14 DAY TRIAL // Google is continuing to beef up on patents to help it protect itself from lawsuits. The company has history of not applying for too many patents while at the same time working on various technologies in various fields; Technologies that in some way or another interfere with technologies from other companies; Companies that have put a lot of emphasis on patents.
Google has put a lot into the still pending-approval acquisition of Motorola Mobility. But in the meantime, it's been buying up patents from whomever sells them, IBM in particular.
In the last week of 2011, Google bought some 217 more patents from IBM, most of them granted, some of them awaiting approval. They cover a wide specter of technologies, not focusing on mobile phone patents, which are Google's biggest interest at the moment.
The patents address server-related technologies such as blade servers, server load balancing, data caching, network performance, server backup, database tuning and so on.
But they also cover consumer web technologies such as video conferencing, instant messaging, email administration, ecommerce, advertising, online calendars and so on. A few of them address mobile phone and mobile web technologies.
Google has confirmed the transaction, but hasn't said anything specific about the deal.
At this point, Google has acquired more than a couple of thousands of patents from IBM alone in the last year or so. It bought more than 1,000 of them in July and then another 1,000 patent batch the next month.
Google now has several thousand patents, up from a few hundreds about a year ago. But it's still waiting on the biggest transaction, its acquisition of Motorola which should add more than 20,000 patents and patent applications to its portfolio.
At this rate, Google will become one of the biggest patent owners in the world. However, it paid many billions of dollars for the privilege and it's still unclear if it actually helped it in any way.