2 posts and columns on IV

Iridium Patents Soar Anew in Licensing Deal

in News on June 25, 2010 at 1:30 pm PT

A collection of satellites called Iridium became a symbol in the 1990s of overambitious engineering, and later a turnaround story. Now the network may also be linked to the imaginative financial engineering going on around patents. Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle firm known more for acquiring patents than dispensing with them, announced a deal this week to sell rights to a large portfolio of satellite communications patents to Thales Alenia Space, a Franco-Italian joint venture that recently won a contract to supply a new fleet of satellites to Iridium Communications. Where did the inventions come from? Mainly the original Iridium project.

AAPL Sauce

in News on January 14, 2009 at 2:36 pm PT

As one might imagine, Apple’s shareholders did not take the news of Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence well. And learning that his “health-related issues are more complex” than first believed certainly didn’t help matters. After trading resumed, Apple shares tanked, plummeting eight percent to $78.50 (and knocking about $6.4 billion off the company’s market cap) before recovering a bit.