Chevy trademarks 'Zora,' is a special Corvette on the way?

Automakers trademark names all the time, whether they want to protect some part of their past or if they are considering a model even far in the future. But occasionally a trademark pops up that is much more enticing than the rest. For example, General Motors recently reserved the name Zora for "motor land vehicles, namely, automobiles," according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The name Zora in association with GM immediately calls to mind the Corvette. Zora Arkus-Duntov is generally considered the father of the 'Vette, at least as the performance car we know it today. He helped get the Chevrolet V8 in the first-generation model to provide a performance boost over its relatively anemic inline-six. He also spearheaded the Grand Sport program that aimed to make the second-generation a world-class racing success.


http://www.autoblog.com/2014/06/10/chevy-corvette-zora-grand-sport-trademark/

IFone Trumps IPhone In Mexico Trademark Ruling

Mexico's intellectual property agency said Friday it has ruled in favour of a small local firm's rights to the 'iFone' name, saying that ads for Apple's iPhone have encroached on the trademark.

The Mexican firm iFone SA de CV registered the name in 2003 to cover specialised telephone service for call centres and businesses, well before Apple registered the similar iPhone moniker in 2007 for its popular mobile handset. iFone doesn't make mobile telephones.

Mexico's Institute for Intellectual Property ruled Thursday that the two names are phonetically identical, and thus there was a trademark encroachment.


http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140608/business/business33.html

NEW PATENT REVEALS THAT AMAZON MAY SOON ACCEPT BITCOIN

Despite reports that America’s largest online retailer, Amazon, has no plans to jump on the bitcoin bandwagon; a recent patent filing by the online retailing giant may suggest otherwise. 

Amazon’s head of payments recently told Re/Code that the company, as of now, has no plans to accept the digital currency. “Obviously it gets a lot of press and we have considered it,” he said, “but we’re not hearing from customers that it’s right for them.”

Nonetheless, Amazon was just awarded a patent that includes the mentioning of bitcoin as a source of funding for its cloud computing services, known as AWS (Amazon Web Services). The service according to Amazon “is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com,” the most central and well-known of those being Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.

PATENT ABSTRACT:

Multi-tenant resources can be funded using payment submitted with requests for those resources, such that the resources do not need to be associated with a specific user account. A resource can be allocated and available as long as payment has been provided. If a user wants the resource to be available for additional processing, for example, the user can submit another request with additional funding. The funding can come in the form of donations from any user, or in the form of investments where the investor expects some return on the investment in the form of revenue, visibility, or other such compensation. One or more management components can track funding for various resources, can accept and select bids for period of sponsorship, and can manage various donation models.

Full news at:

http://cryptocrimson.com/2014/05/new-patent-reveals-amazon-may-soon-accept-bitcoin/