Now, a shell company is taking aim at the flourishing click-to-call industry with a sweeping patent first issued in 1998 for an “anonymous voice communication using an online data service.” In a series of lawsuits filed this week in Texas, the shell company is targeting AT&T, Oracle and a range of banks and retailers for using any products ”which include a telephony call initiated on a website.”

A patent attorney for the company refused to say if the claims referred to phone calls initiated through browsers, apps or both. But language in the lawsuit like ”a website or Internet Protocol interface” suggests the patent owner is casting a wide net.

US patent 5,818,836 itself has a strange history. Twelve years ago, the inventor licensed it to a company that would eventually become an AT&T subsidiary known as Ingenio which then turned around and challenged the patent. In 2004, the US Patent Office agreed to cancel the patent before reinstating an amended version of it in 2008.

Today, the same owner, Stephen Du Val appears to be trying his luck once again by assigning the patent to a shell company called “Click-to Call Technologies LP” and filing a series of lawsuits.

There is a lot at stake if the shell company succeeds. As my colleague Kevin Fitchard explained last week, plumbers and pizzerias love click-to-call because it lets them reach customers at the right place and at the right time. Meanwhile, advertisers like Google have discovered that mobile ads with the click-to-call feature produce a higher click-through rate.

If the patent lawsuits succeed, the shell company could be poised to collect royalties on every company that uses the click-to-cal feature. This would like force retailers like Macy’s, Dell and Carnival Cruises (all named in the lawsuits) to pass on the royalty costs to the consumer. The companies are likely to challenge the patent as obvious and invalid.

Here’s one of the complaints:

Click to Call Patent Suit
(Image by beboy via Shutterstock)

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To get in on the action, you can hit the sign up page and enter your email address. You don’t need to enter additional information, such as what Android phone you use; just an email address. Once registered, you’ll receive an email to confirm your address and that’s it. Depending on the level of interest, you could get a link to the beta version of Flipboard within 24 hours according to the email I received.

Of course, you could always cheat a little and do what I did to get Flipboard, but that’s not going to help the Flipboard team as it works to support various devices, screen sizes and such. In fact, I’m feeling a bit guilty now, so I may uninstall Flipboard from my Galaxy Nexus and wait for the beta link. Oh, who am I kidding: I waited so long for Android support and the app works so well on Android 4.0 that I can’t bring myself to do it!

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From Google’s blog post, here’s how the new groups can be used:

• People in your address book: this allows you to customize the experience of all contacts in your address book. This also works by exclusion. For example, you can set a special greeting just for people in your address book, or screen anyone not in your address book.
• For anonymous callers: these are callers who do not have a caller ID. They sometimes appear as unknown, or restricted, depending on why the caller’s number is not shown. You can use this group to for example screen any call without a caller ID.

As a daily Google Voice user, I can tell you these are welcome additions. My phones ring day in and day out for story and product pitches and while I do have many PR contacts in my address book, many of my calls are from unrecognized numbers. With each new feature, Google Voice becomes more of a personal communications platform, not simply a voice calling app with some whiz-bang features.

Google says you can manage these groups from within a browser pointed at your Google Voice account page, so don’t look to manage actions for these groups in one of the Google Voice mobile apps. At least not yet. But you can customize actions for these groups in a mobile browser. I tested it in Google Chrome for Android and once I switched to the Desktop View, it wasn’t a problem to access these controls.

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The number of people using online video services will also grow dramatically. Worldwide, 792 million people used online video last year. By 2016, that number will roughly double, to 1.5 billion users.

Cisco released these projections Wednesday as part of its annual Visual Networking Index forecast, which also concluded that the world’s data consumption will reach 1.3 zettabytes by 2016 (for more details on that staggering number, check out Stacey Higginbotham’s write-up). But most intriguing about all that data, and the role video is playing, are the devices that are causing it.

TVs and game consoles make us watch longer

There are two major factors for online video’s huge growth potential: Online video is finding its way to the living room TV set, and people are watching more videos on tablets. Cisco’s forecast shows that especially those HD streams to the TV will have a huge impact going forward. The amount of Internet video delivered to TVs already doubled in 2011, and its expected to grow sixfold by 2016. By 2016, online video delivered to TVs will make up for six percent of all worldwide consumer Internet traffic.

Some additional data released by Ooyala today explains quite nicely why TV traffic is growing that much: Once online video reaches the TV, viewers start to stick around much longer. Completion rates for videos longer than 6 minutes are over 50 percent on connected TVs, but only around 25 percent on PCs.

Even more astonishing: 88 percent of all content consumed on connected TVs is longer than 10 minutes.

More devices will cause more traffic

At the same time, we are going to watch a lot more video on mobile phones and tablets. Mobile video traffic will grow 18-fold from 2011 to 2016, and the number of worldwide mobile users will reach 1.6 billion, a six-fold increase over 2011 levels. Altogether, nearly a third of all Internet traffic will come from devices other than the PC in 2016.

Of course, all of that wouldn’t be possible if we all didn’t have more and more devices to watch all those videos. Cisco estimates that the number of connected devices per U.S. household is going to grow from 5.5 connected devices (excluding cell phones and anything accessing mobile phone networks) to 8.5 devices by 2016.

Disclosure: GigaOM has a commercial relationship with Ooyala for the delivery of its video content.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Phillie Casablanca.

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During her latest presentation on the tech landscape at D: All Things Digital, Meeker pointed out that the factors that caused Facebook to warn investors about how increased mobile usage is changing its business model are universal. Mobile traffic now accounts for 10 percent of overall traffic and overall mobile revenue is surging, but companies built around desktop-web economics are scared by the fact that mobile ads are seen as far less valuable: five times less valuable than desktop Internet ads, Meeker said. And even companies that have figured out how to get users to actually pay them for their products–think Tencent and Zynga–are taking in far less revenue per mobile subscriber than per desktop subscriber.

That implies that companies born entirely of the mobile era might have an advantage, but not necessarily, as those companies haven’t really figured this out yet either. “It’s early,” Meeker said. “The screen is small and the ad units haven’t been rolled out effectively yet.”

Meeker reminded everyone, however, that we went through many of the same questions a decade ago amid the rubble of the dot-com bust. Companies like Google and Facebook clearly figured out how to make real money off desktop Internet ads, and Meeker thinks that someone will come along that figures out how to do the same on mobile.

“The data in Japan proves that the users can be monetized,” she said, pointing to gaming companies like Gree and CyberAgent, who have seen strong growth in mobile revenue.

What supports her optimism? The mobile world is much more sophisticated and prepared for this transition than those who tried to monetize the desktop Web back in the 1990s, she said. With so many developers and business people focused so closely on mobile technology–and the fact that there are already so many people using smart mobile devices–at some point relatively soon someone will figure out how to connect the dots.

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Manufacturer and chip

The Asus-Nvidia aspects shouldn’t be a total surprise. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Asus showed off a 7-inch, $249 Android tablet powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip. To date, the company hasn’t launched the device and there were reports that Google was interested in it for a Nexus product. That makes sense as Google doesn’t have to start from scratch for a low-cost, small slate. The Tegra 3 should be more than capable for a 7-inch Android tablet; it currently powers the Asus Transformer Prime admirably. Short of Samsung, Asus may be the top seller Android tablets, particularly if you rule out the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, which hide Android under heavily customized interfaces. Simply put, Asus is a strong partner for Google to debut its first Nexus Tablet.

Screen resolution

Benchmark tests show the device name to be “Nexus 7″, indicating a 7-inch screen size, along with a resolution of 1280 x 768. Again, that’s a reasonable specification for a low-priced slate. The higher the resolution, the more costly the screen component would be. I wouldn’t expect a Nexus Tablet with higher resolution, at least not at a $249 or less price tag. Android 4.0 and supporting apps run perfectly fine on 1280 x 768 based in my experience.

My Galaxy Nexus uses 1280 x 720 while my Galaxy Tab 7.7 display is 1280 x 800. Based on our own server logs, there’s an outside chance the tablet will use the latter resolution. Either that, or someone is testing 1280 x 800 Android 4.1 smartphones on our site; perhaps the next Nexus handsets from hardware partners that Google will sell directly.

Which dessert is being served and who’s helping?

Google names its Android versions after tasty treats, but it appears that Android 4.1 isn’t Ice Cream Sandwich. Instead, it will be Jelly Bean, which Google is likely to show off next month at its Google I/O developer event.

Aside from further optimizations, I’d expect Google’s Chrome browser to become the default app for using the web and it’s possible that Google brings a true competitor to Apple’s Siri voice assistant, reportedly named “Majel,” says AndroidAndMe. Indeed, Google bought CleverSense, an artificial intelligence recommendation service, in December, which could boost Google’s Voice Search capability into a full-blown virtual assistant.

What we don’t know

Obviously there are more details missing, but we can make some fairly safe assumptions about the potential device. First, is the price: It won’t be greater than $249; I suspect Google will aim for $199 if it’s possible. A low price would mean some other limitations as well: Look for storage capacity to be either 8 or 16 GB. I suspect the former as the device will very likely have a microSD card slot in addition to an integrated Google Drive experience. Web connectivity will be limited to Wi-Fi as both price and the lack of carrier involvement would preclude 3G or 4G data. This will add a benefit in the form of future software upgrades as Google can push them directly to the tablet.

I do expect a pair of cameras on the slate, but the sensors won’t be impressive. Google could do away with a front-facing camera, but I’d think that would be the the more important of the two on a Nexus-branded device as it would be needed for Google Talk video chat. I anticipate Google selling a cable accessory to connect the slate to a high-def television. There’s an outside chance of a wireless solution to pipe content to a Google TV, but the company hasn’t had much success with its living room product, so that’s a long shot.

Can Google and its partners mount a tablet comeback?

If even half of what we know or think about the Nexus Tablet is correct, Google, Asus and Nvidia all stand to gain much. Android tablets simply aren’t seeing the same success that Android phone have; partially because Google was late to the tablet game and its first effort, Honeycomb, was rushed and incomplete. As a result, tablet makers have been reluctant to get Android 4.0 tablets to the market. A Nexus Tablet can help change the landscape, but I think Google will have to do more than sell the slates directly on the web. It will need retail partners so consumers get some hands-on time with the tablet. Asus has those retail relationships.

Nvidia could come out a winner as well: The company is losing chip sales to Qualcomm because of its difficulties integrating Tegra with its competitors’ LTE chips. The company is working on this and just last week announced successful LTE testing with AT&T, but in the meantime, a Nexus Tablet can help boost sales.

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The Wall Street Journal reports:

According to the website of China’s Telecommunication Equipment Certification Center, an Apple device with third-generation, or 3G, data capabilities has been issued the license needed for the company to begin sales in China.

The device would be compatible with the network of China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd., Apple’s longtime partner in releasing its popular iPhone and iPad devices. The notice on the website didn’t name the device, listed as “model number A1430.”

Apple, of course, makes its products in China and sells a whole lot of them there, including the latest iPhone and older versions of the iPad. But while the newest model iPad is on store shelves in 56 countries since debuting in March, China has been a glaring holdout.

In late March a Wi-Fi-only version of the device was approved by Chinese regulators, but it never went on sale. And it likely has a lot to do with Apple’s ongoing battle with Proview, the Taiwanese company that claims it owns the iPad trademark in China. The two sides have flirted with settling, but there has been no resolution to the dispute. But this latest approval could mean the pieces will be in place should it eventually be resolved.

Apple has to find a resolution to the situation — not only China is key to Apple’s ability to make its products as efficiently as possible, it is perhaps more so to growing its product sales in the highly populous nation. As of April estimates showed that there were 21 million iPhones and iPads being used in China, but because of the enormous growth prospects, it is considered by the company to be its most important market after North America.

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The promise of the new SDK is that these developers can now build a secure JavaScript application with a backend without having to provision or write code for servers, said James Yu, founder of San Francisco-based Parse.

‘With Parse, we handle user authentication, data storage to a server, etc. without the developer needing to make anything but a static HTML page. We believe … this is the next inevitable step in application design for mobile web and traditional web apps,” Yu said Tuesday.

The SDK builds atop DocumentCloud’s popular Backbone.js, so those developers who know that will be able to adopt it easily to build HTML5 apps.

Parse — which already offers Android and iOS SDKs — competes with Stackmob but the real competition for the new JavaScript SDK is DIY server programming, Yu said.

“The alternative to our platform is getting your own servers running. Since technology is moving toward the fat client, we can provide a service where developers don’t need to touch a server any more but still add server-side technology.”

“We do a lot of work with game developers and they usually get to the point where they want to do things like add a high score list to their app. And they think that will be easy but it ends up being a lot more work than they thought — it balloons out so that they all of a sudden have to maintain a server,” Yu said.

“The overhead of developing mobile apps that require a shared, persistent backend that also supports communication between app users is really high and can easily add 50 percent to your development time, yet the backend is typically fairly generic in that if it’s written right it can meet the needs of a large percentage apps,” said Peter Eddy, a developer with Gazelle, a Boston-based e-commerce specialist. In an ideal world, he added, these developers would like to concentrate all their effort on the user experience and marketing and leave the generic but complicated backend plumbing to someone else.

With Parse’s new SDK, they still need to do the work, but it looks to be a lot less painful.

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Intel doesn’t make Ultrabooks are tablets itself, but it does provide the silicon and reference designs for other manufacturers to make them, including the Wi-Fi radio chips that allow them to connect to the Internet. By adding Devicescape’s software to Intel’s standard Smart Connect manager, Intel’s partners can ship their lightweight laptops and tablets with a public wireless connection already active.

According to Devicescape, the connection is completely automatic. When the device comes into range of any access point on its virtual network, it immediately links to it, even when the computer is in sleep mode. So an Ultrabook owner can enter a coffee shop with a free and open hotspot, order coffee, and after sitting down and pulling the tablet from his bag, discover his e-mail and social networking apps have already synched and updated.

“Smart Connect will work on lid open and lid closed scenarios,” Devicescape CEO David Fraser said via email. “So, you’ll be automatically connected no-matter the state of your PC.”

Devicescape builds its virtual network through crowdsourcing. Millions of devices that already contain its connection manager technology gather information on millions of open access points globally. Devicescape then curates that data, determining whether a hotspot has the speed, reliability and availability to make the cut. Devicescape can’t guarantee the quality of millions of access point it doesn’t own or manage, but it can select the best of the lot. Of the 100 million or so public hotspots and open private access points in the world today, Devicescape’s virtual network incorporates about 8 million.

No word yet whether Intel or its device partners would charge for the service, but my bet is they won’t. While Intel may be licensing the connection manager software from Devicescape, it isn’t paying a dime for the actual access. Its customers could log into any of these access points manually free of charge. Charging for a connection Intel is essentially getting gratis might not go over well with customers, but making a free global Wi-Fi network a perk would definitely be incentive to buy an Ultrabook or Intel-powered tablet.

Asus Zenbook image courtesy of Amazon.com

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At this price, the Lumia 610 isn’t meant to be a high performing smartphone, although Microsoft’s mobile platform is optimized to run well on relatively meager hardware. Nokia opted for an 800 MHz single core Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 — the chip maker’s least expensive silicon — to power the phone, which uses a 3.7-inch touchscreen. Internal storage is limited to 8 GB and there’s no memory card slot. Storage can be supplemented with Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service. A 5-megapixel camera on the back of the device is used for image capture and there’s no front facing camera.

All in all, the Lumia sounds like a capable phone for those who don’t need the latest and greatest hardware, but want the smartphone experience of apps, social networking, photo sharing, web browsing and connectivity; the phone can be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot. But the one bit of hardware that concerns me for the Lumia 610 — and future Windows Phone devices that follow in the 610′s footsteps — is the 256 MB of RAM. That’s half of what Microsoft originally stated was the minimum for its operating system. As a result, some applications won’t run on the Lumia 610, raising the concern of app fragmentation for consumers.

Perhaps that concern is much ado about nothing; the market will eventually decide. But when looking at some of the apps that can’t yet run on 256 MB of memory — the All About Windows Phone blog has a PDF file of the 1,397 apps that are incompatible — you’ll see some top tier apps: Skype, Tango, and Angry Birds, for example. The first two may have little impact as there’s no front camera on the Lumia 61o, although some use Skype as their IM service. I also noticed Nokia TV on the list as well as just more than one quarter of Microsoft’s Xbox Live titles. These are the differentiators for Windows Phone, so to not have them supported seems counter-productive to me.

Indeed, one of the first reviews of the new Lumia 610, from V3, lists the memory constraint as a major con, saying,

While many of its features and functions are more than adequate, the inability to run several key applications due to its meagre 256MB RAM is hard to overlook and drags the rest of the device down. That is a shame, as for the price it’s a nifty piece of kit.

Regardless, folks in the UK on a budget now have a Microsoft-powered Lumia of their own to choose. It will be interesting to hear how well the 610 is, or isn’t, doing over the next six months as Nokia continues to battle through its transition from Symbian to Windows Phone.

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