GOOGLE BID 'pi' FOR NORTEL PATENTS

At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.

Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun's constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday.

"Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers," one of the sources said.

"It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi," the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion.

"Either they were supremely confident or they were bored."

It was not clear what strategy Google was employing, whether it wanted to confuse rival bidders, intimidate them, or simply express the irreverence that is part and parcel of its corporate persona. Whatever its reasons, Google's shenanigans did not work.

A group of six companies -- Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony -- won the auction of 6,000 Nortel patents and patent applications with a $4.5 billion bid.

NORTEL PATENTS WON BY GROUP INCLUDING APPLE, MICROSOFT AND RIM

A group of companies including Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, Sony, EMC and Ericsson offered the winning bid in an auction that will net them Nortel’s extensive portfolio of patents. The bankrupt telecommunications company held roughly 6,000 patents, and the six-company consortium’s winning bid came in at $4.5 billion. Among the big losers were Google, which opened the bidding at $900 million, and Intel. Patents within the massive cache cover a wide range of technologies including wireless, voice, networking, optical data transmission and 4G LTE. RIM said it would be responsible for $770 million of the winning bid, and Ericsson separately stated it would pay $340 million. The rest of the companies in the consortium did not disclose their contributions.

DOJ CLEARS GOOGLE'S BID FOR NORTEL PATENTS

U.S. antitrust enforcers have given Google Inc. the go-ahead to pursue its $900 million opening bid for a trove of high-tech patents being sold next week by Canadian telecommunications-equipment maker Nortel Networks Corp., people familiar with the matter said.
After an antitrust review, the Justice Department concluded that Google's potential ownership of the patents wouldn't raise any major competitive concerns, these people said. The clearance could give Google a leg-up against rivals in its bid for the patents, part of its effort to acquire an arsenal of patents that could help it ward off lawsuits by competitors.