Silicon Valley and the business world has gone nuts over Facebook’s $1 billion buyout of Instagram, but it’s not even the biggest acquisition a major tech company made yesterday. Microsoft paid AOL $1.056 billion in cash for 800 patents after “a competitive auction process.”Patents in the portfolio deal with advertising, search, content generation/management, social networking, mapping, streaming media and security, TechCrunch reports.
AOL said in a memo to employees that it will retain 300 patents that deal with its core businesses, including ads, search and content generation.
Microsoft hasn’t announced what it intends to do with the patent portfolio, although it could be used defensively. Yahoo! is currently waging a patent war against Facebook, a company in which Microsoft owns a stake, and MS may be protecting itself from any similar suits.
Those patents? Netscape.
Which, to some of you, means something. Or at least, used to.
No comments:
Post a Comment