/spandiv style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53797000/jpg/_53797190_012217585-1.jpg" width="304" height="171" alt="Apple logo seen on a window outside of the New York flagship Apple store"span style="width:304px;"The auction drew interest from major tech companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Intel/span /div div class="story-feature related narrow"Related Stories/div p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1"Bankrupt telecoms firm Nortel has sold its remaining patent portfolio for $4.5bn (pound;2.8bn) to a consortium of six firms including Apple and Microsoft./p pThe other consortium members are Sony, Research In Motion, Ericsson, and EMC./p pThe auction of Nortel's assets had been hotly contested, with Google and Intel losing out./p pThe sale included more than 6,000 patents and patent applications including areas such as data networking and semiconductors./p p"The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world," said George Riedel, chief strategy officer at Nortel./p pGoogle had opened the bidding in April at $900m./ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/tnIuPLfPtgZ3Q1Uqr16IoQv44cQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/tnIuPLfPtgZ3Q1Uqr16IoQv44cQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/tnIuPLfPtgZ3Q1Uqr16IoQv44cQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/tnIuPLfPtgZ3Q1Uqr16IoQv44cQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/Q7iSfGPidxA" height="1" width="1"/