General details of the new suit were published yesterday, but according to a report by Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents, Apple’s latest suit targets the Galaxy Nexus, parallel to a separate complaint last fall, but differing in several key respects.

via Apple asks for US preliminary injunction of Samsung’s Android 4.0 Galaxy Nexus.

Apple’s plans to release a third generation iPad within the next few weeks have been broadly anticipated, although the report, published by the New York Times, notes that its “unclear” if the next iPad will be named iPad 3.

via Apple employee says upcoming iPad 3 to have “truly amazing” screen.

via Apple attacks Motorola’s efforts to block iPhone 4S using standards patents, asks for huge damages.

Samsung has announced its plans to replace its homegrown smartphone platform – Bada – with the Linux-based Tizen, which was recently created in collaboration with Intel.

Launched back in 2010, Bada was meant to feature on Samsung’s low-end touchscreen phones. Compared to the feature phone OS found on these phones, Bada was much better because it had an improved user interface and smartphone features such as proper multitasking and native third party application installation through Samsung’s own application store.

Now, however, with Samsung starting work on Tizen, it makes little sense to keep both the platforms existing simultaneously. Then there is also the fact that Samsung has Android and Windows Phone devices as well.

via Samsung to replace its Bada platform with Tizen – GSMArena.com news.

Sculley, who was President of Pepsi before being recruited to Apple by Jobs himself in 1983, has become notorious as the man who ousted the co-founder, but the former CEO claims he never actually “fired” Jobs. He said as much in two recent interviews, one with the BBC and another with computer historian David Greelish, as transcribed by The Mac Observer.

Jobs originally convinced Sculley to leave Pepsi with the famous line: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?” He was brought on for his marketing experience because Apple’s board of directors reportedly viewed Jobs as too young to be CEO.

At the outset, Sculley and Jobs worked well as partners, but they soon came to disagree on Apple’s strategy with its Apple ][ and the Macintosh product lines. Sculley said the first reason he had been brought on was to keep the Apple ][ "commercially successful for at least three more years" in order to buy time for Jobs to create and launch the Macintosh.

The second reason Sculley was recruited for the role was because Jobs wanted Apple to learn how to market computers the way Sculley had marketed Pepsi with the Pepsi Challenge campaign.

"[Jobs] and I spent months together getting to know one another, probably almost five months. Weekends. I’d go to California, he’d come to New York, and so forth. And in those discussions, I was trying to teach him what I had learned at Pepsi about marketing,” the former CEO said. “One of the key insights we learned was that you don’t sell the product, you sell the experience.”

Sculley said he and Jobs were “completely aligned in terms” of what they were and what their roles were. But when the Macintosh Office flopped at launch in 1985, their relationship became strained.

“As we moved out into March [1985], the Macintosh sales were not doing well and Steve and I started to have major disagreements on what we should do about it,” Sculley said. “Steve wanted to lower the price of the Macintosh. And yet he still wanted to run substantial advertising behind the product. And he wanted to de-emphasize the Apple ][."

Former Apple CEO John Sculley

Sculley disagreed with Jobs' approach, arguing that, as a public company, Apple needed to set expectations for sales and profits. He asserted that the Mac wasn't ready for what Jobs wanted to do and remained staunch in continuing to focus on the Apple ][.

"So, that was a major disagreement between us. I said if you try to change that on your own, then I have no choice but to go to the board, and we need to bring this issue up with the board. And he didn’t think I would do that. And I did," Sculley said.

The board responded by asking Mike Markkula, then a vice-chairman at Apple to interview key people at Apple to determine whether Jobs or Sculley was right. After 10 days, Markkula reported that Sculley was right that the technology for the Macintosh wasn't ready for what Jobs wanted to accomplish. As such, the board asked Jobs to step down as leader of the Macintosh division.

"To be quite honest, I didn’t appreciate coming out of corporate America, because remember people get moved around all the time in corporate America, I didn’t appreciate what it meant to a founder, the creator of the Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to leave the very product that he believed was going to change the world," he said.

"So Steve was never actually “fired” from Apple, but he was demoted from the role of leading the Macintosh division and then he went off on sabbatical and then he eventually resigned from the company and took a number of key executives and started NeXT Computing," Sculley told Greelish.

According to Sculley, the board was "outraged" that Jobs took executives with him, as he had promised not to but did it anyway.

"So, that’s the actual facts," he said. "I think [Jobs' biographer] Walter Isaacson delved into that in his book and talked to many different people on the Apple board, and actually corroborated that story.”

However, Sculley did admit to the BBC that he hasn’t actually read Isaacson’s book and has only discussed it with people who have. “I haven’t really thought about it too much because I know what went on back in the 1980s because I was there,” he said.

Sculley also described the circumstances surrounding his departure from Apple. According to him, he resigned because Apple’s board had forced him to step down as CEO and given him the role of chairman “basically without portfolio.”

“At the time I left, Apple was the number one selling personal computer in the world,” Sculley said. “And we had an 8.3 [percent] worldwide market share at that point. We were the most profitable personal computer company in the world.”

For his part, Jobs told a different story about leaving Apple in his much-talked-about commencement address at Stanford University in June 2005.

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via AppleInsider | Former Apple CEO John Sculley says he never fired co-founder Steve Jobs.

HTC, Research in Motion, Sony and Motorola Mobility are all adjusting their strategies for fewer smartphone models, DigiTimes reported on Friday, citing its industry sources in Taiwan. The companies allegedly plan to focus their resources and marketing on “designated models” instead of diluting the market with too many options.

via AppleInsider | Smartphone makers plan to mirror Apple’s approach with fewer models each year.

Kurien has been handpicking hard-charging specialists from IT services market leader Tata Consultancy Services and revenue growth leader Cognizant and paying them top dollar, choosing lean and mean replacements to fill the space vacated by the departing executives.

via Wipro poaches mid, senior-level execs from rivals – The Times of India.

IBM, the world’s biggest computer-services provider, gained 6,180 patents last year, researcher IFI Claims Patent Services said in a statement. Samsung Electronics Co was second, its growth outpacing IBM, and Canon Inc. replaced Microsoft as third. Panasonic Corp moved up to No. 4 and Toshiba Corp advanced to fifth spot.

via IBM wins most patents 19th year in a row – The Times of India.

The No. 1 inventor in America, as it has been for years, was IBM, which was awarded a whopping 6,180 patents in 2011. That was well ahead of the second place finisher Samsung, which won 4,894 inventions outside of its home country of Korea, according to IFI Claims Patent Services.

via AppleInsider | Apple awarded 676 patents in 2011, ranks 39th among all companies.

The world’s first hydrogen-powered three-wheeler, ‘HyAlfa’, was showcased at the 11th Auto Expo here on Monday.

Part of a development project dubbed ‘DelHy 3w’, a fleet of 15 HyAlfa three-wheelers will run on an experimental basis at Pragati Maidan, where a hydrogen refuelling station has also been set up.

India Trade Organisation Promotion (ITPO) will use the vehicles on an experimental basis. The HyAlfa has been developed under a joint project by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) International Centre for Hydrogen Energy Technologies (ICHET), Mahindra & Mahindra and IIT-Delhi, with support from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy.

“The aim of this project is to convert vehicles so that they can carry and use hydrogen — a carbon-free fuel — and thus remove all pollutants,” Mahindra & Mahindra President (Automotive and Farm Equipment Sectors) Pawan Goenka told reporters.

via The Hindu : Business / Companies : Hydrogen-powered three-wheeler makes debut.