vonage

After months of battle, Vonage has lost the bulk of its appeal in the Verizon Communications patent infringement case.

In March, a jury in Virginia found that Vonage had infringed on three patents held by Verizon. And it awarded Verizon $58 million in damages along with future damages of 5.5 percent on the revenue that Vonage was making during the appeal process.

The judge in the case imposed an injunction on Vonage that would force the company to stop delivering a service using technology that infringes on Verizon's patents. But because Vonage has been appealing the case, the … Read more

Internet telephony player Vonage was dealt another serious legal blow Tuesday when a federal jury found the company had infringed on six patents held by Sprint Nextel.

The jury ordered Vonage to pay Sprint $69.5 million in damages.

Sprint sued Vonage in 2005, claiming the company was infringing on seven Sprint patents that dealt with connecting Internet phone calls. Vonage denied the claims and argued that Sprint's patents shouldn't have been approved in the first place.

Vonage said in a statement that it will appeal the federal court's verdict. Vonage also said it will develop technological … Read more

Skype's service appears to be up and running again for the most part, after software issues Thursday prevented millions of Skype users from signing on to the IP telephony application.

Skype officials say the outage was not due to a cyberattack or network upgrades. Instead they attributed the issue to "a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user's own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network."

As of 11 a.m. GMT Friday, the company said that the software had started to stabilize. Some users have … Read more

Internet Protocol telephony player Vonage is still hanging on, but the company, which has been mired in a nasty patent battle with Verizon Communications, is teetering on disaster as it struggles to sign up new customers.

Vonage said Thursday during its second-quarter conference call that it has completed the necessary work-arounds for the Verizon patents that a court found it infringes, but the legal drama has cost the company dearly in terms of recruiting new customers.

Jeffrey Citron, the company's interim CEO, told investors and analysts the company had substantially completed deployments of work-arounds for two of the three … Read more

What do Ashton Kutcher and voice over IP technology have in common?

Kutcher, best known for his role on That '70s Show and MTV's reality show Punk'd, is "creative director" for a Silicon Valley start-up called Ooma, which has developed a device that will allow users to make free VoIP calls to any phone in the U.S.

The company, which has $27 million in funding, officially announced itself Thursday.

Unlike Vonage, which requires users pay a monthly flat rate for domestic calling, or Skype, which charges users a low-cost fee to make or accept calls … Read more

SunRocket, a voice over IP provider, told employees on Monday that it's shutting down, according to several reports from former employees.

The company's Web site is still up, but its customer service line has this recording: "We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls. Goodbye." An internal memo from Sonya Jefferson, director of routing and carrier services for SunRocket was posted on the GigaOm blog earlier Monday.

"Unfortunately this email contains very bad news. We have just been informed that any and all last ditch efforts to keep operations running as well as … Read more

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:20 a.m. PST.

WASHINGTON--A federal appeals court weighing the patent case that Verizon filed against Vonage heard arguments on Monday for an hour without reaching an immediate decision.

After a federal jury ruled on March 8 that Vonage did infringe patents, the Internet phone company has been fighting for its life through the legal process. No injunction is currently in place, however, and Vonage has claimed to have a work-around.

One hint about what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit may be thinking came from comments … Read more

The next round in the ongoing patent infringement saga between Verizon and Vonage will begin on Monday when the companies present their oral arguments to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

Vonage is arguing a few things. First, it believes that it got a bum deal even before the original trial started. Vonage argues that during the markman hearing, or the hearing in which terms of the patents were defined, several of the terms were defined too broadly. This hurt Vonage in the trial because it was this broad definition that the jury used to determine whether or … Read more

So, I know we all get on lists, and our names are stored in databases. It's annoying, but it's a fact of life.

But I was reminded of that Thursday in a particularly annoying way.

A friend of mine, who shall go unnamed, is a Vonage subscriber. Presumably, at one point in the past, she put my e-mail address on the company's Refer-A-Friend list. If I signed up, she would get something, maybe a month of free service or somesuch. I really don't remember if this had happened, but it's certainly possible.

What I do … Read more