Week in review: The argument for software patents, Google’s PowerMeter API

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

In favor of software patents — Patents are getting a lot of criticism these days, but Fair Software’s Alain Reynaud argues that they are worth preserving, just a little flawed.

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Entrepreneurs offer their life’s future earnings for an investment — A truism in the venture capital industry is that firms “invest in people,” not just great business ideas. At the Thrust Fund, that’s literally true.

Google wins patent for location-based advertising — While the blogosphere was buzzing over the patent Facebook won for its news feed last month, Google earned a killer one too. The US Patent and Trademark Office awarded the search giant a patent for using location in an advertising system, which is the emerging business model for most consumer-facing location startups today.

Android app can recognize a person, pull up his status updates — Imagine you’re at a conference and want to know something about the people around you. A new mobile application called Recognizr can identify a person’s face via your phone camera and deliver not only profile information about that person, but also show you their latest status updates.

Lawsuit details: Activision bought Infinity Ward for $5M, went on to generate $3 billion from its games — Activision got the bargain of the century in 2002 when it paid a total of $5 million to buy Infinity Ward, a cash-strapped game studio. Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty series has since gone on to generate more than $3 billion in revenues for Activision. Those details were revealed in a lawsuit filed by two Infinity Ward co-founders last week.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Google opens PowerMeter API — Google announce that it has released the application programming interface (the API) for Google PowerMeter, the tool it launched last year to tell users in real time how much energy they are using and, more importantly, what it is costing them. The decision gives what was a vaguely informative service the potential to spawn gadgetry and software that could change the way we use energy in our daily lives.

Ted Wang and Andreessen Horowitz try to reinvent the seed round — An attorney and a group of early-stage investors published their “series seed” documents, a set of contracts for raising a small, seed round of funding. This is the fruition of an idea Fenwick & West’s Ted Wang first aired in 2007 with a VentureBeat op-ed, where he called for a streamlined legal process around a company’s first funding round.

Skype: We chose Verizon over Nokia in USA — This week we did a number of posts on Skype’s mysterious absence from Nokia’s Ovi store in the United States. Finally, a Skype employee gave us an answer on Friday, explaining that Skype decided against bringing its app to the US Ovi store. Instead, it’s promoting its recent deal with Verizon.

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Roger Ebert experiments with web payments by starting The Ebert Club — Film critic Roger Ebert may have lost his voice, but he found it again on the web. In addition to his usual film reviews, Ebert runs a very successful blog, and is an avid Twitter user. Now the critic is looking to monetize his blog, which is apparently not profitable with its current advertising setup, by starting “The Ebert Club”.

Get ready for some real news at GamesBeat@GDC — Our GamesBeat conference is coming on Wednesday, and we promise this isn’t going to be an event where you hear people rehash what’s been happening for the last six months. We’re going to have real newsmakers talking about the disruptive things they’re doing in the industry.