April 9, 2012 – AOL announced that it sold over 800 patents and their related patent applications to Microsoft and granted Microsoft a non-exclusive license to its retained patent portfolio for $1.056 billion.  The sale includes patented technology from AOL’s acquisitions of Netscape, MapQuest, ICQ, and others.  According to the article, AOL will continue to hold over 300 patents and patent applications, including advertising, search, content generation/management, social networking, mapping, multimedia/streaming, and security technologies.   AOL also reportedly received a license to the patents being sold to Microsoft.