Happy Thanksgiving -- and some information about my iOS trivia game app

I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you're having a great time now with family members and/or friends.

In recent years I've mentioned on various occasions that I was working on an app. Now, at long last and on the occasion of this holiday post, I'll be more specific about it.

This is one of only two posts you'll ever find here about my app. Promised. The only other one will be a single paragraph once it can be downloaded from the U.S. App Store, just to tell you that and where you can find it in case you're interested. Other than that, I'll keep my app and this blog completely separate, recognizing that only some--but presumably not most--of the professionals following patent and antitrust cases play trivia game apps. I've set up a separate blog and several separate social media accounts for my app.

Most of you presumably hadn't heard of me before I wrote about the "smartphone patent wars." That's why it may come as a surprise to some of you that my primary focus is a game app. Actually, in the mid to late 1990s--long before I started this blog (and even before I ran a campaign against a proposed piece of EU software patent legislation)--I was already in the computer games business: I was a consultant to Blizzard Entertainment, now best-known for World of Warcraft; and I founded an online gaming network, which was acquired by a large multinational telecommunications company. So I'm back to my roots now, as counterintuitive as it may seem.

In 2014, I founded a company, Quizista, to develop a revolutionary trivia game, Quizcover. It's revolutionary in the sense that it puts an end to the monotony of traditional trivia games and innovates the most fundamental aspects of trivia gaming: the way the game presents questions, the way players enter their answers, the way the answers are evaluated, and the kinds of hints (also called "boosters") players can get. It also has other advantages, several of which are shown on this feature comparison table (which, by the way, we're not going to use in communications with consumers).

Just like all other trivia game apps, Quizcover comes with the traditional trivia game question type (one option is right while three are wrong), which I call "Pick One" and which still makes sense for a lot of purposes. But on top of that, it has a couple of more interactive question types, Pick Some (multiple answers are correct) and Match Two (where players have to form correct pairs). The conventional Pick One trivia question type would also have worked on a 1990s Nokia phone. The Pick Some and especially Make Two types are very easy to learn, but they make much better use of touchscreens, they're more engaging, and they're more informative. They make all the difference, and I'm deeply convinced that the days of conventional trivia games are numbered. Once someone has experienced the diversity of Quizcover, why settle for monotony?

For a long time I have wanted to make knowledge more playable and trivia gaming more interesting and, at the same time, more informative. I've been fortunate to be working with a group of great software developers and content authors who share my vision. That vision has turned into a reality. Last month, Apple approved the first release of my app for distribution via the App Store and we made it available in a number of markets, but without any promotional efforts so far. In recent weeks we've made further UX improvements, some of which we consider very significant, and we're soon going to conduct our final test of a new version before publishing the app in the United States (the market for which its content was mostly created), which may already happen next week. And then we'll make more noise but, as I said, not on this particular blog.

If you have an iPhone or iPad running on iOS 10 or 11, and if you're interested in joining that final beta test, please email me at info@quizista.com and I'll be glad to make sure you receive a test version soon via TestFlight. There's no obligation attached to participating in such a beta test.

I would also like to invite you to follow Quizcover on Instagram. We recently started posting some facts and questions from our game there on a purely experimental basis and we like the platform, so once we've launched the app in the U.S. market, we'll be more active here, too.

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Supreme Court denies certiorari in second Apple v. Samsung case: $119M ruling upheld

This morning's Supreme Court order list indicates that Samsung's petition for writ of certiorari (request for Supreme Court review) in the second California Apple v. Samsung case has been denied. The top U.S. court's decision follows (literally and figuratively) the position taken by the Solicitor General of the United States, which was not a given but isn't much of a surprise either.

While I still believe the three Federal Circuit panel judges who threw out the $119 million decision got it right, the Supreme Court can only hear a limited number of cases per year. The decision to deny certiorari doesn't mean that the Supreme Court agrees with the Federal Circuit on any of the substantive issues in the case. Part of the anti-cert argument was that other cases might be better vehicles for addressing those issues.

This pretty much ends the roller-coaster ride that this particular case (which is just part of the once-huge #appsung dispute) has been. All that's left to be sorted out now is relatively unimportant.

Samsung made a lot of headway with respect to design patent damages, and will get a new trial. In that context, the Supreme Court had granted a cert petition by Samsung and overruled the Federal Circuit. The Supreme Court might have been particularly hesitant to hear yet another Apple v. Samsung case.

There was a time when this dispute comprised cases pending in nine or ten jurisdictions, and when it appeared to escalate endlessly. By now, it's just about non-strategic matters pending in the Northern District of California. After Judge Lucy Koh granted Samsung a new trial over design patent damages, I already expressed my opinion that this would be a good time for them to put the dispute behind them, especially since neither of them has a major problem with the "article of manufacture" test adopted by Judge Koh. As unfortunate as the Supreme Court decision that became known today may be in some ways, it, too, paves the way for a settlement. At a minimum, those Energizer Bunny-style litigants should be able to settle that second case. The remainder of that case is a mathematical exercise with limited probabilistic elements. They should conserve court and party resources now.

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After report that Apple will drop Qualcomm chips, Qualcomm files a breach-of-contract lawsuit

The day before Halloween, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was designing next year's iPhones and iPads without Qualcomm chips. Instead, Apple would use Intel and MediaTek components according to the report.

Nothing is final yet, and Qualcomm says it could and would still sell its products to Apple. But the window of opportunity for Qualcomm will presumably close in the not too distant future. At this point, if Qualcomm could reach an agreement with Apple, it would have to be considered a "design win" for Qualcomm (though at first sight it would merely be the continuation of a longstanding business relationship).

In case Qualcomm can't turn this around, a settlement of the earth-spanning antitrust and patent licensing disputes between the two companies will become considerably harder to reach. At a stage at which Apple relies entirely on other companies' chipsets, the only commercially relevant questions for the two to sort out will be about (re)payments and rebates for the past, and about standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing revenues for the past and for the future. In that scenario, Qualcomm will have to prove in court that Apple actually does need a license to any valid and enforceable Qualcomm SEPs, and that will take time.

It could be--but presuambly isn't--a coincidence that one day after the Wall Street Journal article, Qualcomm filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against Apple in the Superior Court of California for the County of San Diego (this post continues below the document):

17-10-31 Qualcomm v. Apple Breach of Contract Complaint by Florian Mueller on Scribd

One of the reasons for which I doubt that the timing is a coincidence is that Qualcomm has previously appeared to make filings just before or after news that matter to investors, or before earnings calls. For example, in July it announced infringement lawsuits against Apple just before it became known that another customer (financial analysts tend to think it's Huawei) stopped paying patent royalties.

The short version of the Superior Court complaint is that Qualcomm is seeking damages and to enforce the right to perform a certain kind of audit (specific performance) because Apple allegedly violated a Master Software Agreement for Limited Use by disclosing confidential information about Qualcomm's program code to a rival chipset maker, Intel. For example, the complaint alleges the following:

"[I]n 2017, Apple requested that Qualcomm provide details about how Qualcomm's implementation of a particular interprocessor communication was designed to meet a certain wireless carrier's requirements. Qualcomm’s proprietary implementation of this communication protocol is not dictated by any standard and it contains Qualcomm's highly confidential trade secrets. Apple, however, included in the 'CC'd Persons' distribution list for this request an engineer from Intel (a competitive vendor) and an Apple engineer working with that competitive vendor. In a separate incident, Qualcomm received correspondence indicating that rather than preventing information regarding Qualcomm's proprietary implementations from being shared with Apple engineers working with competitive vendors, Apple appears to have merely redacted the code name that Apple uses for Qualcomm on that correspondence. As another example, an Apple engineer working on a competitive vendor's product asked an Apple engineer working on Qualcomm's product to request assistance from Qualcomm relating to a downlink decoding summary for carrier aggregation."

Also, Qualcomm makes reference to a "posting" by someone who Qualcomm believes could be an Intel engineer:

"[...] Qualcomm became aware of a posting regarding Intel Corp. layoffs that appears to have been posted by a former modem design engineer, and which contains several statements of concern that on August 14, 2017 Qualcomm specifically requested Apple investigate. The post references a CNBC article reporting on the ITC action filed by Qualcomm against Apple and goes on to say: 'We were told to ignore intellectual property rights when designing the modem. There was even a conspiracy to copy Qualcomm's technology by hints from Apple about the 'reference device'.' This statement appears to be made by an Intel engineer working on the Apple (Intel branded) modem."

Let's see how Apple will respond to these allegations. Only one thing is certain: this does nothing to justify Qualcomm's licensing practices, so whatever may or may not come out of that case in state court, the fundamental issues (which are of concern to the industry at large, not exclusively Apple and Intel) are still the same. A good offense is sometimes the best defense, but at first sight, the new complaint doesn't look like something that would give Qualcomm a great deal of leverage in settlement negotiations. In the short term this is just further escalation, and I doubt very much that this will "persuade" Apple to use Qualcomm chips in next year's iPhones and iPads. And if the bridge is burned, this dispute might take as long as Apple v. Samsung (actually, Samsung is still doing a lot of business with Apple, which is more than Qualcomm may be able to say in a year from now).

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