Vringo Soars 30% on James Altucher Article

Noted writer and investor James Altucher, posted an interesting piece at techcrunch.com this weekend which has caused a huge spike in shares of Vringo, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNG). The entire story is fairly in-depth, but essentially, Altucher argues that VRNG could potentially see a big payday relating to a lawsuit it has filed against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). The post, titled "Why Google Might Be Going to $0," outlines a series of patents that can be traced back to the 1990s which deal with monetizing the search business. The patents were granted to a friend of Altucher's and became the basis for search engine Lycos. The friend, Ken Lang, has recently bought these patents back from Lycos and started a company with them called I/P Engine. Two weeks ago, I/P Engine was merged with a public company called Vringo (NASDAQ: VRNG). Subsequently, VRNG has sued Google claiming that the company willfully infringed these patents for sorting ads based on click-throughs. Vringo is claiming that Google has generated $67 billion in revenue as a result of their unlawful use of these patents. Furthermore, the lawsuit claims that every search engine that uses Google "is allegedly infringing on the Vringo patent and is being sued." This includes companies such as Interactive Corp.'s (NASDAQ: IACI) Ask.com, AOL (NYSE: AOL), and Gannett Co. (NYSE: GCI). Another interesting aspect to this story is that there is already some precedent for the claims being made. In the distant past, a company called Overture applied for certain patents based on search monetization. They were granted some of the patents which they were seeking, but denied others on the grounds that they were already held by Lycos. Overture was eventually acquired by Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), which subsequently sued Google on the basis that they were infringing on these patents and YHOO received hundreds of millions of dollars. If Google was infringing on the patents that were owned by YHOO and had been granted to Overture, then the thinking is that they are infringing on the search monetization patents which were not granted to Overture because they had already been patented by Lycos. To make a long story short, these patents are now owned by a company called Vringo, and they are suing Google for a ton of money. Altucher seems to think that they have a case and that Google will settle. In any event, this revelation has caused shares of VRNG to skyrocket on Monday. At last check, the stock was up 28% to $2.11 on very heavy volume. Around 6.3 million VRNG shares have already traded on the session, versus a 3-month daily average of around 800,000. The company is tiny, with a market cap of just $29.39 million, but this could be an interesting catalyst. Investors who are interested in finding out more about what is happening with Vringo should take the time to read Altucher's entire piece, in order to better understand the situation and potential outcomes.