In addition to settling on a good price for the Palm goodies, HP is also demanding that potential buyers license webOS back to it on the cheap for use in printers, a source with knowledge of the negotiations tells VentureBeat.

As for the status of the Palm sale, which includes webOS and Palm’s lovely treasure trove of patents, our source says that Intel has just begun discussions with HP. Our source also says that Qualcomm is still in the running for Palm, but the company has adamantly denied previous rumors about the deal.

Now I’m all for more innovative printers from HP, but it seems like a strange demand when the company is losing money every day it continues to hold on to webOS. (Pictured above, HP’s inexplicable printer/Android tablet combo.) HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm last year, and it revealed in its earnings report today that it spent another $1.66 billion just to wind down its webOS business, as AllThingsD points out.

HP has said previously that webOS could eventually make its way to printers and PCs, but now with a Palm sale imminent, it seems strange for the company to hold true to that initial promise. I can’t imagine that many consumers are chomping at the bit for webOS-enabled printers, and much of the benefit from using webOS as the basis of printer software — including ease of development and potential third-party app support — could be seen by jumping to Android.

Then again, it’s possible that HP has webOS printers near completion, so by licensing the software it’ll still be able to move forward with those products. Given that no major printer competitors are aiming for Palm, a potential buyer shouldn’t have any problem licensing webOS to HP (though that depends on how cheap HP’s demands are for the licensing fees).

And what of Amazon? In September we reported that Amazon was in deep negotiations to snap up Palm, but it’s unclear if that’s still the case now. I still think Amazon would be a good fit for webOS — definitely more so than other alternatives like Intel, Qualcomm, or, God forbid, RIM — because it would be able to take advantage of Palm’s software in future tablets. And of course, it wouldn’t hurt for Amazon to be sitting pretty with Palm’s patents.

“It’s basically a renaming and shuffling,” an HP spokeswoman said.

Stephen DeWitt, who was the senior vice president in charge of HP’s American PC business, will lead the new division, which is known as HP’s Personal Systems Group.

Rubinstein (pictured), whose career included a stint as the head of Apple’s iPod business, will take on a new role as senior vice president for innovation within the division.

The move, announced in a pair of press releases from HP (one, two), comes just 10 days after the company launched the HP TouchPad, its webOS-based tablet. The TouchPad and HP’s webOS-powered phones, such as the Pre and Veer, have been praised for their innovative interfaces, but haven’t made much headway in the market yet. With Android commanding a plurality of the smartphone market (at about 38 percent) and Apple’s iOS dominating tablets to the tune of 75-90 percent, depending on who you ask, HP has a lot of lost ground to make up.

The executive shuffle may be a recognition that webOS needs a more seasoned product marketing executive to push it forward in the market.

DeWitt said the move had nothing to do with webOS’s lack of momentum. ”I’m an offensive-minded coach. This is about stealing the business,” he told VentureBeat.

Asked about Apple’s dominating lead in tablets, DeWitt’s answer was part defensive, part super confident that HP still has big opportunities in what will be a huge mobile marketplace. ”Well, duh,” he said. “Apple’s been in the market for two years and they’ve been in development for years before. We weren’t in the market two years ago. But if you just roll out a couple of years, there are going to be tens of billions of connected devices bringing experiences, things that people value, to wherever they are.”

“For us, the path is complex, but also fits well into what HP does well,” DeWitt said.

Photo of Jon Rubinstein courtesy HP.

Where operates a hyper-local ad network and a mobile app. It recently started to offer Groupon-style local deals. The app allows you to search for restaurants, entertainment, news, and more based on your location.
According to eBay, Where has 120 000 business customers and over 4 million active users. The service works on various mobile devices, such as iOS, Android, Blackberry and Palm.

Milo tracks inventory in local stores, so customers can find out where the product is available. Combined with Where the customers can find out about the best deals and even be able to get it immediately because of the real-time inventory.

eBay is really pushing into the mobile space. The company plans on integrating PayPal into Where’s mobile app so PayPal customers can access more local deals. Longer term, eBay could use Where’s platform to help drive adoption of its point-of-sale offering. eBay is rolling out its mobile app to facilitate mobile transactions and plans on having pilots out for point-of-sale by the end of 2011.

Where was previously known as uLocate. The company has received funding from Kodiak Venture Partners, GrandBanks Capital, and Venrock.

The purchase price was undisclosed. Ebay doesn’t expect it to impact the company’s 2011 guidance. The company will provide more color around the deal on its first quarter earnings call on Wednesday, April 27.

The monetization of mobile wil alsol be one of the key issues at VentureBeat Mobile Summit next week.

HP’s revenue was up 3.7 percent to $32.2 billion in its first quarter of the 2011 fiscal year, up from $31.2 billion the same quarter in its 2010 fiscal year. But the company’s operating profit shot up 16 percent to $2.61 billion in the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, compared to $2.25 billion the same quarter a year earlier.

That’s because HP’s gross margins rose by 1.5 percentage points to 24.4 percent — meaning the company was operating more efficiently despite slimmer revenue growth. Despite the strong showing, HP trimmed its outlook for the full fiscal year — saying they would be around $2 billion short of their original expectations from Wall Street analysts. That weakness will probably come from PC sales — since consumers are still limiting their discretionary spending — and from their services sector, Apotheker said on the company’s quarterly conference call.

Mark Hurd, HP’s former chief executive, also had a penchant for cutting costs where he could to bring about a higher profit and a cleaner balance sheet — sometimes at the expense of research within the company. Hurd’s downfall at HP came after Jodie Fisher, a former HP marketing contractor, complained of sexual harassment. He eventually went on to join HP rival Oracle as president, prompting HP to pick up Apotheker as its newest CEO.

The company’s enterprise segment also did quite well, with revenue growing 22 percent in its enterprise storage, servers and networking to $5.6 billion in the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year — up from $4.6 billion the same quarter a year earlier. HP is still going strong with its printer business — particularly with its web-connected printers, where sales doubled, Apotheker said on the company’s quarterly conference call to discuss earnings. Printer shipments were up 7 percent as a whole, and commercial printer shipments were up 33 percent.

There’s still no word as to how the company’s recent ventures with Palm will play out. HP recently unveiled two new phones and a tablet computer running Palm’s WebOS mobile operating system in its first entry to the smartphone market and its first serious attempt to compete with Apple and Google in tablets. Both Apotheker and analysts didn’t discuss how the new devices might perform, and how that would fit into the company’s guidance, on the conference call to discuss the company’s quarterly earnings.

Investors didn’t take the guidance shortfall too well, slamming HP’s shares in extended trading on Tuesday. Shares of HP were down about 12 percent to $42.40 after the bell.

McKinney started off by drawing a chart showing the traditional trade-off between reach/mobility and richness. On one end, you have a 50-inch television (maximum richness, no mobility), on the other you have a mobile phone (very mobile, not much richness), and most devices lie somewhere in between.

One of the biggest questions right now, he said, is what devices will fill the gap in that spectrum — “larger than a smartphone, smaller than a netbook.” Successful devices in that area include e-book readers and what McKinney and others have called “slates,” although most readers probably think of them as tablets. McKinney emphasized that he wasn’t announcing a specific slate product, but he said HP has already made it clear it wants to run Palm’s webOS operating system on slates, as well as on printers.

McKinney added that the real goal with Palm is to figure out, “How do I get off the line here?” In other words, instead of trading off between richness and mobility, HP wants to create devices that deliver more richness and more mobility.

He didn’t bring any phones on stage, but that doesn’t mean he showed up empty-handed. He unrolled a sheet of printed, flexible screens that he said form the backpane of the displays on new devices. Those screens are printed on the same mylar film as flexible solar arrays. In the first generation, the screens won’t actually be flexible when you buy them — instead, this printing technology “fundamentally transforms” the form factors of the mobile devices you can release. For example, it becomes possible to wallpaper a room with video displays.

After his speech, McKinney was questioned by Accel Partners‘ Rich Wong. He ducked any questions about specific product announcements, but he did talk about why HP spent the money to buy Palm, rather than focusing on building devices with existing operating systems like Android or Windows.

“When you look at success in the marketplace, it’s about those companies that can control the end-to-end experience,” McKinney said.

[photo: JP Manninen]