Apple has been assigned rights to over 200 patents and pending patent applications by Freescale Semiconductor, the chip design company spun off from Motorola in 2003. Though the exact details of the transaction aren’t discernible from the public records, the bulk of the patents appear to be related to wireless communication hardware technology.
Motorola spun its chip design business into a separate unit called Freescale in 1994. In a restructuring effort, Freescale was spun off as its own company in 2003. While responsible for designing many of the PowerPC processors that Apple used until switching to Intel in the middle of the last decade, as well as the radios and signal processors used in Motorola’s mobile devices, the company today designs and sells a range of embedded application processors, DSPs, baseband processors, and more.
The list of patents transferred to Apple, reported by Patently O, includes US Patent #5,960,042, “Method in a selective call receiver for synchronizing to a multi-level radio signal,” originally assigned to Motorola in 1999 when Freescale was still a subsidiary. It also includes recent patent applications such as US Patent Application #12/981,423, “Channel Sounding Techniques for a Wireless Communication System,” filed in December 2010 and published in April 2011. The majority are related to wireless communication, and most seem applicable to iPhone and iPad design.
Patently O noted that the notices filed with the USPTO give Apple an “assignment of assignors interest,” which indicates that Apple owns full title to the patents. It is suspected that Apple paid for transfer of the patents outright with cash—Apple has been amassing a huge pile
Firefox development has always been a bit on the slow side. The wait between versions isn’t as bad as Internet Explorer, but it’s a snail’s pace compared to Google who has nearly unlimited resources to throw into Chrome. Following the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla made a commitment to its users to move to a rapid release schedule. More aggressive timelines means more help is needed to help squash bugs, and today they released a new way for 
Netflix has been making headlines recently over its meteoric rise in popularity, and along with it, the impact it is having on our poor, beleaguered, bandwidth starved Internet service providers. Reports suggesting the company could be consuming up to one third of all peek time Internet traffic is common, but 
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin claim they originally set out on a mission to organize and archive the worlds information, but even for Google this is a nearly insurmountable task. 
Sony just can’t catch a break. Just as the Japanese company was pulling itself out of the hole following the PSN and SOE hacks, a 
