Thought we could go two months without a Vonage update, but it wasn’t meant to be as the misery of Vonage (symbol: VG) the VoIP carrier continues. A new court ruling yesterday found Vonage technology has violated Sprint patents. This sent the stock tumbling yesterday afternoon and has bled through today.

By some definitions (under $5 a share) Vonage has been a penny stock since March 2007 when a ruling that they violated Verizon patents didn’t go their way. Perhaps the worst part of this Sprint ruling is that jurors determined they violated the patents “deliberately.” But the $69.5 million judgement that Vonage plans to appeal wasn’t the only crushing blow delivered in court yesterday. newsnet5.com reports:

In addition to the $69.5 million in damages, jurors awarded Sprint Nextel a 5 percent royalty from Vonage on future revenues.

Perhaps foolishly at this point, we still use Vonage as a secondary phone line and fax in our offline business. We kicked them to the curb in our online business in favor of Skype in July 2006. Fortunately, I chose not to get into the Vonage IPO in May 2006.

Stock competition 2007 update
I wish in the stock competition versus my wife I’d have passed on buying Restoration Hardware (symbol: RSTO), which has become my worst pick to date (-41.84% as of this writing).

She’s soundly kicking my butt with an overall portfolio return of +26.18% (pictured above) while I’m currently licking wounds at -10.42%. Her most recent trade was Qualcomm (symbol: QCOM) where she bought in at $40.13 and sold at $42.32. You can follow along and view our stock competition 2007 portfolio here via Google Spreadsheets.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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