The International Herald Tribune’s Victoria Shannon reports that in an interview with the newspaper, Cisco CEO John Chambers called his company’s lawsuit against Apple, Inc over Apple’s use of the name iPhone a “minor skirmish” that could have been avoided had Apple agreed to interoperability with Cisco products.

“We told Apple for five years, ‘This is our trademark. We’ll license it to you, but it is ours,’” the Herald Tribune quotes Chambers as saying. “All we ask is that people respect our trademarks and our intellectual property. We would have traded that for just interoperability.”

In the article, Shannon describes “interoperability” as “the ability of the Apple phone to work smoothly with Cisco products.”

Apple CEO announced the company’s $500 “iPhone during the MacWorld conference in San Francisco earlier this month. Cisco claims to have owned the “iPhone” trademark since 2000.

According to the story, Chambers told Shannon that there’s precedent for Cisco allowing others to use its trademarked names. Chambers said that Cisco freely relinquished rights to the name to the name Netscape in the 1990s when James Barksdale and James Clark, Netscape’s founders, called up and asked to buy the name, which Cisco had trademarked but was not actively using.

Cingular will soon be no more.

According to a Reuter’s news report, the U.S. cellular giant will be rechristened AT&T in a campaign set to begin next week and last “several months.”

The decision follows the FCC’s approval of last month’s $86 billion mega-merger between AT&T (itself formerly SBC Communications until SBC purchased AT&T in 2005 and took on the name) and Bell South. AT&T aqnd Bell South had jointly owned Cingular prior to the merger.

According to the report, AT&T’s logo will begin to appear on all Cingular’s marketing material, including television advertising, beginning next week.

At first it looked like it was all settled: The new Apple mobile phone product would be dubbed “iPhone” afterall, and Cisco, which owns the trademark to the name, was on board.

Not so fast.

A day after Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the company’s newest product line, and a day after Cisco officials announced they had been discussing the use of the name “iPhone” with Apple, Cisco has filed suit against Apple for trademark infringement.

“Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco’s iPhone name,” is how Mark Chandler, a Cisco senior vice president and general counsel, was quoted in a Cisco press release today. “There is no doubt that Apple’s new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission.”

“Today’s iPhone is not tomorrow’s iPhone,” the release continues. “The potential for convergence of the home phone, cell phone, work phone and PC is limitless, which is why it is so important for us to protect our brand.”

The Geneva-based World Economic Forum has released a list of its 47 tech pioneers for 2007, three of whom focus on the IP communications space.

Signaling the upcoming increased importance of communications convergence, all three — Bridgeport Networks of the US, HelloSoft Inc. of India and UK-based Truphone — are behind products aiming to merge IP-based and mobile communications.

BridgePort Networks develops telecommunications software for mobile services between mobile and Internet protocol networks. Its network convergence gateway uses roaming technology to extend single identity phone number services over multiple access networks, including mobile, cable, DSL, and WiFi.

HelloSoft is a leading provider of VoIP technologies for wireline and wireless devices. The company enables mass deployment of low-cost, power-efficient, fully-featured multi-mode wireline and wireless devices by providing highly optimized RISC-based VoIP products with superior voice quality, QoS, and efficient call switching specifically designed for next generation end-points.

Tryphone has developed a software infrastructure that allows mobile phones with Wi-Fi to make calls and send SMS messages using only Wi-Fi and the Internet. When a Truphone-enabled mobile handset is out of Wi-Fi range it reconnects to the mobile network, allowing customers to roam between the two networks.

The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

According to the Forum’s announcement, Each of the 47 selected companies “is involved in the development of life-changing technology innovation and has potential for long-term impact on business and society.”