Gateway, Inc.

Company overview. Gateway, Inc. (originally Gateway 2000, renamed Gateway in 1998) is a U.S. personal-computer brand founded in 1985 by Ted Waitt, Norm Waitt and Mike Hammond in an Iowa farmhouse. It was headquartered most recently in Irvine, California. Gateway went public on the NYSE in 1993 and was acquired by Taiwan's Acer Inc. on October 16, 2007 for approximately $710 million in cash; it is now a wholly owned subsidiary/brand of Acer and no longer files independently or trades. Historical scale: roughly 24,600 employees at its 2000 peak, reduced to about 1,800 by the time of the Acer sale (Los Angeles Times, Orange County Business Journal, Wikipedia).

Products / operations. An operating company, not an NPE. Gateway designed, marketed and sold desktop and notebook PCs and consumer electronics (including monitors and TVs), originally via direct catalog/phone/online sales and later through retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart. Its 2004 acquisition of eMachines (~$266–290 million) shifted it to a retail-channel model. Under Acer, "Gateway" persists primarily as a consumer PC and display brand in the U.S. and select export markets.

Patent-litigation posture. In the tracked data Gateway appears in two (duplicative) N.D. Cal. entries, both as plaintiff and zero as defendant — but the posture is defensive: these are declaratory-judgment actions filed February 8, 2008 by Acer, Inc., Acer America and Gateway against Technology Properties Ltd., Patriot Scientific and Alliacense. That group (the "TPL entities") is a patent-assertion operation that demanded royalties on the Moore Microprocessor Portfolio and CORE Flash patents. Gateway therefore filed as a DJ plaintiff to preempt infringement threats, rather than as an NPE asserting its own portfolio.

Notable cases / context. The tracked matter, Acer, Inc. et al. v. Technology Properties Ltd. (N.D. Cal., No. 5:08-cv-00877), consolidated with parallel HTC and Asustek/Barco DJ actions and with TPL's later Eastern District of Texas infringement counter-suits. It proceeded to claim construction, summary-judgment and trial-stage motions before disposition. Gateway's involvement reflects its status as an Acer subsidiary, not an independent litigant; no Gateway-asserted patent suits are recorded in the tracked data.