Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with Bill Gates, has filed suit against 12 major corporations over technology he claims to have patented.

The companies: Google, Facebook, eBay, Apple, Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc., Netflix, Office Depot Inc., OfficeMax Inc., Staples Inc. and YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.

All four patents are for technology innovated more than 10 years ago by a software company that Allen owned. Interval Research Corp was financed for about $100 million by Allen during the Dot Com bubble, and was shut down soon after.

The second patent,which allows a website to offer suggestions related to items that the user is viewing, is a feature on Amazon, but Amazon has not been listed. (Maybe for being Seattle-based?) Microsoft, the company that Allen co-founded with Bill Gates, is also missing from the list of companies being filed upon.

The other patents are for technology that enables ads and stock quotes (among other things) to flash on screen, and provides links of related news stories for readers who are viewing a topic.

No doubt that the reason Allen and his firm, Interval Licensing LLC, are suing is from the success of NTP Inc, who won the suits it had with Apple, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd, and Microsoft in 2006.

One result was RIM settling out of court with NTP at the price of $612.5 million. So maybe Allen has a chance?

Indonesia can be added to the list of countries who are threatening to ban Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry smart-phone. Instead of routing local data transmissions in non-Indonesian facilities, the country wants RIM to install a server in Indonesia to handle its data traffic.

Indonesia is worried about whether or not BlackBerry data can be intercepted and/or read by third parties. Officials representing other countries have also said that, “for security and culture reasons, they want more latitude to look at emails and data transmissions made over BlackBerry’s encrypted and proprietary communications network”.

BlackBerry service will be cut off on Friday in Saudi Arabia according to the country’s telecommunication regulators. The United Arab Emirates wants the phone’s services shut off on October 11th, according to USA Today. Other countries have expressed their interests in blocking the use of RIM smart-phones.

A senior analyst at Forrester Research explained to USA Today how most mobile providers route their data communications through the commercial Internet, but RIM routes the data to mostly servers in Canada. The analyst said that its arrangement was built before the Internet entered maturity, and that it “has been a strength for RIM but now a disadvantage.”

Current Microsoft Corporation Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner made the comparison and called the iPhone 4 Apple’s Windows Vista.

“It looks like iPhone 4 might be their Vista and I’m okay with that,” Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, told an audience during the Worldwide Partner Conference on July 14.

If you are not aware (at this point, everyone is), Turner was poking fun at his main rival, referring to the dismay that consumers had at his own company due to Vista having to have several major updates and Service Packs before the operating system’s bugs and compatibility issues were resolved.

The latest iPhone has had major antenna issues, with Apple founder Steve Jobs even calling the problem “Antennagate”. Apple tried to ratify the problem at its June 16th conference by offering free bumpers and making sure that the company threw its rivals (primarily RIM and Motorola) under the bus. Jobs even went the length to demonstrate reception issues with the rival’s phones.