Apple Tried To Buy Palm Before HP Won The Bidding War -- And RIM Completely Blew The Deal

The race to buy Palm earlier this year was fast and hot, with the company's bankers contacting 16 companies about the deal, including five serious potential suitors.
HP won the bake-off, acquiring Palm for $1.2 billion in late April.
But other companies involved in the talks included Silicon Valley's increasingly competitive rivals, Apple and Google, as well as BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, we have learned from a source familiar with the negotiations.
According to our discussions with this person:

• Apple was mostly interested in Palm's huge library of intellectual property and patents (450+ patents on file, another 400+ applications on file). And unlike some other bidders, Apple even seemed committed to funding Palm's operations, perhaps to challenge RIM's dominance in the keyboarded segment of the smartphone industry, our source says. (There's a bunch of problems with this idea, such as the idea of Apple supporting two rival app platforms, but that's what this person says.) Ultimately, Apple didn't bid high enough, while HP offered an amount the board couldn't say no to. (Recall that Steve Jobs tried to buy Palm years ago in its first life, too, when it was owned by 3Com.)

• RIM basically had the deal in its hands and "had to work incredibly hard to blow it," our source recalls. RIM initially came in higher than HP, but HP upped its bid, our source says.

• Google, likely interested in Palm's intellectual property, supposedly only wanted it because Google thought Apple might want it. But Google supposedly didn't know Apple was actually bidding for Palm, so it didn't proceed.

• Nokia, bizarrely, wasn't anywhere near the deal. That may prove to be a stupid move, which we'll expand on later.

Why I Caved, Bought Cable TV, And Gave Up On My 'Hulu Household'

have a confession to make.
Late last month, I walked into the Time Warner Cable store on East 23rd Street in Manhattan and sat down with a saleswoman. I left a few minutes later with a bright orange shopping bag, a new Scientific Atlanta digital cable box, and $80+ monthly digital cable subscription.
Okay, that's not too out-of-the-ordinary. Time Warner Cable added 56,000 new digital TV subscribers last quarter, finishing the year with almost 9 million subs. I wasn't alone.
But by buying cable, I was a failure. I was admitting defeat. I was caving in to The Man.
Why? Because I'm the guy who, almost two years ago, returned my Time Warner Cable set-top box to that same store on 23rd Street. I proudly vowed to get all of my TV content from the Internet forever -- becoming a "Hulu household," as I called it.

The Real Genius Of The Kindle? The Return Of ‘Unitasking’

Thomas E. Weber is the Editor of SmartMoney.com and a veteran business and technology journalist. A former Wall Street Journal senior editor and bureau chief, he created the paper’s first column devoted to the Internet. Those with short attention spans can follow him on Twitter @tweber, or email tweber@smartmoney.com .
When’s the last time you did only one thing at a time?
If you’re reading this—particularly if you’re in the news or content business—there’s a good chance you’ll have trouble answering that question. Technology has long been on a relentless march to “help” us do more things at once. Content is no exception. From TV news screens packed with crawls and overlays to online news, where that newspaper web site is apt to be one of umpteen browser tabs open at once, we’re all juggling ever-more threads of information simultaneously.
But one new technology is taking consumers in the opposite direction, and I’ve found it has unexpectedly helped me reclaim control of my attention span. It’s the Kindle. Unlike most digital devices, Amazon.com’s e-reader makes it difficult to multitask.

Much has been made already of the Kindle’s significance for publishers. By creating a payment infrastructure for digital reading matter, the Kindle is helping prod many to reconsider charging for their wares instead of relying on advertising revenue. Less discussed has been the Kindle’s tendency toward unitasking—but it’s clearly part of the device’s appeal, and it, too, offers lessons for publishers.
Here’s why. The problem right now isn’t just figuring out what type of content people will pay for. An overlooked part of the puzzle—one that’s finally beginning to get more attention—is what type of environment will foster that willingness to pay. And an environment that helps overloaded infovores regain their concentration could have appeal.