Mr. Simons comes from the Washington offices of the law firm Paul Weiss, where he served as a partner representing big tech clients including Microsoft and Sony in a $4 billion acquisition of patents from Nortel Networks.
No longer monologuing, Tetrick has added an assortment of impressive-seeming new directors to the company's board and announced the company's acquisition of patents related to lab grown meat.
But for the past couple of years, Facebook has already been taking steps to build up its patent portfolio through the acquisition of patents from a host of other players, from large IT companies, to a patent troll and a defunct social network.
In the past few months, Facebook's patent portfolio has grown exponentially as a result of acquisitions of patent portfolios from IBM and Microsoft.
In recent years, Facebook has consistently looked to the outside to augment its IP holdings with strategic acquisitions of patent assets.
Consulting a patent attorney who specializes in transactional practice will be instrumental in determining whether a license or acquisition of the patent is beneficial and/or necessary for the business.
At this meeting two events took place that led to the later acquisition of the patent by Singer.
Apple's acquisition of this patent might mean it's looking at ways to shore up its own flexible display research and development efforts, or that it's just hedging its bets against future developments.
The Justice Department is currently investigating the more recent acquisition of Nortel patents by another consortium that included all of the major mobile phone operating system companies that are locked in fierce competition with Android phones.
If the reports are accurate, a mobile payments service from Apple would have been a long time in the making, coming after years of speculation involving potential acquisitions; lots of patents; a steadily growing pile of consumer credit card data from its (likely over) 800 million iTunes accounts; and as a counterbalance to moves from would-be competitors.
Monday's acquisition of 800 AOL patent assets by Microsoft set a new high water mark for the value of an average patent asset (a patent or patent application) of 1.25 million dollars.
