Two and a half years after Nortel Networks Corporation filed for bankruptcy protection, the estate of the insolvent Canadian telecom was scheduled on June 27 to sell off its last valuable asset: a portfolio of nearly 6,000 patents that could be key to the future of mobile computing.
The patent trove — which covers technologies used in smartphones and tablet computers, as well as in cellular infrastructure, online search, and even social networking — is expected to bring in more than any of Nortel’s previous asset sales and could set a record for the most money ever raised in a single public sale of intellectual property assets, lawyers familiar with the auction process say.
