Android patent war, purchasing Google Music and Android by the numbers

Android and Apple Patent War Round 2

On Last week's show, we reported that Android lost in its bid to buy up all of Nortel's patents. It seems that $4 billion was just a little steep, even for Google's no doubt deep pockets.

A consortium of bidders that included Apple bought up the patents for $4.5 billion. With that battle over, the war wages on.

The latest patent files to hit the auction block number some 8,800 and are coming from InterDigital, all specific to mobile technology. Apple seems intent on keeping such patents out of Google's hands and with some $80 billion in liquid capital sitting in Cupertino, this one could get ugly.

Let's do the math. If Nortel's library of about 6,000 patents went for $4.5 billion, that puts the value of each patent at about $750,000 and the folio of 8,800 patents could then be valued at 6.6 billion dollars.

Google is very weak when it comes to defending Android against patent disputes given that, well, they don't have many... and fewer still relate specifically to mobile. If Apple holds all the patents, it's bad news for Android devotees.

Let's band together. If 8,799 Android Weekly viewers plus one host can come up with $750,001 each, we can do this. Who's with me!?

Anyone?

Google Music purchasing?

With Apple the undisputed leader in digital music downloads and Amazon nipping at Android's heels, it seems Google may be readying its own digital music downloads solution.

Google Music already lets us store our music in the cloud, making it accessible anywhere. However, uploading gigs and gigs of music is something of an arduous task. Add in draconian bandwidth and usage caps levied by ISPs and it's even more so.

All we have to go on for now is that site Android and Me uncovered an icon set for an Android Market whose color precisely matches that of Google Music.

Given that the overall Android Market is green, the movie download store is red and the book buying market is blue, this seems to indicate that an Android flavored digital music download store is all but inevitable.

Android Overtake - Activate

In April (Android Weekly episode 9) we counted up Android activations -- then happening at a rate of four per second -- with a nifty on-screen graphic that my Producer assured me was more trouble than it was worth.

Now, three months later, Android activations are clocking in at six every second. That's 150,000 activations per day. That's... well, that's a hell of a lot.

Other numbers-based news from Google's new CEO Larry Page in the company's second quarter earnings call with stock holders: 6 billion total app downloads from the Android Market, 115 people signing up for Google+ per second, despite the fact that it is (or was, depending when you're watching this) invitation only. Over 10 million people are using Google+.

And the most important piece of news for Google stock holders? Net earnings of over 2.5 billion in Q2.

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