One of the biggest percentage gainers today among any industry is $31 million New York-based Vringo (VRNG), which makes software for social networking and mobile devices.
The shares closed up $1.42, or 86%, at $3.07, apparently propelled by an article postend on Saturday by Tech Crunch’s James Altucher, in which he argues Vringo might stand to gain billions of dollars in a patent suit against Google.
Altucher relates the story of his friendship with inventor Ken Lang during grad school in the early ’90s, and how Lang in 1998 filed a patent on ranking Web page search results based on number of click-throughs.
Vringo on March 14th said it was merging with Lang’s new patent holding company, Innovate/Protect. Innovate/Protect has a patent suit against Google (GOOG) alleging infringement of Lang’s patents, which it mentioned in a letter to shareholders on March 19th. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for June 4th.
The company has also set up a Web site about the Innovate/Protect merger, which includes a link to the full complaint against Google, but also listing AOL (AOL), IAC/Interactive Corp. (IACI), Gannett (GCI), and Target (TGT) as defendants, filed on September 15th, 2011.
As Altucher puts it, Google could “go to $0″ if Lang and Vringo successfully sue for what Altucher thinks would be triple damages based on willful infringement of Lang’s work:
The company sues Google for a big percentage of those $67 billion in revenues plus future revenues. The claim: Google has willfully infringed on Vringo � I/P�s patents for sorting ads based on click-throughs. I remember almost 20 years ago when Ken was working on the software. �Useless!� I thought then. Their claim: $67 billion of Google�s revenues come from this patent. All of Google�s revenues going forward come fro! m this p atent. And every search engine which uses Google is allegedly infringing on the Vringo patent and is being sued.
Altucher is a holder of Vringo common stock, and said he would be buying more of the shares after having posted his article.
Google stock today was up $5.68, or 0.9%, at $646.92.
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