Google may have lost the Nortel auction patent battle with Apple, Microsoft, RIM and a host of other tech firms, but Sneak can't help applauding the way the search firm went about the bidding process, demonstrating its corporate personality as smart, funny and creative.

According to sources who talked to Reuters, all of Google's bids during the auction for some 9,000 odd patents referred to famous mathematical numbers.

The company bid $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128 during the early round, which maths wizzes may recognise as Brun's constant and the Meissel-Mertens constant. Once bidding passed $3bn, Google offered $3,141,592.65, representing the first nine digits of Pi.

The eventual winning bid was $4.5bn at which point Google dropped out, which is strange as it could have bid $6.66bn to really confuse those who argue that the company has lost its way from the 'Don't Be Evil' mantra.

Other companies involved in the bidding were apparently utterly confused by the bids coming from Google, and the source told Reuters that the company was "either supremely confident or bored".

However, Google has a track record of these kinds of shenanigans. When the firm went public in 2004 it looked to raise $2,718,281,828, the value of e multiplied by a billion. Sneak doesn't know what this means, but it sounds jolly smart.

Other details emerged from the source, including the fact that Apple named its consortium Rockstar and went by the name Ranger, which sound like team names made up by the wallies that appear on The Apprentice.

04 Jul 2011