Chinese insurer to appeal MS ruling

A Chinese insurance company said Friday it will appeal a court order to pay damages to Microsoft for intellectual property infringement, and accused the software giant of acting in a monopolistic manner, states the Wall Street Journal.

A Shanghai court on Thursday ordered Dazhong Insurance to pay 2.17 million yuan to Microsoft for using unlicensed copies of the US company's software.

Microsoft said the verdict was its biggest legal victory in China, the world's second-largest personal computer market after the US, but one where software piracy is rampant.

At its f8 developers' conference in San Francisco last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision of a cross-site social platform, with a developmental state that may already be quite far along, reports Tech News World.

Essentially, he sees a kind of online social sphere wherein anything one communicates that he likes gets channelled to Facebook, where that like becomes a public fact.

"Today, the Web exists mostly as a series of unstructured links between pages. And this has been a powerful model, but it's really just the start," said Zuckerberg. "The Open Graph puts people at the centre of the Web. It means the Web can become a set of personally and semantically meaningful connections between people and things.”

Actor Andy Serkis, who so memorably played Gollum and King Kong using performance capture, has announced the UK's first studio specialising in the technique, writes the Guardian.

As he told a recent British Screen Advisory Council discussion on working with digital film technology, Serkis caught the bug of “cyber-thespianism” working with Peter Jackson at his Weta studios, in New Zealand, first on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and then on King Kong.

He is in discussions with various partners, and would head the studio himself. He wants it to be used not only for film and video games, but also for live performances to create motion-capture creatures in ballets, rock concerts or even nightclubs.

California-based Better Place said it signed a memorandum of understanding with Chery, China's largest independent carmaker and exporter, to collaborate on electric vehicle technology, reveals Cnet News.

Under the agreement, the companies will jointly develop switchable-battery electric vehicle prototypes in the hopes of securing regional Chinese government pilot projects, Better Place said.

Better Place is aiming to build a network of charging stations for electric cars, leasing batteries to customers for use in their vehicles. Better Place is already building networks in Israel, Denmark, and Australia.