Ryan Seacrest Company Losses in Patent Battle With BlackBerry Over iPhone Case
After being almost crushed by so many negative news the past few months, Waterloo-based tech firm BlackBerry appears to be finally on a winning streak this week. After reporting a 64 per cent drop in its fourth quarter revenue on Friday , BlackBerry won a San Francisco court's nod for a preliminary injunction on the sales of Typo.
Typo, owned by American Icon host Ryan Seacrest, sells a $99 iPhone keyboard case that looks like BlackBerry's keyboard case. BlackBerry filed a lawsuit against Typo in January, claiming that Typo breached its patent.
Typo insisted that the claim of BlackBerry is not valid since it had similar keyboard designs even before the Canadian firm had it patented in 1999.
Mr Seacrest has co-founded Typo and invested $1 million in the company.
Also on the same day, BlackBerry logged a $4.4 billion loss in Q3 and reported revenue of $976 million for Q4 fiscal 2014. It is the first time that the tech company reported revenue below $1 billion since 2007.
However, CEO John Chen saw the numbers as narrowing its loss and being on track to return to profitability for the following year.