api

After a jury today decided that Google did not infringe on two of Oracle's patents, it was revealed that most of the jury seemed to embrace Google's patent arguments during the trial.

After the verdict was handed down at the U.S. District Court of Northern California and the jury was dismissed, jury foreman Greg Thompson stopped in the hall to answer reporters' questions regarding deliberations. At one point during deliberations in the Java API copyright phase, Thompson said, he was the lone holdout, managing to swing a couple of jurors to his side, according to a report … Read more

The real impact of today's jury verdict in Oracle's long-running and -- as we now know -- overhyped lawsuit against Google means that the case is basically over.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the 10 remaining jurors, who served for about a month, and sent them home.

What happens next depends on how much more money Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wants to spend on litigation. Ellison could find a reason to appeal Oracle's whopper of a loss on its allegations of patent infringement. Or his attorneys … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- The  jury in the Oracle v. Google trial rendered a partial verdict, favoring Oracle, in the copyright phase of the trial. Yet a question the jury failed to decide prompted Google to call for a mistrial, and could sharply limit damages even if the verdict stands.

The five male and seven female jurors failed to deliver unanimous answers to four detailed questions (see below) Judge William Alsup provided them prior to deliberations. The questions aimed to determine whether Google's Android mobile platform infringed on part of the Java programming language that Oracle acquired from Sun … Read more

As the second week of the Oracle-Google trial got underway Monday, Judge William Alsup continued to probe the depths of Java and Android APIs and copyright law. Prior to the jury entering the courtroom, Alsup asked the Google team whether Google admitted that it copied the 37 APIs at the center of the lawsuit.

"I quibble with the word "copy," Google lawyer Bruce Baber said. "APIs have been out for long time, in books, on the web and available in (Apache) Harmony. We absolutely used and included them in Android so we would have them exactly … Read more

The tagline is "In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control! Reveal the hottest nightspots, who's in them, and how to reach them..."

For a lot of people, this sounds like an app made in heaven, but the fact that the service used Foursquare and Facebook data to automatically pinpoint the location of specific women near users has even more people freaking out, writes Cult of Mac.

Now, in response to the uproar about the app, Foursquare has apparently shut down the app's access to its … Read more

For Android tablet owners, shopping the Google Play Store can sometimes be a pain, with tons of scaled-up phone apps hiding among the truly tablet-optimized. Sure, there's always the curated Staff Picks for Tablets section, but that offers only a tiny taste of all the delicious HD goodness that's really out there.

Enter Tablified Market--a curated market just for tablet-specific apps. The people behind it have a strict set of criteria that an app must meet in order to be included in the database, which to us means no more phone apps in search results. For one, an … Read more

Along with the news that Reddit was spinning out into an independent company last September, the community-curated site also said it was searching for a new CEO.

That new CEO started the job today. Yishan Wong comes to Reddit with an engineering and management background; his last position was Director of Engineering for Facebook.

In a blog post, Wong writes that he was shocked to learn he got the position because even though he had worked at startups and managed large teams of engineers, he didn't have previous CEO experience.

"At first, I didn't really quite believe … Read more

Getty Images today unveiled an API designed to make it easy for a wide range of Web site publishers to access, search, and use the company's vast collection of stock photography.

The new service, known as Connect by Getty Images, is designed to give Web publishers built-in access to Getty images, as well as the search meta data associated with them.

Getty said it already has more than 40 customers using Connect, including Bleacher Report, ReachLocal, Zazzle, and many other ad agencies and publishing platforms.

The Connect API is free for Web site publishers to use, but customers who … Read more

Mozilla engineers have begun work on a new API for Web sites that will allow them to notify you when they update, similar to how a mobile app notifies you that it has new content for you to check out. But what it really sounds like is a way to drag the concept of RSS feeds into Web 2.0--finally.

Jeff Balogh, a Web developer at Mozilla, explained in a blog post earlier this week that the push application programming interface is designed to extend the idea of the push services we already experience on iOS and Android to the … Read more