the latest update to Madden or Words With Friends and use it to judge those games’ creators. But Edmund McMillen, co-creator of the popular (and maddeningly difficult) indie platformer game Super Meat Boy, said the game and its public image are so tied to his story and personality that it’s impossible not to feel judged.

“We put everything into it,” McMillen said of himself and his “Team Meat” partner Tommy Refenes. “We are the game.”

The mainstream response

Just as with indie music and movies, there’s a more emotional response to the idea of a game produced by one or two people than one produced by a faceless company. And finding indie game developers who are willing to question the values of big games companies — like EA and Zynga — is like finding sand on a beach.

“That doesn’t seem like art to me,” the hobbyist dev Alterman said of Zynga, which did not respond to requests for comment. “They’re playing a different game.”

“Zynga’s a business,” Team Meat’s McMillen said. “I would go so far as to say they don’t even make games. They make money.”

“That sounds like hell to me,” Refenes says in “Indie Game: the Movie,” after he’s asked about working at EA or Epic Games.

Plus, players are responding to independent developers in a big way. According to the mobile app analytics and advertising firm Flurry, 56 percent of all mobile games played in Q1 2011 were made by indie devs; one year later, in Q1 2012, that share had jumped to 68 percent.

But those opinions and trends don’t seem to deter Rich Hilleman, EA’s chief creative officer and one of the company’s first 20 employees from the early 80s. He’s careful to praise talented indie devs who have gone on to join EA, but also stresses the administrative headaches that come with staying small.

“I want to not have to worry about clearing credit cards and legal issues and translating this stuff into Maltese,” he said. “I think you recognize that it was fun to be independent, except that that stuff wasn’t all that fun.”

When Hilleman joined EA, the company didn’t do any development in-house; it was solely a publisher that connected independent game designers with bigger audiences. Within the gaming world, the company helped make rock stars out of developers like Bill Budge, whose game, Pinball Construction Set, was packaged like a music album, with Budge’s name in giant script on the front.

Not really something you’d see today. I’ve sunk countless hours into EA’s Need for Speed racing game on my iPhone, but I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person who helped make it.

When I told him this, Hilleman countered that customers, not publishers, are the ones who decide who the stars are, although it’s hard not to wonder why that star status doesn’t correlate with hugely popular games like EA’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, which gained 1 million subscribers within three days of its launch last year.

Hilleman readily volunteers that one of the closest modern rock-star successors to Bill Budge is an indie dev: Notch, the creator of Minecraft. In the past three years, Notch’s sandbox game has built an extremely passionate community of over 16 million players, despite having primarily three programmers listed in its credits.

Despite all this, Hilleman draws a firm line in the sand in opposition to independent developers who say they’re freer to pursue “passion projects” than developers at EA.

“Building video games is just hard,” Hilleman said. “There is no such thing as building something you do not like. It just does not happen.”

Of course that doesn’t mean life is necessarily easier for devs who, at big companies, don’t have to translate anything into Maltese. James Swirsky, co-director of “Indie Game: The Movie,” said he saw plenty of hardship in his two years as a games tester at EA.

Devs there, he said, “were just as stressed out and pushed to the brink as the guys you see in the film.”

The key difference

Independent game developers share a lot of DNA with their big-business brethren, and the differences aren’t big enough to merit a culture war or to force audiences to choose between one or the other.

Furthermore, the mainstream world is not clueless: EA has learned its lessons from the years in the mid-aughts when console games seemed stuck in a rut, and has tried to reach out to and learn from the independent community — although Hilleman is quick to point out the irony of the situation, since in the 80s “Electronic Arts” was still small enough to be synonymous with the indie scene.

Meanwhile, Zynga has established a successful pattern of growing by acquisition, looking for the independent shops that are happy to sell out (not that that’s a bad thing, as OMGPOP and others can tell you).

But there’s still a key difference between the independents and the rest, and everyone watching the gaming space should note: With the rise of indie games as an economic force to be reckoned with, the charges are set for an explosion of creativity in the gaming world in the coming years. Indie devs have been around for decades, but now it’s easier than ever for them to make a comfortable living while making the games they personally pick and love.

The “hardcore” gamer community often derides social games on Facebook and mobile devices as too simplistic. But that will change. Games will get better and more ambitious as barriers to entry continue to fall and more outlier voices come into the mix.

With indies coming into the spotlight, games may finally be able to come into their own. Call it a real-world power-up.

Recently, Funzio sold to Japan’s Gree for $210 million, and Zynga acquired OMGPOP for $180 million; not too long before that, Electronic Arts paid $750 million for PopCap.

In an interview, Pocket Gem’s COO Ben Liu said that mobile game companies are hot commodities right now, but to sell is shortsighted.

“We feel like it’s the early days of mobile,” Liu said. “There’s a decade-long shift occurring from PC and the Web to mobile, and games is only the first vertical to take off. There’s so much opportunity. We need all of our attention on that to be successful.”

Liu would not disclose the company’s revenue, but said that it has been growing extremely fast. Over the past year and a half, the company has moved its offices five times to accommodate the growth of its staff — from 10 to 120 employees.

And as of a few months ago, the company recorded 60 million app downloads since its founding in 2009. Its hit title Tap Zoo generated 20 million downloads alone.

Pocket Gems’ games fall into the “casual” genre, and are focused on building products that have fairly addicting play; they attract a predominantly adult female audience. The games normally have “tap” in the name — Tap Zoo, Tap Pet Hotel and Tap Jungle allow players to build, respectively, their own zoo, pet hotel and mystical rain forest.

Last week, Pocket Gems released its first game exclusively for Android, called Tap Dragon Park, which allows players to train dragons to defend their kingdoms.

Pocket Gems has been able to rise in the rankings without having to tap investors too much. (Maybe their next game will be Tap Bank?) It has raised $5 million in capital from Sequoia Capital and a handful of angel investors, and is profitable.

Here are Liu’s thoughts on some of the issues facing the mobile games industry.

On making acquisitions versus being acquired:

Liu says Pocket Gems isn’t entertaining offers at this time, but will consider making acquisitions of its own. “We’ve been completely focused on organic expansion, but I think as we continue to grow, something we’ll look at is acquisitions, as well. We are focused on building a great team organically, and are opportunistic.”

How many games can you release in a year?

“Last year, we launched 10 games total. Some of them are new IP that requires a larger team and can be franchise-sustaining, and others are seasonal titles or extensions.”

Is there an issue with copycats in the space?

“Yes, all of our games have been cloned extensively by most of our competitors. But that’s one of the prices of success. We’ve always prided ourselves on being an innovator. The thing that is difficult to clone is creativity. … We have a saying: Pocket Gems is a leader and not a follower. And many of our competitors have a fast-follower strategy.”

What are your thoughts about third-party distribution platforms, like Gree and DeNA, which are trying to create mobile social networks?

“We haven’t opened our games to third parties. It’s in our interest to develop our own platform. Their businesses are really compelling, but there’s no winning platform yet in the mobile space. We have our own loyal community, which is a powerful game engine. We don’t want to be dependent on someone else’s platform. Our own great platform is a powerful source of marketing, and it is good at letting our users know about the games. That’s the most effective.”

Is summer a good time for people to play and discover new mobile games?

“It’s a good time. People are on vacation and in transit, and it’s a natural device to use during those times. And people have more downtime and free time. We’ve found historically for it to be good. Holidays are another.”

I have five predictions of how Facebook will be maturing in the first year after its IPO:

1. Search

Facebook has become home base for users in many ways. But when it comes to search, Facebook makes you take a bus transfer at Google every time you want to leave the house.

And that’s a shame, because Google starts each search from a place of knowing almost nothing about me. When I’m taking a vacation to Bali, I’m far less interested in Google’s generic recommendations of things to do than I am in recommendations from my friends who have been there.

Facebook already knows which of my friends have been to Bali, and which restaurants and attractions they liked the best. It can even differentiate between the friend I trust for restaurant recs and the friend who always finds the best surfing spots.

There is a clear battle between Google and Facebook. But it’s not over “search vs. discovery,” as it is often framed. Rather, it’s “transaction vs. relationship” — which is why Facebook has the potential to disrupt search as we know it.

Prediction: Facebook will launch a purely social search by the end of 2012 (before tackling the whole hog in 2013).

2. Advertising

Despite the company’s fierce ethos of consumer experience first, business concerns second, an IPO will inevitably put upward pressure on the latter. With the numbers published quarterly and the prices reset every day, Facebook will be forced to support that share price (if not for the sake of its shareholders, then at least for its employees!) by expanding its advertising revenues.

Facebook today brings in quarterly ad revenue of $872M — just a tiny fraction of Google’s $9B. But transactions are by nature pecuniary — and relationships are priceless. As a gatekeeper to nearly a billion consumer relationships, Facebook can roll out new advertising products that are far more valuable than AdWords.

The market for online brand advertising is already huge at $85B today. As soon as Facebook unlocks the potential of relationship-based advertising, the market will open up by tens of billions more.

Prediction: By Q2 2013, Facebook will have more than tripled ad revenues to $3B per quarter.

3. Open Graph

Occupy Facebook! Oh wait, we already do. Or does Facebook occupy us? Facebook currently occupies 1 in 7 minutes of all time spent online.

As the locus of consumer identity, attention and relationships, Facebook has the potential to be the one true platform that links together every destination on the web.

But it’s not there yet. Open Graph was a start, but it lacks a complete and actionable vision for how publishers can connect, access data and establish relationships. Publishers don’t want bits and pieces of data that they need to analyze themselves — they want a unified schema that bridges their audiences’ online worlds and real lives.

When I buy a chicken at Whole Foods using a Facebook app’s mobile grocery coupon, Facebook can match that incoming data point with the fact that I read Cooks Illustrated and that I’ve been on an Indian food kick lately (based on my restaurant check-ins). By the time that chicken is in my reusable bag and I’m hauling it out the door, there should be chicken curry recipe suggestions on my Facebook page.

Facebook has an opportunity to turn data from the long tail of Facebook apps into real inferences about you and me that publishers and other brands on the web can actually use.

Prediction: Facebook will completely redesign their analytics offering by Q2 2013 to provide not just data but real, integrated audience insights that will guide brands’ personalization efforts.

4. Commerce and Currency

Advertising won’t be the only revenue play Facebook makes in its first year as a public company.

Digital commerce (i.e. digital goods) already represents more than $16B in market size, and is projected to grow to $36B globally by 2014. E-commerce is another $680B on top of that. Both are currently conducted by arcane means: Visa card numbers and PayPal accounts.

Why have digital payments been so slow to evolve? Because even the most trusting of us only allow a few close associates access to our most private details. Who knows me the best? My bank, my lawyer, my mother and Facebook. In fact, no one owns my identity as well as Facebook these days (sorry, Mom!). Just because Facebook doesn’t have access to my wallet yet doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.

A host of companies today (Google, Apple, Square) are trying to become your digital wallet, but Facebook holds a valuable advantage: it is already the locus of your relationships with third-party Web sites through Open Graph. While the logistics will certainly be no piece of cake, commerce is right up Facebook’s alley.

Prediction: By Q2 2013, Facebook will be presiding over $2B in transactions.

5. Timeline

There’s nothing more core to Facebook than its user experience, and Facebook has since its birth shown a consistent healthy dissatisfaction with it no matter what the status quo.

The current timeline experience is a nice try, but it’s not quite right. Timeline solved one problem — the indigestible frequency and quantity of updates at all levels of priority — while creating several more. New Problem #1: Timeline’s intuition about what’s important is too frequently just plain wrong. And while it gives us a great retrospective on people, it does a surprisingly poor job of helping us stay up to date with them. New Problem #2: Timeline depends heavily on Open Graph widgets to summarize our lives.

The latter is both ambitious and troubling. We admire great biographers for their ability to identify and communicate the essence of a person. It’s an insult say that a Nike Fuel score algorithm can capture the “real me” in the same way.

Timeline is a v1 product. It will take significant and deep tuning over many versions to reach its full potential.

This may seem like it’s just a UI update, but it’s not. Timeline is the clearinghouse for everything that happens on Facebook. Getting Timeline right is probably the single most valuable thing Facebook can do to grow its effectiveness with users — and its revenues.

Prediction: Facebook will release the first major redesign of Timeline by the first half of 2013.

Will the precocious kid that Facebook is today grow into a smart, savvy adult? A boatload of investors and J.P. Morgan certainly seem to think so. Over the long term, it will depend on Facebook’s ability to leave its youthful single-minded focus on users behind and execute consistently against two metrics: great user experience and revenues to match.

This is a guest post by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz). Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint, and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).