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Patent wars: How much is a patent worth anyway?

According to Frost & Sullivan analyst Craig Cartier, the Pi-loving Googlers did some pretty simple math to reach $12.5 billion as a price for Motorola:

"Motorola has a portfolio of 24,500 patents and patent applications that instantly bolsters Google’s strength in the IP war. Looking at some recent patent auctions and using some simple math can show why these patents were indeed the target of Google’s acquisition.

Using one of the industries recent patent auctions as a baseline, in December of 2010, Novell sold off its portfolio of 882 patents for $450 Million. A simple division calculation leads us to a value of $510,204.08 per patent. Why not round that figure off you ask? Well, let’s look at the patent value of the Motorola acquisition.

Forgetting that Motorola also makes mobile phones, let’s say the entire value of the acquisition was in their 24,500 patents and applications. At a $12.5 billion price tag, that equates to…drum roll please…$510,204.08 per patent. Can anyone guess what heuristic they used in the board room in valuing the deal?

In the Motorola acquisition, Google bought a patent portfolio and got a mobile phone business thrown in for free."

I cannot find this quote directly from Craig Cartier, but originally saw it on The Economist site. As comments on that post say, not all patents (ideas) are created equal, but it sure looks like there's a healthy going (average) rate, with no economies of scale. Actually it's the opposite of that - a chunk of Motorola's patents are in 'application' phase, so potentially worth less than actual, granted patents. Did Google overpay? Do they have more money than sense?

[via David Olsen]

Washington DC's intranet goes Google (sort of)

Elizabeth Montalbano (PC World) has written about the US capital's city intranet team deploying Google Apps to "power" their new intranet. I say "power" because it really looks like a switch to a different and, critically, online productivity suite as opposed to a new intranet per se.

CTO Vivek Kundra decided to go with Google Apps as the basis for the new intranet not only because it was less expensive -- the city is paying Google about $475,000 a year in licensing fees -- but because new applications and interfaces can be assembled quickly on Google's platform because of its open nature.

"When we looked at integration and deployment costs, what we decided to do [was use Google because] it was at a lower cost and was a faster way of achieving the same goal," he said.

The intranet is catering for 38,000 employees so this is no small deployment for Google Apps, although in truth it falls some way short of a "Google intranet". Read the full article here.