Google has found itself caught in a bidding war with the other tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, and others over more than 6,000 patent filings from Nortel. It was a war that the search giant lost when a group which consisted of Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion, Ericsson, Sony, and EMC joined together to bid $4.5 billion in cash. Google chose to bid using numbers based upon mathematical formulas and constants, with their final bid based upon pi ($3.14159 billion). A post over at the Official Google Blog, Patents and Innovation, by Google’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel Kent Walker in early April discussed the patent reform and the need for a company to defend themselves by building a competent patent portfolio. Google’s decision to pursue the Nortel patents was based in part upon creating a “disincentive for others to sue Google.” While Google might not have had success in the auction for Nortel’s intellectual property, they haven’t been standing around doing nothing. Only July 11th and July 12th, Google recorded the assignment of 1,030 granted patents from IBM, all of which cover a range of topics from the fabrication and architecture of memory, and microprocessing chips, to other areas of computer architecture servers and routers as well. A number of the patents also cover relational databases, object oriented programming and a wide array of business processes as well. Some of the patents acquired from IBM that are related to search and search engines that Google has acquired recently include the following: General Counsel Kent Walker discusses the loss of the Nortel bidding in an interview with TechCrunch recently: “We buy companies all the time — for both people and interesting technologies. This would have been north of $4 billion for none of those things. We were bidding on the right to stop people from innovating,” Walker says. “You have to have the discipline not to overbid,” Walker continues. “Are there other opportunities out there? Of course,” he says, noting that Google is looking at all of them, but refusing to name specific opportunities. Rumors have pegged InterDigital as the next Google/Apple patent fight. We aren’t sure of any of the financial details or the circumstances around Google’s assignment of IBM’s interest in the newly acquired patents but it is not a bad start towards building a deeper patent portfolio. While we linked some of the patents above that focus on search, there is a nice range and depth of intellectual property that was involved in the acquisition and we wonder if Google is interested in pursuing other new interests and innovations. It seems that Google sent out an email sometime to main stream media sources, in which they explained their reasons for making the purchases. The Wall Street Journal released good coverage of the issue here: Google Buys IBM Patents. Stay tuned for more news and info on the topic by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed. Authors: