on 22 October 2009
Unseasonably hot news from Finland today as it emerges that mobile handset giant Nokia is busy in the Federal District Court in Delaware, US, with plans to sue Apple over patent infringement.
Nokia is taking Apple to task because the company “infringes Nokia patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) standards” – in other words, critical elements of Nokia’s technology for handling wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption.
At a corporate level this could be quite a scrap, given the enormity of what is at stake (the action relates to every iPhone shipped since 2007!) and the size of the companies involved.
But spare a thought for Dopplr, what some believe to be is the travel social network of the moment, which has a popular and rather cool-looking iPhone app currently resting at around 40th place in the most popular travel apps on the iTunes App Store.
The UK-based firm could find itself in the middle of this most messy of bunfights given that it is now owned by Nokia.
And this often strikes at the heard of the psyche of start-up – does it want to be involved or forced to tow the party line when the parent company falls out in such dramatic fashion with another company?
It may not have any choice, of course. But Dopplr’s reach and targets for increasing engagement with users probably rely on providing innovative tools such as the iPhone app.
We await news from Lapland…
NB: Nokia, Dopplr, Apple were all unavailable for comment.
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Would be a pity to see Dopplr disappear from the iPhone, which I can’t quite see happening anytime soon despite the scrap. Used it on my last trip to Zurich and found it useful although still limited in volume of data for some destination.
I don’t think this will impact Dopplr or any other area where Nokia and Apple overlap (who knows, maybe Sports Tracker will launch an iPhone app after they are spun out). Nokia want license fees and they have fallen out over the price, these negotiations must have been going on for months. I don’t think this is some opportunistic surprise attack. Nokia collect a lot of reasonable license fees from some of their biggest competitors (like Ericson) or they agree a license swap. Too early to tell who is being the jerk in this case, or even if either of them are.
Beside this Nokia’s site is down!! http://www.nokia.com/NOKIA_COM_1/Sorry/
Nokia has about 12 000 other patents (as far as I know it is more than any other mobile company has) so this might also be a start of a bigger fight.
Personally I have never actually liked Dopplr. The biggest problem beeing the small amount of active users it has.
Techcrunch are reporting that Nokia have put Dopplr up for sale
Techcrunch article
Great article. There’s a lot of good info here, though I did want to let you know something – I am running Ubuntu with the latest beta of Firefox, and the look and feel of your blog is kind of funky for me. I can understand the articles, but the navigation doesn’t work so well.