Infineon sells wireless division to Intel

In today's podcast: Paul Allen files patent suit against tech companies; Infineon sells wireless division to Intel; and HP ups bid for 3PAR, as bidding war continues.

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A firm owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed a lawsuit against Google, Apple, Facebook, and other companies alleging that they have violated patents related to search, multimedia, screen pop-ups and database management. Interval Licensing filed the patent lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington. The companies named in the lawsuit are Aol, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.

Intel will acquire Infineon Technologies' wireless division for US$1.4 billion, the company said Monday. The acquisition of Infineon's wireless division could help Intel grow faster in the high-volume smartphone market, where the company has minimal presence. Most smartphones today carry chips designed by rival Arm, and Intel has had its eye on the smartphone market as the volume of chips for mobile devices outpaces traditional CPUs that go into PCs.

The bidding war for storage vendor 3PAR continued to escalate Friday, with Hewlett-Packard submitting a new offer of US$30 per share, or $2 billion. The offer topped a $27 per share bid made by Dell earlier in the day. 3PAR is known for its "thin provisioning" technology, which allows storage resources to be provided on demand. It differs from traditional "fat provisioning," which allocates an excess amount of storage to an application in anticipation of future needs.

Google continues to aggressively pursue social-networking capabilities, this time with the acquisition of Angstro. Angstro is a small organization with a few products including Noteworthy News, a service that delivers news about people and companies in a user's professional network.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.