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The Dietary Data Recorder System uses 3D modeling to estimate food volume, analyzing user-recorded videos that are obtained with a simple “swooping” motion

Can your smartphone help you lose weight and stay healthy?

University of Washington researchers have developed a device that uses a smartphone to help people watch what they eat and maintain a healthy diet.

With a swooping motion, a user can take an image of a pear, apple or other food item and the device’s 3D modeling estimates the food’s volume and calculates and logs the caloric content. It works for more than 9,000 types of food.

The Sensors, Energy, and Automation Laboratory at the University of Washington worked on the project with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

BUSINESS JOURNAL PHOTO | Anthony Bolante

Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna (center) speaks at a press conference announcing legal action against Adscend Media at Facebook’s Seattle office while Assistant Attorney General Paula Selis (left) and Facebook General Counsel Ted Ullyot listen.

Delaware-based Adscend Media LLC says it is being wrongly accused of hijacking clicks and "friending" on Facebook as a deceptive means of spreading spam, and the company accused Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna of blindsiding Adscend with the "false claims."

Adscend's response Friday came a day after the company was attacked by Facebook and McKenna as a spam-spreading scourge plaguing social networking sites such as Facebook.

The online ad network is the target of federal lawsuits in Washington and California filed Thursday by Facebook and McKenna (pdf, 27 pages), accusing the company of “clickjacking” on social media websites.

In what Adscend Media itself calls a “strongly worded statement,” Adscend says McKenna’s lawsuit is “deeply troubling.” The company says it plans “a vigorous defense against these false claims.”

Adscend said it complies with state and federal laws and is being falsely accused. The company said it is “undertaking an investigation to determine whether any of Adscend Media’s affiliates engaged in the activity alleged by the Attorney General’s office and Facebook. If they did, we are fully certain that the activity was conducted without the company’s knowledge,” according to a statement.

“We find it deeply troubling that the Attorney General’s office made a public spectacle of these serious allegations without first questioning the company as part of its investigatory process and, even more inexplicably, without notifying the company that the complaint was being filed. Adscend Media first learned of the allegations from media inquiries,” said Adscend attorney Mark J. Rosenberg.

The Nokia Lumia 800 has an 8 megapixel camera and tight integration with social media, but will it be enough to take on the iPhone?

Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 under an agreement that has Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7 as Nokia’s primary smartphone platform.

The payment was spelled out in Nokia’s earnings statement, which says Microsoft will spend billions more on the Nokia partnership:

In the fourth quarter 2011, we received the first quarterly platform support payment of USD 250 million (EUR 180 million). We have a competitive software royalty structure, which includes minimum software royalty commitments. Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments are expected to measure in the billions of US Dollars.

The payment was reported by ComputerWorld.

BUSINESS JOURNAL PHOTOS | Marcus R. Donner

Chef Jason Wilson, in the kitchen of his Seattle restaurant Crush, is also designing menus for Google’s Bothell and Kirkland offices.

Celebrated chef Jason Wilson was enjoying tacos at Bimbo’s in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle in February of last year when a friend let him know about a rare opportunity at Google .

His friend, Brian Petoletti, is the general manager at the Kirkland Google campus. Petoletti suggested Wilson’s cooking style and priorities — supporting locally grown produce and naturally raised meat — would be a good fit for a company known for employee amenities and free food.

Wilson, the owner and chef of Capitol Hill’s Crush restaurant, was instantly intrigued.

“We spoke primarily about the food philosophy and the commitment to organic and sustainable cuisine,” Wilson said, “and it was really in line with my cooking.”

Microsoft photo

Captains from the Microsoft Imagine Cup Grants winning teams, Dominik Tomicevic from Croatia, Gerardo Francisco Pérez Layedra from Ecuador, Jason Wakizaka from the United States and Mohammad Azzam from Jordan meet with Bill Gates (right) and Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad Smith (left) at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

A group of college students who developed a smartphone app that uses a snapshot of a blood sample to determine if it’s affected with malaria is one of the recipients of $75,000 from Microsoft's Imagine Cup Grants program.

Team LifeLens from the U.S. was one of four teams that won the grants. The team is comprised of students from University of California, Davis; Harvard Business School; University of Central Florida; and UCLA.

The LifeLens application runs on Windows Phone 7 software, It uses a high-resolution imaging sensor and a micro ball lens attachment, according to Microsoft.

Apple image

Workers assemble and perform quality control checks on MacBook Pro display enclosures at an Apple supplier facility in Shanghai.

A letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook to his employees suggests the company plans to address its supply-chain issues, including factory conditions and educating workers about their rights.

9to5mac.com posted portions of the letter, which comes as Chinese factories — where Apple's iPhones and iPads are made — are under scrutiny for appalling working conditions.

On Thursday, The New York Times highlighted how the employees in the government-subsidized factories cranking out iPhones and other Apple devices work excessive overtime, are often underage, have died in factory explosions and live in crowded dorms.

Remember when Major League Baseball owners got into trouble after they were accused of conspiring not to get into bidding wars for ballplayers as part of a “gentlemen’s agreement” to keep salaries down?

Was a similar kind of collusion practiced by big tech companies like Google and Apple?

A U.S. District Court judge ruled Thursday that a lawsuit may proceed against Google, Apple and other Silicon Valley tech employers that says they conspired not to hire each others’ key workers.

The two tech giants and five others already settled similar charges with the Department of Justice in 2010, agreeing not to behave that way, but none of them admitted or denied that they had violated laws in the past.

With customers relying upon fellow customers' reviews at online retail sites like Amazon.com Inc. , a firm that promised free products in exchange for favorable five-star reviews has drawn the attention of federal officials.

The New York Times reports that a California company selling leather cases for Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle Fire tablets gave away its products to customers who would write favorable reviews on Amazon.com. Before Amazon officials took down the product page, the cases received 310 five-star reviews out of 335 reviews and nearly all the rest were four stars. The Federal Trade Commission said it is "very concerned" with the rating process.

RealNetworks named Thomas Nielsen CEO on Nov. 1.

Thomas Nielsen has only been on board as CEO of RealNetworks for 10 weeks. But he already has helped the Seattle digital media company pull the trigger on its biggest deal in years, a blockbuster $120 million sale of RealNetworks patents.

The deal with Intel will bring in a large pile of money to invest in new products and businesses as RealNetworks continues its makeover.

I caught up with Nielsen on Thursday afternoon to talk about his new job, the Intel deal and why RealNetworks is publicly endorsing a proposed law that would recognize same-sex marriage in Washington.

Nielsen, who was most recently vice president of the Digital Imaging Group at Adobe Systems, took over the reins from interim CEO Mike Lunsford on Nov. 9.

Nielsen said when he joined RealNetworks last fall, he looked at the company’s existing businesses, turning over rocks to see if there was any unrealized value there.

He said he quickly realized that RealNetworks was holding a collection of patents that, while not collecting dust, did have unrealized value.

“I felt like I had just bought a house and was digging in the yard and stumbled on this treasure I didn’t know was there,” Nielsen said.

Intel gets about 190 patents and 170 patent applications as well as the RealNetworks video codec software, a compression and decompression technology that allows for smooth viewing of videos over 3G networks on smartphones and other devices.

The Intel deal is a “wonderful deal for us,” Nielsen said. It still allows RealNetworks to use the technology in a lease-back agreement akin to selling a building and then leasing back the office space from the new owner, Nielsen said.

PSBJ photos / Anthony Bolante

Facebook General Counsel Ted Ullyot (left) speaks at a press conference at Facebook's Seattle office while Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna (center) and Facebook Lead Litigation Counsel Craig Clark listen.

Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna is putting the resources and expertise of his office behind a problem that is plaguing social media giant Facebook: spam that is targeting Facebook members.

Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna speaks at a press conference at Facebook's Seattle office

Facebook and McKenna are teaming up to fight “clickjacking” on social media websites with parallel lawsuits against Delaware-based Adscend Media LLC.

“We don’t ‘like’ schemes that illegally trick Facebook users into giving up personal information or paying for unwanted subscription services through spam,” McKenna said during a news conference at Facebook’s Seattle office. “We applaud Facebook for devoting significant technical and legal resources to finding and stopping scams as soon as possible – and often before they even start. We’re proud to join forces in order to protect Washington consumers.”

McKenna and Facebook attorneys said Adscend is making $20 million a year by getting people to click on deceptive links that spread spam to their network of Facebook friends. The goal, said prosecutors and Facebook attorneys, is to go after “the head of the snake” and dry up its source of revenue that is encouraging tactics that hijack clicks and “friending” on Facebook.

Adscend is an online ad network that works with affiliates to place ads for brands on the internet. The legal action is not targeting brands, which likely are not aware that Adscend and its affiliates are allegedly responsible for the spamming tactics, said Assistant Attorney General Paula Selis.

The chief financial officer of Yahoo Japan said that his company is in talks with Yahoo about a complex deal to reduce the American company’s $6 billion stake in his business.

“Yahoo is still trying to finalize the mechanism [for selling its stake] and we are cooperating with them,” The Wall Street Journal quoted Akira Kajikawa as saying at a news conference.

Is Amazon pondering creating a standalone video-streaming service that will compete with Netflix?

That's what the New York Post is reporting, citing sources that say the Seattle online retailing giant's streaming plan would be different than a paid video-on-demand movie and TV service. Amazon currently offers its Instant Video free with its Amazon Prime $79 unlimited shipping service.

When a state passes new laws requiring retailers like Amazon that advertise on marketing affiliates to collect sales taxes, those affiliates are sometimes legislated out of business.

The New York Times reports that Illinois recently passed a "nexus tax" that requires out-of-state retailers that advertise through Illinois-based Internet marketing affiliates to collect and pay Illinois sales tax.

The app described in Microsoft’s patent application would give pedestrians options to avoid walking through an unsafe neighborhood, or an area of intense heat or streets with steep hills.

But the pedestrian route app that uses GPS and government data on crime and weather has sparked a fire storm of controversy from groups who say its elitist and even racist, branding certain neighborhoods in cities as undesirable.

The app does not include the name ‘ghetto.” But the app has been given the name from critics, who say the app reenforces stereotypes of certain neighborhoods.

Cozi has raised an additional $3 million in equity funding, according to a regulatory filing.

Cozi said the $3 million investment round is an extension of Series C funding that brings the total raised to $25 million. The funds will be used to build out the company’s Cozi Gold offering, launched last September.

Cozi said its year-over-year sign ups increased by more than 100 percent in 2011, with more than 1 million new family members joining the service.