Steve Jobs sought no-poaching deal with Palm
Apple’s autocratic CEO suggested a possibly illegal deal with the head of Palm two years ago, according to a report by Bloomberg, under which Palm and Apple would stop poaching each other’s employees. The two companies, five miles apart in Silicon Valley, have a history of sniping star staffers from one another.
Jobs allegedly made the proposal in August 2007, shortly after the first iPhones went on sale, to Palm’s CEO at the time, Ed Colligan… Continue Reading
Best Buy accidentally sells Palm Pre for half-price $99
An unknown number of shoppers over the weekend were able to purchase Palm’s hot new Pre smartphone for half its current price. A “human error” listed the Pre for $99 instead of $199 in a printed advertisement. A Best Buy store in San Francisco sold 10 of the 30 Pres in stock at the misquoted price, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The episode highlights a mobile industry truism: Handset prices are pretty much whatever… Continue Reading
Palm’s brazen Pre hack back into iTunes
Palm’s latest Pre software deliberately identifies the device as manufactured by Apple, in order to let the Pre connect to iTunes on PCs and Macs.
The back story: Palm and Apple have been battling over the new Pre smartphone’s access to Apple’s iTunes music management application. Palm shipped the Pre a few weeks ago with a trick ID field set on its USB port. The setting fooled iTunes into thinking it was talking to an Apple… Continue Reading
Apple confirms: Pre locked out of iTunes
Apple PR wrangler Natalie Kerris has officially confirmed to BusinessWeek what Pre owners have been tweeting: “iTunes 8.2.1 … disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre. As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”
Just this second, Palm spokeswoman Lynn Fox has sent out a counter-snipe: “Palm’s media sync works with iTunes 8.2. If Apple chooses to disable media sync in iTunes,… Continue Reading
Market research vs. gut instinct
Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing and the inventor of the Palm Pilot, knows a thing or two about innovation. In this segment, from Stanford University’s Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lectures, Hawkins discusses how to balance market research with your intuition.
Focus groups can only take you so far. Listening to customer wishes and demands helps more. But sometimes, you simply need to ignore what the data is telling you and follow your gut.
Roundup: Schmidt is bullish, Yahoo spikes New York Times traffic, Windows 7 on a thumb drive
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt says it’s “reasonable to be optimistic for 2010″ — Reuters has more.
Michael Jackson traffic set off cyberattack alarms – Google’s automated defense systems interpreted a sudden tsunami of “Micheal Jackson” [sic] queries as an attack. I’ve gotten similar stories under FrieNDA from IT people at a couple of other places, too. We all went a little Jacko-crazy yesterday.
Windows 7 may be available on a thumb drive – Now that a significant… Continue Reading
Roundup: RIP Farrah Fawcett, Palm’s not-so-big loss, PC sales looking up
Palm’s fourth-quarter performance beat Wall Street expectations, and that’s before the Pre’s arrival kicked sales into high gear. The company’s Q4 loss was $53.4 million, or 40 cents per share, on sales of $113.2 million, excluding one-time items. Wall Street had been expecting a 62-cent loss on revenue of $80.64 million. Palm’s fiscal 2009 loss adds up to $241.1 million, or $2.08 per share excluding items.
“She will be remembered as the modern Mona Lisa,” Hollywood… Continue Reading
Apple hints that Palm’s ability to sync with iTunes may be short-lived
At a recent conference, Palm executives proudly proclaimed the recently launched Pre smartphone’s ability to synchronize with Apple’s iTunes media. But the technical achievement may turn out to be temporary.
Apple hinted that future versions of iTunes may break compatibility with third-party media players. That’s one interpretation of a cryptic post that Apple made on its web site about how it’s not able to guarantee claims by third parties that their devices will be able to… Continue Reading
Palm promotes former Apple exec to CEO
Palm cleared up its leadership questions at the top today as it promoted Jon Rubinstein from executive chairman to chief executive. Meanwhile, current Palm CEO Ed Colligan is taking a job at Elevation Partners, the private equity firm that owns much of Palm.
Rubinstein is the logical choice to head Palm in the wake of the launch of the Palm Pre, the new smart phone that is pretty much flying off the shelves in Sprint stores…. Continue Reading
Palm Pre goes on sales at Sprint stores nationwide
The Palm Pre went on sale at midnight last night in Sprint, Best Buy and Radio Shack stores around the country. Crowds lined up to get their hands on the smartphones, which are expected to be in short supply.
Palm and its exclusive wireless carrier for now, Sprint, both have a lot riding on the Pre’s launch. It represents Palm’s attempt to one-up the iPhone and recover a lot of its past cachet as an innovator… Continue Reading
Roundup: Verizon Pre not coming too soon, the fall of Vidoop, and more
Here’s the latest action:
Verizon won’t be offering the Palm Pre within half a year — Lots of coverage on Techmeme.
“The Fall of Vidoop” – A fascinating, in-depth look at issues inside the secure storage company, as told by former employee and web developer Chris Messina.
Facebook gets SMS – Receive text messages about your friends’ latest status updates (yes, kinda like how Twitter works).
How should Twitter, the company, use Twitter, the service? — ReadWriteWeb explores the idea.
Best Buy… Continue Reading
Palm Pre lets you command an army of Asian dancers, new ad says
Hot on the heels of the glamorous Hollywood launch of Palm’s much-anticipated Pre smartphone, you can now watch what is apparently the first television ad for the device — to which my initial response is: “Huh?”
Palm is hoping the Pre will be a strong competitor against the iPhone, and early product reviews are certainly promising. But you probably recall Apple’s memorable “there’s an app for that” iPhone ads, which both demonstrated specific tasks you can… Continue Reading
Palm launches Pre with the glitterati of Hollywood to get cachet
Hollywood and Silicon Valley met Wednesday night as Palm bankrolled a big party of stars to celebrate the launch of its Palm Pre smart phone.
It’s a sure sign that introducing a new phone isn’t just a big deal for tech fiends. In the photo above, Palm chief executive Ed Colligan rubbed shoulders Jason Alexander, the comedian and longtime sidekick of Jerry Seinfeld. They’re flanked by Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, and Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein.
They’re all… Continue Reading
Palm shows off the Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes
Sometimes there’s no need to reinvent what your enemy has done. That seems to be the thinking that Palm embraced as it announced today that the Palm Pre cell phone will be able to sync with Apple iTunes content.
Although the iPhone is Public Enemy No. 1 for the Pre, Palm executive chairman Jon Rubenstein said at the AllThingsD conference today that the Pre can access media content in iTunes as well as photos that are… Continue Reading
Palm’s day of reckoning coming on June 6, with the Pre’s release
After much public speculation about the release date and pricing of the Pre (Palm’s answer to the iPhone), Sprint announced today that it will start selling the device on June 6, with a price of $199.99 (basically equivalent to the cheapest iPhone), if you make a two-year service commitment and after you receive the rebate.
Both smartphone maker Palm and mobile carrier Sprint have been struggling recently — with Palm’s sales falling below expectations and Sprint… Continue Reading
Roundup: Hulu eyes world domination, Schmidt busts antitrust talk, Nokia plots app store and more
Hulu closer to going global — The online video site backed by NBC Universal and Fox has signed a bevy of content deals with overseas television producers with an eye toward British and Bollywood programming.
OpenTable sets terms for IPO — The restaurant reservation service plans to sell 3 million shares for somewhere between $12 and $14 each to raise $16.1 million net from an IPO underwritten by Merrill Lynch & Co.
iPhones to point North — The next model… Continue Reading
Roundup: Windows 7 nearing launch, Facebook phished, Dean’s upcoming Seattle speech
Here’s the latest action:
Windows 7 readying for birth — Microsoft’s new operating system is entering its final stages of testing and the company has a “release candidate” ready, possibly for launch on May 5. It will be interesting to see if it lifts computer sales in the midst of the recession.
Walt Disney takes nearly 30 percent stake in Hulu — News of the Disney relationship with the Web video aggregator is here.
Anyone remember the Razr? — Motorola posts… Continue Reading
Roundup: Amazon’s ‘ham-fisted’ error, Facebook’s baseball surge and more
Here’s the latest action:
Gay books disappear from Amazon’s sales rankings — What caused the incident now known as “amazonfail”? The online retailer first blamed a glitch, and is now saying a “ham-fisted” cataloging error is at fault. Meanwhile, a hacker claims to be responsible.
With the start of baseball season, teams see a surge in Facebook fans — The Boston Red Sox’s page grew from 1,173 fans to more than 46,000 in under a week.
Banner advertising isn’t dead… Continue Reading
Palm announces availability of webOS Mojo SDK — but it’s limited
Today at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco, Palm announced the availability of its Mojo software development kit (SDK). Third-party developers will be able to use this to build applications for its webOS software which will run on the Palm Pre device.
It’s important that Palm got this SDK out to developers before the device launches. As we saw with the launch of the iPhone 3G and App Store last year, it exploded right out… Continue Reading
Report: iPhone and Android taking everyone else’s market share
The iPhone’s operating system provided 50 percent of U.S. advertising requests to Admob last month, according to a report the mobile ad network published today.
Meanwhile, the seminal Android-powered G1, built by HTC, has grown to 5 percent only three months after launch, the report says. These numbers don’t provide a comprehensive window into the smartphone web and app market — Admob is just adding up requests that its graphical and text ads receive due to… Continue Reading