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Intellectual Ventures, founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold, filed three patent infringement lawsuits today against nine companies in the security, memory, and chip markets.

One lawsuit names as defendants Check Point Software Technologies, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro and accuses them of infringing on four of its patents related to antivirus and Internet security, according to the lawsuit available for download here.

The second suit accuses Elpida Memory and Hynix Semiconductor, makers of DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) and Flash memory, of infringing between five and seven of its patents. And the final suit alleges that three … Read more

The FCC is looking into letting people report emergencies over SMS and streaming video

Netflix launches a streaming-only plan, letting people ditch the DVDs

Amazon launches a Black Friday shopping page

Yelp introduces Check-In Offers, giving people discounts for location check-ins

Google TV serves up almost no TV now that Viacom joins the networks that block the service from playing their online content

Amazon allows you to give someone an MP3 as a gift

Google Docs has a Microsoft Office plug-in that lets you sync your desktop documents to Google Docs

Amazon launches … Read more

Those of you ready to shop for the holidays now have a new tool to find the best prices.

Available today in Apple's App Store, Amazon's new and free Price Check for the iPhone tries to find the best deals on items among both online and offline retailers. iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users shopping at their favorite outlets can compare prices on the shelves against those at other stores as well as at Amazon and other online vendors.

You'll find a variety of ways to get the app to recognize an item. You can take a picture of the product's bar code. You can snap a photo of a book, DVD, CD, or video game. You can speak the name of the product. If all else fails, you can simply type the name of the item into the app's search field.

Amazon then matches the product's photo or description with the same item already in its database and provides a list of vendors and their respective prices. Price Check even offers details on the item and reviews from other Amazon users.

If you find an item and a price you like, you can buy the item directly through the app, whether it's sold by Amazon or by another retailer through Amazon. You can share prices on your favorite items through e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter as a not-so-subtle holiday wish list for friends and family.… Read more

Congratulations to Caroline McCarthy for completing last weekend's New York Marathon in four hours and six minutes! It's not only an impressive athletic feat for a first-time marathon runner, but a philanthropic one as well.

Caroline raced to benefit Camp Interactive, a program that introduces inner-city youth to technology through outdoor activities. Thanks to contributions from friends, family, and even some 404 listeners, Caroline was able to raise $5,431 for the cause.

Uncle Henry, aka Tapchus in the chat room, also joins us on today's episode with insights on how marathons have changed in the past 20 years. Henry's completed several of them himself, and even tells us about a bizarre race within the staircase at the Empire State building.

Henry ran back when Apple iPods, GPS tracking, automatic FourSquare check-ins, and wristwatch pedometers weren't around, so it's interesting to hear from Caroline and Henry on how running has changed with those inventions.

This year there was no shortage of runners wearing strange outfits for the marathon, and Caroline tells us that superheroes and animal costumes dominated the race this year.

Apparently there was even a guy who ran all five boroughs while juggling three balls--an achievement appropriately called "joggling."

There are also video voice mails today from two listeners: Lila recommends a pair of durable Sennheiser headphones, and Nate recalls a voice mail from two years ago that was featured on last weekend's 404 Throwback episode. Thanks for staying with us, Nate!

If you want to get in touch with the show, upload your video to YouTube and send a link to the404(at)cnet(dot)com. If you're camera shy, you can also leave a message on our voice mail box by calling 1-866-404-CNET as well.

Knowing where your friends are, and seeing their location are two very different things. Loopt's latest iPhone update, and soon-to-be Android update, illustrates this point nicely.

Today the iPhone version of the app is getting an update to finally include integration with Facebook's Places feature, which was rolled out to users in late August. Now Loopt users can check in to both networks at once, and see where friends are from both places on a single map.

Of course Loopt is not the first iOS app to map out Facebook friends (Sobees got there last month), but it'… Read more

More than $100,000 worth of checks got deposited through PayPal's mobile check-capture service in its first 36 hours, the company announced.

"We knew that this would be popular, but we had no idea how much pent up demand there was...," a PayPal spokeswoman wrote on the company's blog yesterday.

PayPal's iPhone app, which was updated with the new feature on Wednesday, lets people take a picture of a check and have that amount deposited into their PayPal account at no charge. The service requires people to hold onto checks for 15 days to allow … Read more

There may be no jet packs yet, but we are very much living in the future. Proof enough of that is PayPal's latest addition to its iPhone app, which brings with it the capability to snap a photo of a check and have it be deposited to your PayPal account free of charge.

Sure, this is something that customers of Chase and USAA have been able to do with each company's respective iPhone applications for months now, but this is PayPal. Why is that important? It means if you've connected your PayPal account to another bank that … Read more

Environmental variables are Windows elements that specify basic system properties and control how various programs behave. They're stored in the Registry, and modifying them changes how the system or a particular program behaves. Experienced users can tweak their systems by modifying environmental variables, and Windows offers several methods, including the temporary Set command and the Registry Editor. We tried out Rapid Environmental Editor, or Rapid EE, from RapidPDF. It's a free tool that adds some sophistication, features, and ease of use to the process by replacing the cumbersome Windows dialog with a full-featured interface.

Before we ran Rapid … Read more

There's a new partnership for GetGlue, a start-up that lets users "check in" to the movies or TV shows they're watching, music they're listening to, and books they're reading. The company announced Tuesday that it's partnered with four major book publishing houses to launch "stickers," the equivalent of Foursquare's achievement badges, for the season's biggest-ticket fiction and nonfiction books as well as bestselling authors like Tom Clancy and Paulo Coehlo.

On board are Hachette Book Group, Simon and Schuster, Random House, and Penguin. The largest publishing house that isn'… Read more