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OnePlayS, the gaming rental service, has now gone live in Europe.

The service had been beta testing in Denmark for a few months.

CEO of the company is Lass Jensen, a founder of movie rental property (now owned by Amazon), Lovefilm.

Says Jensen (via GI):

We are extremely happy that our beta-testing have been a success and therefore is it a real pleasure to offer our services to all the European gamers.

OnePlayS has 1500 titles and subscriptions cost as little as €4.99 per month. There are no late fees.

The company also offers an unlimited games per month package for €10.00.

Google TV is a failure.

Logitech, makers of the Google TV-based "Revue" set-top box, lost $30 million in the Q1, following a disastrous $34 million loss thanks to the Revue and its accessories based on the device.

The Revue debuted last October for $250 and was instantly met with criticism for the price and the fact that Google TV was buggy. Additionally, the media companies put a death knell in the service when they began blocking free streaming content from their own sites, like Fox.com or ABChd.com.

New CEO Guerrino De Luca, replacing recently fired Gerald Quindlen, said this of the set-top (eWeek):

We launched Revue with the expectation that it would generate significant sales growth in spite of a relatively high price point and the newness of both the smart TV category and the underlying platform. In hindsight, there are number of things we should have done differently.

Microsoft has been ordered to pay Alcatel-Lucent $70 million for infringing on a patent.

The patent is used in Microsoft Outlook and two other apps.

Lucent was asking for $75 million in damages and Microsoft asked the jurors to limit the fee to $5 million. It is clear with what side the jury sided.

The patent involved teach for touch-screen form entry. Alcatel-Lucent argued that the tech "played a central role in the entire operation" of Outlook.

Lucent won the case originally in 2008 and was awarded $358 million in damages. An appeals court overturned the damages award however, saying the figure lacked "sufficient evidentiary support."

Says Microsoft (via Bloomberg)

We continue to maintain that current law requires a genuine apportionment of damages when the infringement is directed to a small feature of a feature-rich product. We are reviewing the verdict in that light and considering next steps.

AT&T has announced this week that it will begin throttling unlimited data hogs on its smartphone networks.

The customers affected will be those in the "top 5 percent" during any billing period and use unlimited plans (which have since been discontinued by the carrier).

Starting on October 1st, the carrier says they will begin reducing speeds on the heaviest users with full speed returned at the end of the billing cycle.

Says AT&T:

Like other wireless companies, we're taking steps to manage exploding demand for mobile data. Many experts agree the country is facing a serious wireless spectrum crunch. We're responding on many levels, including investing billions in our wireless network this year and working to acquire additional network capacity. We're also taking additional, more immediate measures to help address network congestion.

One new measure is a step that may reduce the data throughput speed experienced by a very small minority of smartphone customers who are on unlimited plans - those whose extraordinary level of data usage puts them in the top 5 percent of our heaviest data users in a billing period. In fact, these customers on average use 12 times more data than the average of all other smartphone data customers. This step will not apply to our 15 million smartphone customers on a tiered data plan or the vast majority of smartphone customers who still have unlimited data plans.

It's only been in the U.S. for two weeks (read our review here) but Spotify is already facing a patent lawsuit.

The unlimited streaming music service has been sued here and in Europe by PacketVideo, who claims to own two patents that cover "methods of streaming music over data networks," says the BBC.

Spotify says it will "strongly contest" all claims on the patents, which were filed in 1995 when streaming music and data networks were not relevant.

PacketVideo says it tried to "amicably resolve" the dispute out of court but was shot down.

Spotify, in response to the suit says:

Our success is due to highly innovative, proprietary hybrid technology that incorporates peer-to-peer technology.

PacketVideo is claiming that by distributing music over the internet, Spotify (and by inference any other similar digital music service) has infringed one of the patents that has previously been acquired by PacketVideo. Spotify is strongly contesting PacketVideo's claim.

Google gets itself into a new arena.

Months after acquiring ITA, a leader in flight comparison software, the search giant has now launched a service for finding and booking hotels.

"Google Hotel Finder is an "experimental search tool," says the company, who has launched the service in the US for the time being.

Integrating Google Maps, the service will help users refine their choices with price, stars, user rating and geographic location.

Interested users can then create a list of choices and book the hotel directly through Priceline, Travelocity, Expedia, Hotels.com and others.

Earlier this month, Apple and a consortium that includes RIM, Sony, Ericsson, EMC and Microsoft outbid Google and purchased 6000 patents from bankrupt telecom Nortel Networks.

Google opened the auction at $900 million but the final bid was a massive $4.5 billion.

The patents covered a wide range of topics from wireless, data and optical networking, voice, Internet and semiconductors.

Today, the Department of Justice has let it be known that they are "intensifying" investigations into what the patents will be used for by their new owners.

Specifically, the DOJ wants to know whether the patents were purchased with the sole intention of starting lawsuits against Google over the Android platform. The DOJ reserves the right to place rules and conditions on the sale depending on what the answers are from the companies involved.

Google, in their initial bid, said they were buying the patents to protect themselves from litigation.

Rovi, the interactive programing guide vendor has sued Hulu this week, over alleged patent violations.

The three patents are US Patent #6,396,546, US Patent #7,103,906 and US Patent #7,769,775 and each relates to, unsurprisingly, online TV program guides and search products.

Rovi is seeking monetary damages and attorney fees in the case.

In 2010, the company sued Toshiba over similar patents, and in the end, Toshiba agreed to license the products and will use Rovi's TotalGuide interactive guide in upcoming TVs.

No stranger to litigation, Rovi tried a similar case against Virgin Media in 2008 and despite winning the case in 2011, the patents were ruled invalid and stripped from their inventory.

Additionally, the company formerly known as Macrovision is in a current suit with IMDB (and parent Amazon) over 5 patents relating to program guides.

AntiSec, the group formed by Anonymous and LulzSec, has claimed a new victim, the government security contractor ManTech International.

The group published 400MB of internal documents to the Pirate Bay last night.

ManTech has the FBI, the departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, Energy and Justice and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as customers.

Reads the message with the leaked documents:

[W]e pwned ManTech utterly and throughly; and we did not need hundreds of millions for it. In fact, we did not require any funds at all, we did it with Lulz.

We are providing these ManTech documents so the public can see for themselves how their tax money is being spent. But don't you worry, the U.S. is a rich country and can afford to waste money, right?

Most of the documents involve ManTech's dealings with NATO.

Google has confirmed they have purchased 1029 patents from IBM this week, for wide-ranging tech.

All 1029 are listed here thanks to SEObythesea and relate to everything from SEO to routers, microprocessing chips and object oriented programming.

Financials of the purchase were not revealed, but it was likely not cheap.

Says Google of the deal (via IB):

Like many tech companies, at times we'll acquire patents that are relevant to our business needs. Bad software patent litigation is a wasteful war that no one will win.

Patents have become somewhat of a battlefield in recent years, following the rise of smartphones. Oracle is currently in a suit against Google over Java use in Android and is seeking billions of dollars in damages and royalties. Apple, the king of the smartphone, is currently in fights with Samsung, HTC and Nokia.

According to a Hulu Support Team tweet, it appears that the company is looking into going ad-free for their premium subscription packages.

Currently, despite paying $7.99 per month, Hulu Plus users still get ads with their TV and movie playback.

Reads the tweet:

We’re currently an ad-supported service but looking into the option of a higher price ad-free version.

Hulu has put itself up for sale and is said to be valued at around $2 billion, as long as certain conditions are met such as exclusive licensing agreements for up to 5 years.

Apple, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all said to have at least had opening talks with the on-demand streaming company.

According to a new survey by consulting company AptiQuant, Internet Explorer users scored lower than other browser users on a standard IQ test.

The group tested 100,000 participants while monitoring what browser they used.

A "population average" for IQ tests is 100, but Internet Explorer users scored below average. IE 6 users scored the worst of all, at just over 80. IE6 was released in 2001.

Users of Opera, Camino and Explorer with Chrome Frame scored the highest, with over 110. Opera users scored over 120.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari users were slightly above average.

Internet Explorer remains the world's most popular browser, since it comes pre-installed in new Windows builds. The browser has 43 percent market share, according to StatCounter, ahead of Firefox at 29 percent and Chrome at 19 percent.

Dell has launched its Streak 10 Pro tablet in China this week.

The Honeycomb tablet is the company's first 10-inch model and is priced competitively at 2,999 yuan ($465 USD).

Streak 10 Pros feature a 1280x800 resolution, dual-cameras, edge-to-edge glass, Tegra dual-core processor, an SD slot, and is just 0.47-inches thick while weighing 1.5 lbs.

Dell also sells a dock that adds multiple USB ports including a "Host mode" which allows for PC emualtion.

John Thode, a Dell vice president and manager of Dell's mobility business, told Cnet why the company chose China for launch:

This...avoids a bunch of the inhibitors and barriers to success that we've seen in the U.S. market. Things like confusion over what exactly Android is bringing to the table.

Ubisoft has been in the headlines the last year due to its use of DRM that requires an "always-on" Internet connection.

If you ever have a connection hiccup, or just plain lose service, you are returned to the main menu. With the DRM, you cannot play games offline, even in "single player" modes. This has happened multiple times where an Ubisoft authorization server has gone down, leaving legitimate players standing idle while those with pirated copies play happily.

The most recent game to feature the DRM is "Driver: San Francisco," which will launch in August.

In an interview with PCG, the developer says the DRM has been a success, seeing "a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection."

Despite the outcry over the DRM, it appears Ubisoft believes it is here to stay.

Last December, hacktivist group Anonymous carried out a DDoS attack on online transaction giant PayPal.

The company says today that they collected well over 1000 IP addresses for those responsible and have passed on the info to the FBI.

PayPal was targeted because they froze the donation account of WikiLeaks.

The site says they collected traffic logs via a Radware intrusion prevention system installed on its network.

FBI officials say the 1000 IP addresses handed over were responsible for most of the malicious packets sent during the attack.

A lot of the packets contained strings that included "wikileaks," and "goodnight."