According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the tech giants Cisco, Google, Verizon and HP are working together and with other firms to form the Allied Security Trust.

The purpose of this group will be to purchase intellectual property assets before they can be purchased by patent-holding firms. The cost for each company to join the trust will be roughly $250,000 to join the trust and will each deposit $5 million into a joint pool to purchase future patents for the trust.

Both the tech and telecom industries have both been plagued in recent years by several patent suits filed by patent-holding companies that do not actually produce any of the technology whose rights they own - also referred to as “Trolls” because they “troll” for developments and get patents on technologies years before the technology is even remotely ready to come to market. Then they can file suits against the actual developers of the technology for “infringing” on their patent.

The most prominent such case involved a patent-holding company named NTP that successfully sued BlackBerry maker Research in Motion for infringing upon its patents for e-mail-to-mobile device technology, something everyone with a Blackberry uses.

After getting a $612-million-dollar settlement from Research in Motiion, NTP sued Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA for infringing upon five of the same patents.

You can see how this trust will stop a lot of this activity and protect the larger corporations from troll-based lawsuits. The winners in the end will be us - the consumers because we won’t have to pay the added costs to cover the litigation in our product purchases!

They just received approval for their virtual camera control technology meaning the cameras within the virutal environment can be controlled by the user through use of a motion sensor, HD color viewfinder and two thumbstick controls, which mount to a tripod fluidhead and panbars.

The technology can also be mounted to a Steadicam or a shoulder mount for hand-held operation.

This is a remarkable development because it completely enhances the gaming experience as well as the development of all types of media from motion picture pre-visualization, visual effects, and 3-D animation. The technology will allow digital layout artists, and those are the fine folks that plot camera paths and compose shots for feature films and episodic animation, to completely vault over the current limitations for producing cinematic live action-style shots quickly and effectively, in real-time, with the fluidity and precision that only real-life camera equipment operated by a human cameraman can offer.

As far as video game production, that is enhanced as well with easier than ever to create video game cut scenes, trailers, and televised video game tournaments. The technology enables sports cameramen to film the action at video game tournaments from within the game itself. Directors can block multiple cameramen within the game during battles, and call an in-game multicamera live switch consistent with standards used in real-life sports broadcasts. Meaning a director saying, “Okay film on camera 2″ doesn’t just apply to the real world anymore.

The court ruled that Toyota had to pay year that Toyota had to pay Paice LLC $4.3 million for using the Virginia-based company’s patented technologies in its gasoline-hybrid vehicles. Additionally, in addition to the $4.3 million reward, Toyota must also pay Paice $25 for every Prius, Highlander Hybrid and Lexus RX400h sold.

Originally, Paice had asked that Toyota be banned from selling those hybrid models at all, however when the case was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, it was ruled that Toyota could sell those vehicles and the request for a block on the sales was refused.

The first patent is US Patent 20080125106 and is titled “Wireless communication out of range indication” and in a nutshell would provide an alert when WiFi or mobile signal is in danger of being lost giving the user the opportunity to take “corrective measures” such as logging off or alerting the person or persons that they are communicating with that the conversation needs to be terminated because of impending signal loss

Apple’s own CEO Steve Jobs is credited as one of the inventors in the filing of US Patent 20080122796 titled “Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Determining Commands by Applying Heuristics.” The patent application relates to Apple’s multi-touch technology and will make the touch screens more reliable and easier to use.

In another wireless invention US Patent 20080125040, that is titled “Location discovery using bluetooth,” Apple developed a method and system for locating objects using a Bluetooth communications protocol.

The final patent filed is simply titled ”Media Player System” and was filed under US Patent 20080123285. This patent describes a method of wirelessly connecting the hand held media player to another device. Kind of like beaming from Palm Pilot to Palm Pilot.

Along with the solar powered iPhone that Apple is said to be in development of, there are some cool changes going on at Apple.

Well, iVoice Technology thinks so.

On June 12th they announced a patent filing for a trash can that is made from recycled tire crumb rubber. This is part of their green platform and their pursuit of more eco-friendly products.

This isn’t just a little modeled circle of rubber to be placed at the corner of your desk, these will be fully functional items. The trash cans will be manufactured from 100% recycled tire crumb rubber. The molded trash can main member has an open top, side walls and a bottom. In some designs, there is an attached or unattached lid, as well as one or more handles. There are optional wheels attached to the bottom for ease of movement.

This was filed on behalf of iVoice’s new “green” platforms, B Green Innovations, Inc., its wholly-owned subsidiary, and this is the third of many green products that will be produced by this division.

According to an article by Ars Technica, the patent would use technology to enforce “No flash photography” zones or “No cell phones” in certain areas — and the technology would work by disabling the device entirely during the period of time it was in an area where usage was limited or forbidden.

I can see this heavily implemented in places such as hospitals, and on airplane flights. The technology could further be developed to enforce speed zones and control the acceleration of vehicles.

Forklifts, boxes, people lifting heavy objects and perhaps delivery of items may all spring in there - but a company called ExpressCube has applied for and received a very interesting patent that will change the way many warehouses do business in the future.

The technology patent ExpressCube has developed is for dimensioning and weighing equipment that will completely eliminate charge backs and let warehouses operating at optimum capacities.

The ExpressCube counter top system is an economical cubing and weighing system designed to meet point of sale, factory shipping and logistic applications in a commercial environment.

The unit that has been developed can measure the dimensions of rectangular or square objects in inches or centimeters, weigh the object in pounds or kilograms, and calculate the dimensional weight based on user-defined cubing factors. Automating this feature will save many man-hours in labor for the measuring and calculating of housed items.

WiMax is the wireless broadband standard that can transmit data for up to 30 miles using a bandwidth that exceeds current DSL and cable capabilities. This would make free WiFi more of a possibility in many areas around the globe.

In light of this, Intel and Cisco are joining forces with a number of other tech companies to patent the WiMax technology.

Some of those other players include Samsung, Sprint Nextel, Alcatel-Lucent and Clearwire which are all combining forces to form the Open Patent Alliance, which will hold the rights to WiMAX-related patents and license them to makers of computers, networking devices and other products according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.

This grouping is designed to keep reasonable limits on the royalty rates and ensure the cost of adopting the technology remains competitive — as some have voiced concern that the high prices for WiMax make it not as attractive to some consumers.

Previously, Echostar and TiVo had battled it out over TiVo’s time warp technology and their DVR patent was upheld. Echostar was found in to have indeed infringed on TiVo’s technology patent and TiVo walked away with damages in the amount of $70 million dollars. Winning this case was exactly what TiVo needed in order to claim to be one of the founders of existing DVR technology. Previously it was rumored that TiVo had lost large potential clients (e.g. Comcast) because confidence was lacking in the actual validity of TiVo’s claims.

Echostar/Dish Network had already been offering digital video recording - usually sold as “instant replay” to their customers and the loss of the suit would have affected the ability for this service to perform in millions of boxes that are already in the homes of their subscribers.

To avoid losing customers to services that could provide DVR, the company has been working on their own patent for “walk-around” technology that would be perform the same function without infringing on the technology that TiVo developed.

TiVo is skeptical and CEO Tom Rogers noted, “…based on what we’ve been provided by EchoStar to date, we believe that EchoStar’s modified software does not avoid infringement.”

Now, it’s up to a Delaware court to declare that their patent work around successfully skirts TiVo’s multimedia time-warping patent and in the meantime, rumor has it that TiVo will ask a federal judge to mandate Dish Networks shut down DVR functionality for continuing to infringe on TiVo’s patent in contempt of the earlier ruling—if the judge agrees.

Depending on how this suit plays out, it may change some of the services Dish can offer - wait and see!

The two companies named in the dispute, AngioDynamics Inc. and Vascular Solutions Inc., agreed they will pay Vnus, respectively, $6.8 million and $3.1 million. In return, the two companies were granted a license to use Vnus products in the treatment of varicose veins.

For both health and cosmetic reasons, the treatment of varicose veins is growing year after year with no signs of slowing down; so the potential for continued damages to Vnus was high.

The dispute originally encompassed a larger scope of companies including AngioDynamics, Vascular Solutions and Diomed when it was originally filed in 2005 and the trial was scheduled to begin June 23, 2008. However, Diomed filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March, resulting in a stay of the patent litigation against it. However, Vnus said it plans to file suit against Diomed’s estate to retrieve damages.

The shares of Vnus rose from $1.92 to $19.44 in Tuesday afternoon’s trading, reflecting the positivity of the outcome of this technology patent dispute.