Friday Apple Rumors: Apple Confirms Novauris Acquisition

by Christopher Freeburn | April 4, 2014 12:47 pm

[1]Here are your Apple rumors[2] and AAPL news items for today:

Another Buy: On Thursday, Apple (AAPL[3]) acknowledged it has purchased U.K.-based speech-recognition software developer[4] Novauris Technologies, TechCrunch notes. Apple declined to reveal the price of the acquisition or its plans for Novauris software. Some of the team behind Novauris had previously worked for Dragon Systems. Apple appears to have purchased Novauris last year. On its website, Novauris says it has developed “core technology targeted at a specific class of voice-enabled applications, namely those that allow access to very large databases with just a single utterance.” While Apple doesn’t disclose its strategy behind acquisitions, the pickup is almost certainly intended to improve its Siri voice assistant, which is facing rising competition from Google’s (GOOG[5]) Google Now and Microsoft’s (MSFT[6]) new Cortana voice assistant. Over the last year, Apple has purchased 15 companies[7] — including Topsy Labs, Broadmap and PrimeSense. During its last fiscal quarter, Apple spent $525 million on acquisitions, Bloomberg notes.

Quick: The launch of Microsoft’s Office Suite for iPad has been a big hit[8], the Seattle Times notes. Microsoft took to Twitter (TWTR[9]) on Thursday to announce that Office suite apps for iPads — including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote — had been downloaded more than 12 million times since they debuted on Apple’s App Store last week. The Office apps can be downloaded for free and will allow users to read documents created with Office programs. Users who wish to edit or create documents with the apps on their iPads will have to pay for an Office 365 subscription.

One Less: Apple has agreed to settle a patent-infringement lawsuit for undisclosed terms[10], AppleInsider notes. Apple was sued by Intertrust — which is owned by Philips (PHG[11]) and Sony (SNE[12]) — last year over alleged violations of 15 Intertrust patents covering mobile computing and security. The suit alleged that virtually every Apple mobile device infringed on the patents. Intertrust has licensing agreements with a wide variety of technology giants, including Samsung, Adobe (ADBE[13]) and HTC. The trial judge was informed of the out-of-court settlement between Apple and Intertrust on Tuesday. The lawsuit has been dismissed with prejudice.

For more about the company, check out our previous Apple Rumors[14] stories.

Source URL: https://investorplace.com/2014/04/friday-apple-rumors-apple-confirms-novauris-acquisition/

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