Palm to sell stake; taps ex-iPod chief
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Smart-phone maker Palm Inc.  said on Monday it will sell a 25 percent stake to private equity firm Elevation Partners for $325 million in a deal that brings in a former senior Apple Inc. executive as chairman.
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Shareholders of Palm Inc. voted Wednesday to approve the partial sale of the struggling company to a private equity firm and change the boardâs makeup.
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Smartphone maker Palm Inc. is consulting with investment bankers on its strategic options, including the prospect of selling the company, seeking investment from venture capitalists, or making an acquisition of its own, according to a report in the The Wall Street Journal.
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That's what the inventor of the Treo and Palm Pilot says about the Palm Foleo. He has a tough selling job ahead.
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(InfoWorld) - Just when Palm was expected to ship the Foleo, its controversial smartphone companion product, the company instead decided to kill it. In a blog posting, Palm CEO Ed Colligan wrote that he decided to cancel the Foleo so the company could focus all its energy on a single product platform. While Palm will continue to offer some products that use Microsoft's Windows Mobile software, going forward, all its internal work will be on a new software platform due out next year. Just over a week ago, on Aug. 24,Â Palm denied reports that the launch of the Foleo would be delayed. Palm first introduced the product in May, saying it would ship in the summer. The Foleo was a Linux-based lightweight PC that would operate in conjunction with the Treo smartphone. But because the Foleo had little processing power, it wouldn't add much more than a larger keyboard and screen, so it could hardly justify the proposed $500 price tag, said Todd Kort, an industry analyst. Palm still believes a product like the Foleo could work and plans to build a "Foleo II" based on Palm's upcoming software, Colligan wrote. He wouldn't speculate on when that second-generation product would ship. "Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we cannot afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus," he wrote. Criticism and lack of market interest may have contributed to Palm's decision to kill the product, Kort said. "There was very little interest in it from the public," he said. Palm also may have stumbled in generating interest from the developer community, he said. Developers don't want to work on products for a platform unless it's likely to be successful, and the negative response to the Foleo may have kept many developers away, he said. "I think Palm was wise enough to pull back when all the signs were indicating negative," he said. Palm isn't in the position to take a big risk on a new product category. While the company is still profitable, its sales have slowed considerably as it moves from being a PDAÂ maker to a smartphone developer. Palm's profit for the quarter ending June 1 reflected a 44 percent drop from the same quarter last year. "If they would have poured a lot of resources into this and failed, it could have dragged the company down pretty quickly," Kort said. Palm will take an earnings charge of less than $10 million related to the cancellation, Colligan said in the blog post.
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(InfoWorld) - Palm introduced a smartphone with a new brand aimed at a younger audience on Thursday. The Centro phone will cost $99.99 and initially be available exclusively from Sprint Nextel starting in mid-October. Palm designed the phone to be cheap, small, and simple to use in an effort to expand the smartphone market, said Ed Colligan, Palm's president and CEO, during a webcast news conference at the DigitalLife conference in New York City. In the U.S. this year, he expects that of the 160 million phones sold, just 8 million will be smartphones. The mass market isn't buying smartphones today because they're big, complex, have clunky designs, and are expensive, he said. "This is not an iPhone killer," Colligan said. The iPhone, with its high price tag, appeals to the relatively small existing smartphone market, while Palm is aiming the Centro at the larger feature-phone segment. The Centro should attract people who traditionally would buy a basic feature phone but now want the second generation, he said. "It's small enough that it competes with the standard feature phone, and it gives the full power of essentially a Treo," he said. College students, young professionals, and "CEOs of households" are the types of people Palm designed the Centro for, he said. The phone runs the Palm OS and operates on Sprint's 3G network. It features a touchscreen and a full keyboard and comes loaded with instant messaging applications from Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Messenger. It also includes push e-mail from corporate Microsoft Exchange servers. While sales of Palm's Treo smartphone line have been strong, the company continues to struggle to record profit gains. It faces stiff competition from the entrenched BlackBerry, other Windows Mobile smartphones, and new entrants like the iPhone. Palm recently stumbled by announcingÂ a smartphone companion device, the Foleo, and then deciding toÂ kill the product just before it was due to ship after much industry criticism of the concept. Palm said it plans to resurrect the product in the future. Palm is developing a new operating system that it expects to unveil next year. It currently sells phones based on its existing software as well as Windows Mobile.
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The Motley Fool - Yesterday, I wrote about how everyone and their neighbor seems to gunning for a slice of Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL - News) iPod and iTunes business. And while I still believe it's possible for News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS - News) MySpace, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - News), and Sony (NYSE: SNE - News) to erode some of Apple's market share for downloadable music, I don't expect the company to passively stand by as revenues drop.
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Mobile computer maker Palm Inc.  on Monday said it will sell a 25 percent stake to private equity firm Elevation Partners for $325 million, and said it will pay $9 in cash to stockholders.
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The Dutch private equity firm will sell the stake in the mobile telephone company to a Dutch investor.
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Record sales, but numbers still down Palm is still losing money, despite the Centro selling in record numbers (for Palm). The company lost $9.6m in the three months to 30 November, on revenues which are down 11 per cent on last year to $349 million.â¦
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The second-largest radio company in the U.S. based on station count has agreed to sell the company to a group of investors that includes the broadcasterâs chief executive.
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Smartphone maker Palm is reportedly consulting with investment bankers about a sale, investment, or other move.
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Eric Benhamou, formerly CEO of Palm, has joined the board of Web security company Finjan
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PalmSource, a maker of software for mobile devices, named Jean-Louis Gassee as its chairman on Tuesday. Gassee, a general partner with venture capital firm Allegis Capital, was previously the president and CEO of Computer Access Technology and of Be.
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Palm Inc. has reached a deal to sell a quarter of the company to Elevation Partners, a private equity firm, for about $325 million as part of a plan to reorganize the company.
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NEW YORK/BOSTON  - Billionaire investor Carl Icahn said on Tuesday he will seek a seat on Motorola Inc.'s  board and has taken a stake in the mobile phone maker, aiming to convince it to do a big share buyback.
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JP Morgan says Apple will replace its popular iPod Nano MP3 player with an inexpensive Nano-style mobile phone by the end of the year.