With the merger of Alcatel and Lucent, patents for digital music orginating from Bell Labs also changed ownership. Now Microsoft has been sued by Alcatel/Lucent, who won in the first instance in the US, as the WSJ reported (see story below) last night.

Of course this decision leaves quite a mess in the digital music industry now since others might be threatened with litigation as well. Patent attorneys smell some nice business for themselves and I am sure are busy working for the likes of Apple, Macromedia and many others.

The whole thing is quite a mess because Microsoft had paid the German Fraunhofer Institut 16 million USD to license the technology already, believing that this would do the trick. The Germans (and the French Thomson) took the money. If I were Microsoft I would ask for that money back now, since the assumption certainly was that it would cover all that is required to obtain the full MP3 license. Of course this is not the final word in this case. Appeals are typically successful in half the cases and that is what Microsoft will certainly try. The case is on trial in 6 instances in San Diego, California. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it at the end.

Swiss Airlines and Zurich airport won best European airline and airport awards, as I was able to read on an in-plane video presenation during a recent flight back from London to Zurich.

This news was nicely shown on the audio/video system just like in a powerpoint slide. Although simple, I had not seen something like that done by any other airline.

If they now also bring their website look&feel up to speed, then I would be entirely impressed with them. Also I could not find any of this news on their home page at all. One reason why they are a good airline though - I suppose - is things like excellent Ricaro leather seats in the planes (in economy as well) that are very comfortable (I had also been on a flight back from Canada with Air Canada and the seats were horribly hard and inconvenient). Other things are the Swiss chocolate treat, just a little thing, but it adds up I assume. Zurich airport is highly efficient, I think, and also it is a very nice place to wait for your flight. Excellent facilities, very light glass-covered waiting rooms and it is a brand new airport of course.

I just recently lost my wallet in a plane and had quite a bad experience. The airline (AA) was entirely incompetent to deal with it. They - or this was my clear impression - had no mechanism in place to check the airplane in another location (the plane had flown back from Boston to London, UK). Then I had to cancel the credit cards, needed to apply for new credit cards, debit cards, drivers license (required me to go to the police even and give a report), etc.

• convenience, no more fiddling around with coins and bills and a wallet that can be lost easily and then causes lots of headaches in the aftermath
• much faster payment procedure, it takes only 1/10 of a second to do the payment with your mobile phone and a NFC chip included
• payment faults and errors can be reduced as well
• fraud and theft is minimized, you can remotely disable the mobile phone so limit any loss

The most interesting part of the article was a report on how this vision is executed in countries like South Korea and Japan where they are once more ahead of us.

The worldwide payments using mobile phones will explode from just $3.2 billion in 2003 to more than $37 billion by 2008 according to Arthur D. Little. Even if that number - as so often with analysts and consultants - is way too high, it still makes clear that there is a huge market ahead of us and developing. Mobile operators now also want to get a cut, and of course the credit card companies need to shift gears to make sure that they don't miss this trend. And they are clearly on it as some recently announced partnerships suggest. What is at stake for them can be seen in the fact that the average household in the US has 10 cards. I guess my troubles with losing the wallet were peanuts compared to what they would have to go through. Of course they also then pay for a service that allows them to cancel all of the cards with a single call to a center where they then have all the card info, and can cancel them instantly and reorder new ones. Needless to say, there must be some demand for mobile phone purchasing in the US as well as the desire to get rid of all that plastics in a thick wallet.

How Sony's near field chip system works can be seen on their FeliCa website and below some more application areas.

• naming trade mark case with Cisco
• exclusive contracts with carriers in the US (Cingular) and Europe (to follow)
• no exchangeable battery

Also Palm CEO Ed Colligan has a bunch of reasons:

• it is difficult to build a good smart phone
• price is too high and the features can already be found mostly in a Palm
• also the 1% market share does not make him excited