During the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has confirmed that the company, under the new management of HP, will also be creating WebOS netbooks, alongside tablets, smartphones and printers.
Says Rubinstein: “We’re working a wide variety, as Todd said, smartphones definitely, slates, netbooks, working with the guys in the printer group. webOS [...] will have a unified user interface across all of these, will have a unified developer environment, and it’s all based on the foundation that we build in webOS from day one.
When we developed webOS, we thought about making this scalable across a variety of mobile devices; that’s what we’ll be delivering going forward.”
While tablets, printers and smartphones had been confirmed in the past by either HP or Palm, netbooks had only vaguely been mentioned.
In April, HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion, after outbidding RIM, Apple and Lenovo.
With the acquisition, the company also acquired all of Palm’s patents and its WebOS mobile operating system.
Result for: new management
On Tuesday the Judiciary Committee in the US House of Representatives approved the Performance Rights Act for consideration by the full House. If enacted into law as currently written, it would require most terrestrial radio stations to pay royalties to the copyright holder of each recording they play.
Under the current arrangement these broadcasters only have to pay publishers’ royalties. This system was put in place based on the idea that radio exposure sells music.
Just like they seem to do with any use of a recording that doesn’t make them money directly, the labels have characterized this as piracy. As usual they believe the problem isn’t their own business model, but rather that people simply aren’t giving them enough money.
The bill is still a long way from becoming law. A companion bill was introduced in the Senate earlier this year, but hasn’t made it out of committee yet.
Despite claims that radio exposure no longer drives sales, labels continue to provide music to radio stations free of charge. If they really believe what they claim shouldn’t they have stopped by now?
If they do believe it and haven’t stopped isn’t that the sort of thing that suggest a need for new management instead of propping them up with another royalty scheme?
Result for: new management
After being shut down by the CRIA last November, the popular public torrent Tracker site Demonoid has seemingly made its long anticipated return.
The greeting message at the site reads as follow: “Welcome back!
Since a few months ago, Deimos, the site administrator, lacks the necessary time to take care of the website, because of personal matters he’s been needing to attend to. For this reason, he has decided to leave the site staff.
Before leaving, he assigned a new site administrator from among his friends to take care of the site. The old moderator team will continue helping with the site, unchanged. We will try to keep running everything just as it always has been.
The trackers and website seem to be working properly, and should any issues arise, they will be taken care of as soon as possible. The site might be going on and offline over the next days as we work out any problems.
Welcome back, and enjoy your stay!
The new reopening is also coming with conspiracy theorists however. Many point out the example of ShareReactor, the large eDonkey site which was closed down by raids in 2004 but made a return in 2006. It was revealed that the site was under “new management” and traffic declined so low that the site was taken down again.
Time will tell whether Demonoid can make a true comeback.
