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AOL sells 800 patents to Microsoft in $1bn deal
By Daniel Farey-Jones, marketingmagazine.co.uk, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 11:40AM
AOL has agreed to sell more than 800 technology patents to Microsoft as part of a $1.06bn (£670m) cash deal following an auction process.
AOL: sells off 800 patents to Microsoft
AOL did not reveal specific information about the scope of the patents, but according to Reuters they include technology rights from AOL's current and former businesses, ranging from Netscape, ICQ and MapQuest to CompuServe, Advertising.com and others.
AOL said it would continue to hold a portfolio of more than 300 patents and patent applications spanning advertising, search, content generation/management, social networking, mapping, multimedia/streaming and security.
The deal includes a non-exclusive licence for Microsoft to these retained patents.
AOL intends to return "a significant portion" of the proceeds to its shareholders.
The AOL-Microsoft deal is the latest in a series of patent agreements and disagreements between leading technology companies.
Last month Facebook bought a series of patents from IBM in the wake of a lawsuit being filed against it by Yahoo.
Follow Daniel Farey-Jones on Twitter @danfareyjones
This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk
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Chronicles of Cannes – Day Two: The Redux
Day two dawned….and with it another migration back to the Palais.Annie Leibovitz explained the art of bringing a story down to a single moment, and shared the inspiration behind the campaign she created with Disney making tales as old as time relevant to today. We heard from Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at Google (yes, really) reinforcing the importance of storytelling in driving audacious invention. Mother warned us to hang on to the joy of craft and keep our brains happy in order not to become advertising douchebags. And Facebook discussed scalable creativity.
Read more on Chronicles of Cannes – Day Two: The Redux…
