A Silicon Valley technology company is suing Yahoo Inc for allegedly stealing trade secrets by hiring away 13 key engineers who had nearly completed its interactive speech technology project.
Nuance Communications Inc said it would ask a Santa Clara County judge on Friday to block Yahoo from allowing the engineers to work on the technology it intended to market to Yahoo and other Internet companies.
The California case concerns voice-recognition technology that Nuance says was at least 75 percent complete before its vice president of research and development, Larry Heck, took a job at Santa Clara-based Yahoo. About a dozen Nuance engineers on the project followed him to Yahoo this month, leading Nuance to conclude that Yahoo is attempting to swipe its technology.
"Yahoo and Heck now plan to replicate this technology for Yahoo, depriving Nuance of a valuable corporate opportunity, and positioning Yahoo as a competitor," Jeffrey Chanin, Nuance's attorney, said in court documents.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in Santa Clara County Superior Court, is the latest by a technology company using courts to protect their intellectual turf when engineers or executives defect to other companies.
Earlier this month, a Washington state judge cleared the way for a former Microsoft Corp executive to work for rival Google Inc, but ruled the executive could not work for his new employer on projects he worked on at Microsoft.
Chanin accused Yahoo and Heck of colluding in violation of California's unfair competition law to "cannibalize" Nuance's hard work, commitment and investment.
Menlo Park-based Nuance, which produces a variety of voice-automation software applications for customer-service centers, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Yahoo, however, said it is not colluding with Heck or the other engineers to steal Nuance's technology.
"We believe the claims are without merit and we plan to defend ourselves vigorously," Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars said.
The technology at issue is called Nuance Directory Assistance Automation, which allows phone users to get information, such as phone listings, without speaking to a person.
Nuance said that one day its voice technology could enable users to search the Web with their voices instead of typing on a keyboard.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
US CONSCULTANT: The US Department of Commerce’s Ursula Burns is a rarely seen US government consultant to be put forward to sit on the board, nominated as an independent director Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday nominated 10 candidates for its new board of directors, including Ursula Burns from the US Department of Commerce. It is rare that TSMC has nominated a US government consultant to sit on its board. Burns was nominated as one of seven independent directors. She is vice chair of the department’s Advisory Council on Supply Chain Competitiveness. Burns is to stand for election at TSMC’s annual shareholders’ meeting on June 4 along with the rest of the candidates. TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) was not on the list after in December last