Klausner Technology Inc., owner of a telephone answering machine patent “linking displayed data with [a] recorded audio message” settled with Apple over the use of Visual Voicemail on the iPhone reports Macworld.

Klausner was granted the patent in 1994, and renewed it in March. As part of the settlement, Klausner is licensing the patents to Apple and AT&T. Klausner has already licensed it to Vonage, Sprint Nextel, and eBay.

The details of the settlement were not released, but Klausner had been asking for $360 million in damages.

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While you can use utilities like BootPicker or rEFIt to quickly select a Boot Camp partition at startup, Flipside hopes to take the pain out of booting into Windows (no, it doesn’t make Windows pretty, simple, or virus free — that’s for version 2.0). Flipside automatically finds your Windows partition on your Mac and boots you into it — all without changing your startup disk settings. If you’re in a hurry to reboot into Windows, then you can have Flipside force-quit your open Mac applications and instantly reboot (not recommended, but could be handy).

This tool is definitely useful if you find yourself booting into Windows regularly. Best part of this application? It’s free — however, donations are accepted. You can download it today from Barraford Software.

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For the attentive in attendance, you likely noticed that none of Toshiba’s newly announced laptops (yes, even the absurdly powerful Qosmio rigs) have built-in Blu-ray drives. Like, there’s not even an option. When questioned about the obvious oversight (ahem), Tosh’s Europe CEO Alan Thompson noted that “Blu-ray was just one of the many ways that you can get HD content and is not required for accessing HD content.” Furthermore, it seems as if the outfit is continuing on in its pursuit to develop the best DVD upconverting technology in the whole wide world, as it explained to the press in London that its forthcoming technology would “fill in the gaps” and “add resolution.” Company representatives even remarked that “Blu-ray was only a storage medium,” and reiterated that BD “wasn’t the only way to view high-def content.” It’s one thing to bow out gracefully, pick up the pieces and get on with life. It’s another thing to douse yourself in ignorance and pretend that Blu-ray (let alone HD DVD) never happened.

Read - Toshiba’s London press event
Read - Toshiba Europe CEO comments

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Promised at 10 a.m. Pacific time (1 p.m. Eastern), Mozilla was eager to set a one-day world-record for the release of Firefox 3. With most of the day already gone for much of the world, and nary an update to be seen, it’s looking bad for June 17.

Getfirefox.com alternates between being entirely down and cheerfully offering up the latest and greatest version of Firefox 2.

“Check for Updates” inside of Firefox (eventually) returns a “AUS: Update XML File Malformed (200)” error reading the XML file that would normally contain information about Firefox updates.

When will we see an update? “Shortly,” according to the Mozilla Blog. They are also careful to point out that the “official” 24 hours of record-breaking will commence the moment the software is released, and not from their original 10 a.m. estimate.

Thanks everyone who sent this in!

Update: 3:05 p.m.: We did it! TUAW single-handedly provided the schadenfreude necessary to get the server running, and getfirefox.com is serving up Firefox 3.

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After a public beta that started at Macworld Expo 2008, Nolobe today shipped Iris, a new image editing application for Mac OS X. Nolobe is the same company that brings the world Interarchy, a popular advanced FTP client.

What separates Iris from the competition is the single-screen user interface that dispenses with a lot of the traditional floating palettes that clutter screens with other applications. While it’s a 1.0 release, a quick tour of the trial download shows that Iris is a surprisingly full-featured image editor supporting most major file formats, advanced compositing tools, and color correction machinery that lets you fix or enhance your favorite photos.

Iris requires Leopard, and can be purchased from Nolobe for $79. If you’d like to take Iris for a spin, download the free trial.

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What I admire most about Apple is the patience the company demonstrates. Nothing is rushed, either to the market or the press. Even when all parties are clamoring for what they want, the executives in Cupertino are patient enough to ignore the din and wait until the time is right to act.

There’s a report on MacNN today about the increasing interest in the 3G iPhone in the UK. Part of the reason is that subsidies provided by O2 will make the new phone free for some shoppers on July 11th. “Free” is a powerful motivator, but interest would have been just as high without that four-letter word.

When the iPhone was first released with its now-infamously high price tag, It was purchased (in large part) by Apple’s rabid fans, who evangelized the thing to everyone they met. Many of those people thought, “Nice, but the price is high.”

Which leads to my second point. Namely, pricing sends a message. When you notice the discount bin at your favorite record store, you think, “lousy music in there.” The $3.99 CDs can’t possibly be good. Conversely, the $19.99 new releases must be awesome. I mean, they’re twenty bucks!

Next month, all the people who were swooning over the iPhone but put off by the price tag will descend upon Apple Stores in droves. Expect quarterly sales figures to exceed expectations, as Apple is going to sell a boatload of iPhones.

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Teaming with Parallels, Media Temple has just announced the start of private-beta period for its latest (mt) Labs offering, the (xv) Xserve-Virtual — which they are dubbing “the world’s first VPS Leopard Server.” Although virtual servers running Linux or Windows are pretty standard hosting options, this is one of the first Mac hosting opportunities I have seen period (outside of a co-lo), virtualized or not.

Now that Apple has sanctioned the virtualization of OS X Leopard Sever on Apple hardware, both Parallels and VMWare have announced plans to integrate Leopard Server virtualization into their product lines. While VMWare is integrating Leopard Server in its upcoming version of Fusion, Parallels is taking a decidedly more enterprise approach and working Leopard Server virtualization into its Parallels Server product. Parallels Server uses Parallels’ bare-metal hypervisor architecture and as such, each virtual machine runs its own kernel and operating system.

Media Temple, which already partners with Parallels in its (dv) and (dpv) Nitro products, is going to be the first official hosting launch partner for Parallels Server for Mac, offering Leopard VPS hosting on Xserve hardware. The Xserves used by (mt) are running 2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400s with 32GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM and 3×300GB 15,000-rpm SAS with 16MB disk cache drives on a Xserve RAID Card. In the private beta (apply here), the Xserves will be split into 8 virtual machines, with each VM guaranteed 2 GB of RAM and two cores of CPU resources. The advantage of using a virtual machine as opposed to a physical Xserve, aside from cost, is that hardware maintainance is taken care of by the host. Plus, if something goes completely haywire, the virtual machine can just be reinstalled to its starting point.

The (xv) can be used to host websites, run iChat and iCal server, use Podcast Producer and for anything else a regular Xserve running on a LAN can do. Anything you can install on a regular Mac, you can install on the (xv), and you can control the (xv) using both Screen Sharing and Remote Desktop. Media Temple is still working on the scalability plans for the (xv) but are planning on offering a scale-on-demand package similar to its (dv) product.

Although pricing is currently undetermined, Media Temple will be using the beta testing to find out which configurations are most efficient to help set the ultimate price.

If you have experience running a Mac server, you can apply for the (xv) beta here. It’s really exciting to see OS X virtualization, both for enterprise and for home/small business use take off. I can’t wait to see the final product!

Thanks Jen and Jorge!

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Well, it looks like Philadelphia’s on-again, off-again WiFi network won’t be going dark for good quite just yet, as The Philadelphia Inquirer is now reporting that a group of local investors are stepping in to keep it aloft. While complete details are a bit light at the moment, the new company is apparently at least considering going with an advertising-supported business model that’d provide free access wherever the network is available, as opposed to the $20 a month Earthlink was charging for the service. To bolster that potentially losing proposition a bit, the company will also apparently be going after institutional subscribers like hospitals and universities, who’d be offered the opportunity to extend their own secure wireless networks into the city.

[Thanks Brad L, image courtesy of Stippling]

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