Tuesday was a banner day for Vnus since its shares jumped dramatically on the news that their patent dispute with two rival companies had been settled, resulting in payments to Vnus totalling $9.9 million dollars.

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.

NemeriX was awarded a patent today for a single chip multi-band GNSS receiver technology. In a nutshell, it means that GPS and location-based products using this technology will be able to acquire parallel signals in all frequency bands from the GPS, GLONASS and Galileo systems making the need for three different receivers unnecessary.

This patent awarding to NemeriX will mean that both businesses as well as consumers who utilize multiple products can now integrate their products into one receiver and save space and money.

The product also has the ability for the user to program the frequency synthesizer and to easily tune the three receiving channels. This includes filtering levels as well as frequency plans.

The receiver was originally developed to address specific needs within the high end consumer as well as the space market. This product will be designed to meet the needs of consumers and businesses across the board that utilize GPS/GNSS applications.

News broke today that Apple filed a patent for a technology that would insert a layer of solar cells under the touch sensitive screen of the iPhone.

This is a stride forward as previous attempts to create solar powered MP3 players, cell phones and other mobile devices have failed because by the time the solar panel is added, there simply isn’t enough room on the object.

The genius of putting solar panels under the screen will allow the 2.4-inch by 4.5-inch glass face of the iPhone to — in effect– do dual duty as a solar panel.

If the patent Apple has filed is approved, this will make iPhone a truly indispensable device, especially in areas where limited access to electricity is a problem.

Additionally, international travelers will be able to charge up their iPhones without worrying about the current differences.

Thoughts are if Apple gets this technology approved it should make a race among the other cell phone and media companies to come up with similar technology to produce their own solar powered products.

The US District Court in San Diego, California found that Microsoft violated two of Alcatel Lucent patents — and hit the company with a heavy fine.

Originally, the suit filed by Alcatel Lucent sought $1.5 billion in damages that related to four specific patents related to video decoding technology. The jury in the case found that Microsoft did not infringe on two of the four technology patents.

The patents that Microsoft was found to be in violation of included two patents that were part of an audio user interface applications developed by Alcatel Lucent.

Dell was also named in this suit as infringing on technology included in the fourth patent suit.

Dell was found not to have infringed.

After the suit, Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel gave the following statement, “We will move immediately to have the two verdicts against Microsoft overturned. We feel confident the verdicts will be overturned, just as the court overturned a verdict last year by a San Diego jury,”

Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman Mary Ward states that the company was pleased with the decision of the judge.

Microsoft patented new technology that creates an environment where malware applications can be detected by the behavior characteristics of the programs.

This will enable the security applications to detect and prevent malware programs from entering operating systems and creating havoc.

The technology’s inventor, Microsoft’s Adrian Marinescu, explained that suspected malware would be taken to a virtual sandbox where the executable code could be examined and determined whether it was friend or foe.

Marinescu wrote, “The virtual operating environment confines potential malware so that the systems of the host operating environment will not be adversely effected [sic] during simulation,” the patent says. ”

As a program is being simulated, a set of behavior signatures is generated. The collected behavior signatures are suitable for analysis to determine if the program is malware.”

The patent included technology to recognize the base behaviors of malware rather than the traditional way of waiting for infections to happen and then relying on signature codes to identify and attempt to correct the damage. Since the major chunk of malware that is released is simply re-written older code from other malware programs, using the base behaviors will potentially help to stop a host of system infections.

The patent has been ongoing  since 2004, and Microsoft has not stated yet when or where this new patent will be used in its existing or upcoming products.

The Acer Corporation, longtime maker of computers and computer components, can breathe a big sigh of relief since the SanDisk Corporation has dropped their multi-million dollar lawsuit.

The lawsuit was originally filed in April 2008, and accused Acer of infringing on a variety of patents that included memory cards used in cameras, cell phones and USB drives — according to the a spokesperson at the U.S. International Trade Commission.

SanDisk included 47 companies and subsidiaries in the original filing, and claimed up to five of the original patents used in the development and application of semiconductor chips.  These are the chips that manage flash memory operations in a range of devices like memory cards, media players and a host of other products.

The Acer Corporation was dropped from the lawsuit  when SanDisk learned that Acer had no corporate relationship to Apacer Technology, originally thought to be related to Acer.

Apple’s best selling media player - iPod - has been hit with a patent infringement case filed by ZapMedia. The suit asks for an unspecified amount in damages and includes both the iPod as well as the iTunes website.

The suit was filed on May 14, 2008 in the Eastern District Court in Texas. ZapMedia cited “multiple attempts” to resolve the patent issue with Apple before the lack of satisfactory closure in the matter resulted in the lawsuit being filed.

In the suit, ZapMedia alleges that in the late 1990s a predecessor to the current corporation created an exclusive interconnected system that is much like the online distribution process that is used in Apple’s iTunes store.

Two patents were filed in October 2000 to protect the intellectual property of these designs. The suit also alleges that the patent filings may constitute the foundations of the DRM (digital rights management) platform.

ZapMedia claims that Apple - as well as other media and technological giants - came in contact with their original technology concept in meetings, as the overview of the original designs were explained to them in possible partnership ventures.

The suit further alleges that no permission was asked by Apple for use of the designs, and they unveiled their own iPod media player and iTunes software application in October 2001, and opened an iTunes store in April 2003.

The suit contends that the technology used by Apple is based on the original designs by ZapMedia’s predecessor company.

Blizzard Entertainment is on the move to merge its PC properties with cellular phone market.

The trademark filed by “World of Watercraft” developer Blizzard Entertainment, is an indication of the company’s desire to integrate their gaming properties within the parameters of mobile phone convenience.

The new trademark was filed for a system called “Battlechat”, and will provide an interface for the electronic transmission of data and messages including: voice, text, and messages transmission.

At present, there’s no express guarantee that the user will be able to slay Dragons from their cell phone.  However, in this industry, where you find smoke—fire is never far behind.

SecureLogix Corp. has been issued its 12th patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The patent covers the technology that forms the basis of communications appliances and bundled applications that provide voice network management and security capabilities.

SecureLogix’s Virtual Private Switched Telecommunications Network can presently encrypt voice, fax, modem, and video calls across the traditional public telephone network.

SecureLogix is a forward-thinking company that secures telecom network resources from abuse and attack.

The General Patent Corp. International announced a licensing agreement on January 15, 2008 between Digitial Technology Licensing (DTL) and Nokia.

The patented technology is an audio data compression algorithm used for speech coding, which is used in GSM cell phone communications. This technology also provides backward compatibility, which allows cell phones to communicate with older technology in cellular towers.

DTL is also pursuing litigation with Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Spring/Nextel and Motorola for infringement of the DTL patent, which is called Digital Output Transducer.