Louis Carbonneau Articles | FizzLaw

Louis Carbonneau
  • On April 5, 2012 Microsoft announced that it has reached an agreement with AOL to buy and license more than 900 patents from AOL in a $1.056B deal. The transaction took place at an open auction that included submissions from firms such as Goldman...

    April 26, 2012 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Seattle - March 17 2012. TANGIBLE IP, an international patent brokerage and Intellectual Property advisory firm headquartered in Seattle announced the recent closing of a small patent portfolio in the online provisioning technology area.  The...

    March 19, 2012 | Louis Carbonneau

  • We are back, after a few months’ hiatus that found us busy launching our sister firm Tangible IP, specialized in strategic IP conducting and patent sales.  Over 1500 patents sold later that returned tens of millions to their owners and...

    February 13, 2012 | Louis Carbonneau

  • What a difference a month makes.  Our last issue of Pointers in early July analyzed the mega-patent sale of the Nortel portfolio for the unprecedented sum of $4.5B. by what appeared at that time a Microsoft led consortium and declared Google the...

    August 22, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Originally published July 1, 2011 Usual foes gang up in anti-Android play  Earlier this week, it was reported that a small Canadian Non Practicing Entity (Wi-Lan) paid $8M dollars for approximately 60 patents belonging to a US based company....

    July 2, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • We’ll know in a few days whether the US Congress will finally break from its long standing tradition of sending patent reform to the mothballs for another year as it adjourns for the summer. Although the bill (pompously called the America...

    June 21, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Ah, the joys of bootstrapping! When every penny counts and love money is getting scarce, it is not uncommon for startups and small companies to engage in consulting services during their first months (or even years) of activity to bring some external...

    May 25, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • With the increasing popularity of Open Innovation, technology companies are recognizing that little value is derived from innovating in a vacuum or spending previous time and scarce resources reinventing the wheel. Consequently, joint technical...

    April 23, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Ever heard of Glassybaby? According to a recent Seattle Times article, “[Galssybaby] is a compelling small-business success story: After a seven-year battle with lung cancer, young mother develops colorful and inspirational product, hires local...

    March 29, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Inviting people to your website is like having them over at your house for Thanksgiving; neither their behavior nor that of your other guests can simply go unchecked or you’ll be the one who has to pick up the pieces. These days, most...

    March 17, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Open Source has been in turn hailed as a panacea and denounced as a scourge (remember Steve Ballmer’s “cancer” outburst). It is neither. Nor is it a monolithic concept one can fit in a box. As many already know, Open Source is...

    March 17, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Inventors often wonder what path they should follow when it comes to filing a patent application. Most small companies with limited cash and unproven technologies are naturally attracted by the apparent cost deferral (but not necessarily cost...

    March 17, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • I gave several talks in the past few weeks to groups of recently minted or soon to be entrepreneurs and two things struck me. The first one is that many people who are still working full time at a company are building a startup on the side and...

    March 15, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Community Cloud. It’s getting pretty cloudy out there, isn’t it?  As businesses start embracing cloud computing in its many forms, they are part of a paradigm shift that’s changing the...

    February 9, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • When I was at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to be involved in several M&A transactions where my role was to oversee the intellectual property and legal due diligence of the target companies. I was always amazed to how little attention had been...

    February 9, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • For many businesses however, the last days of 2010 signaled the closing of the fiscal year, along with the annual performance assessment of their employees. So it’s not uncommon to start the new year with new resolve to either downsize or let...

    January 11, 2011 | Louis Carbonneau

  • It’s December 14, heart of the holiday season.  You rely on your website for most of your company’s sales and it just crashed! Every hour the site is down costs you thousands of dollars in lost sales.  You just called the...

    December 14, 2010 | Louis Carbonneau

  • Every business owner dreams of being the next Google or Facebook. Yet, when it comes to handling of privacy, these two giants have attracted their fair share of bad publicity and lawsuits. Respect of privacy (or lack thereof) is a serious matter...

    November 16, 2010 | Louis Carbonneau

  • The first contract most individuals are required to sign in their adult life is a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), very often as a condition to interviewing for or accepting a job. Similarly, most pre-startups and startups need to engage in...

    November 2, 2010 | Louis Carbonneau

  • If you’re not sure whether trade secrets may be an important asset of (or risk to) your company, just ask Bill Gates... His very own Corbis was slapped recently with a $20 million judgment by a Seattle court for apparently...

    November 2, 2010 | Louis Carbonneau

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