Attention, Blackberry users in the U.S.: four years of war are over on the Research in Motion-NTP front with a win-win settlement. RIM has agreed to pay NTP US$612.5-million for a license that covers "all the current NTP patents involved in the litigation as well as any future NTP patents." As important, RIM has "the right to grant sublicenses under the NTP patents to anyone for products or services that interface, interact or combine with RIM's products, services or infrastructure." Needless to say, it's a huge - albeit expensive - victory for RIM, which can now focus on battling Microsoft, Palm, Nokia, etc. rather than NTP. Of course, it's also good news for NTP's 20 or so investors, who will walk away with a cool $20-million each. The question that has to be asked if how this dispute ever got this far. Did RIM simply mis-read NTP? Did NTP show more staying power than a little patent-holding company was ever expected to have? Another thing to consider is why this battle carried on for almost a year after a $450-million settlement blew up last year? Was another year of legal turbulence really worth $162.5-million for RIM? All in all, it's a good day all around, and you can expect many bottles of champagne to be popped all around Waterloo tonight as a huge, dark cloud has finally been lifted. Is there a lesson to be learned from all of this acrimony? Will this encourage patent holders to press forward knowing there is a big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Will it jump-start the patent troll business where holding companies snap up patents so they can squeeze targets for payment?
Update: A good explanation why a settlement came to fruition is RIM's preliminary fourth-quarter results, which suggest RIM will add 620,000 to 630,000 subscribers - far below the 700,000 to 750,000 range provided in December. The reason? "Uncertainty surrounding the NTP ligitation caused corporate and retail customers in the United States to defer BlackBerry purchase commitments" For more comments, check out TechDirt and Jim Estill, who sits on RIM's board but, unfortunately, offers only a smidgen of comments to accompany a Reuters story. His comments does make you wonder about the role the RIM board played.
Tags: RIM, Research in Motion, NTP, Blackberry

Let's put aside Google Base, GBuy and GMail fixes for the moment to focus on Google's need to improve its financial transparency. Since it went public in August 2004, Google has frustrated analysts with its refusal to provide guidance, which only adds to the volatility of its shares. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have adopted a "trust us" approach while Wall St. wants more "show us". This week, however, Google may have started to grow up financially after its stock was beaten up after CFO George Reyes said "clearly, our growth rates are slowing" during a Merrill Lynch webcast. Whether or not his comments were misinterpreted, Google was forced to scramble as CEO Eric Schmidt during a four-hour meeting with analysts yesterday bubbled about how Google was aiming to be a US$100-billion company, and plans to achieve this goal were underway. Hopefully, Google has learned it needs to take an entirely new approach to explaining how it's growing, where it's growing and its strategic vision so investors can get a better handle on the company's prospects. It's one thing for Sergey and Larry to have a hidden game plan of 100 or 1,0000 strategic goals, it's quite another to avoid transparency in the name of strategic secrecy or strict adherence to Sarbannes-Oxley. Another intriguing financial issue for Google is the need to diversify revenue sources. As Australia's Herald Sun accurately puts it: "Forget fancy innovations such as Google Earth or the recently announced blogging software. About 97 per cent of the company's revenues come from the four-line text ads that appear with Google search results". The biggest question is how much more gas  this lucrative vehicle has left in the tank? Obviously, Google's launch of new (albeit less than inspiring) services creates more AdSense real estate. But the company needs other tools to generate enough growth to fuel significant revenue increases and engage investors. Whether it's e-commerce (Google Base, Google Video), pay-per-call, radio advertising (dMarch Broadcasting) or a move into print advertising, the Google's advertising empire needs to expand beyond AdSense. Maybe my description of Google as a one-trick pony is simplistic but the facts are the facts. Reyes' comments suggest the company may be starting to grapple internally about where future growth will be generated. Or maybe Schmidt's comments indicate that all is well. Whatever the corporate message - and it appears to be a little confused - Google needs to be a little more clean on its strategic vision and financial outlook/results.
For more, check out John Battelle offers us a cross-section of comments from analysts and coverage from CNet, and Inside Google. Meanwhile, Mike Langberg takes umbrage with a quasi-sarcastic/patronizing remark made by Eric Schmidt.
Tags: Google, Sergey Brin, Larry Page

Bill Gross may be focusing on harnessing solar power these days but the Internet could sure use his creativity. Instead of coming up with new, interesting revenue streams - like Gross' pay-per-click model that jump-started Overture and was later embraced by Google  - many of the Internet's leader players are being strategically lazy by slapping new fees on activity that has been traditionally free. In particular, I'm talking about propoed fees slapped on traffic travelling across networks and e-mail. This week both issues were thrust into the spotlight with the introduction of the Net Neutrality Act by Senator Ron Wyden, and the launch of a petition by a coalition to prevent AOL from introducing its controversial e-mail tax. The Net Neutrality Act is an attempt to counter the campaign by  broadband service providers such as BellSouth and AT&T to implement downstream tollgates or packet prioritization is a sloppy attempt to recoup revenue they are losing as their traditional local phone businesses erode due to competition from VoIP players. Rather than coming up with new ways to differentiate themselves and generate revenue from offering a variety of access packages to consumers, they have decided to attack net neutrality - a concept that has allowed the Internet to flourish over the past 40 years. On the e-mail front, AOL's "tax" to guarantee e-mail messages are delivered to AOL customers, and not gobbled up by spam filters is a misguided money grab tooffset the decline of its dial-up access business. If you want a two-tiered Internet, tollgates and e-mail taxes are blunt instruments to make it happen. But it's the wrong way to go. If ISPs and e-mail providers want to generate more money, there are better ways to go. For example, ISPs could introduce access packages based on how much speed and bandwidth a consumer wants - something now under consideration according to the Wall St. Journal. This tiered approach is used with great success by BT as a way to give consumers options other than all-you-can-eat plans. Some other revenue opportunities are value-added services such as anti-spam, anti-virus and QoS that can increase ARPU based on consumer choice rather than fees such as an e-mail tax that are arbitrary imposed. Hopefully, these revenue grabs will be defused by the efforts of people such as Senator Wyden, and the Coalition to Stop the AOL Email Tax that includes 50 organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation MoveOn.org and the Gun Owners of America.