The Official HP Palm Blog

Stephanie Richardson: Place your bets

Me, You and Palm: Profiles of Palm People
	Role: Are we building what you want? Are you wanting what we're making? Product marketing is the art of placing bets on what you're going to love.   At Palm since: Just before we launched the Treo 700p. Seems like forever ago
I have always been a person who’s full of questions, ideas, and opinions. From choreographing group dances to “Billy Jean” as a kid (come on girls, we all did it) to planning road trips in college, I love getting people aligned and working together toward one goal…kinda like herding cats. (Remember that TV ad? Yeah, that’s me on the horse.)   You are not an easy audience to please. I’m always trying to figure out what you’re going to love about your phone, not what we love about it. Because sometimes those two things are different.   Palm is full of people who just want to do the right thing. Maybe that sounds obvious, but it’s not. Everyone here wants to deliver the right product, in the right way, to the right people.

  

Jan. 8, 2009 – the day we announced the Palm webOS platform and the Palm Pre phone at an invite-only event at CES in Las Vegas. And probably one of the best – and most nerve-racking – days in my career to date. The event went amazingly well, but for those of us who have been working on this product for what seems like forever, the jittery behind-the-scenes went very much like this:

Jan. 7: Rehearse the presentation and demo, worry about everything going as planned, rehearse some more, worry about what people will think, rehearse some more, worry about everything from someone stealing the demo devices to the power going out in Vegas. Followed by a completely sleepless night.

Jan. 8, before the morning press conference: Cross fingers and toes, realizing that there isn’t anything we can do at this point. It will be what it will be, and we hope it will be great.

Jan. 8, during the press conference: Jumping around in our seats at first, huge sigh of relief when Jon Rubinstein came on stage and it all started. More relief when Ed Colligan came on stage – so far so good. Extreme relief and now nervous excitement as Matias Duarte went through the demo and everyone ooohed and aaahed right where we’d hoped they would.

Jan. 9: 3,465 (or thereabouts) demos later, sore feet and throats from talking for hours on end – and enormous pride that everyone loved the product and everything went off without a hitch.

Talk about placing your bets. A really great day.

Join Stephanie on a Facebook discussion board all this week and find out if her betting skills were any help at the Blackjack table in Vegas.

The webOS developer community leaps ahead

Today, Palm expanded the Mojo SDK program for webOS, announcing that a broad group of developers will be provided with the software development kit to create applications for the Palm Pre phone (as well as other future devices running webOS).

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Palm’s senior vice president of Applications Software and Services Michael Abbott also highlighted some of the most exciting aspects of webOS -- including a new branded service that lets developers create apps that push live content across the Internet -- and invited the audience to apply for the early access program at the Palm Developer Network website.

The power of webOS lets developers rethink how they develop for mobile devices -- and creates opportunities for new kinds of apps. Abbott highlighted several key features of webOS that open up new avenues for the creative ingenuity of the developer community:

• a cards metaphor that simplifies multi-tasking
• Palm Synergy to unify information from sources like Google, Facebook, and Exchange
• a user-friendly approach to notifications that ensures the user is up to date without distracting them from the task at hand. 

An often-overlooked aspect of webOS is that Web applications run natively on the phone. They don’t depend on access to a server, and can run even when there is no access to the Internet. But the full power of webOS is unleashed when the device works together with “the cloud” – the combination of all of the Web sites and services that a user interacts with.

Abbott noted that webOS encompasses software that runs both on the device and in the cloud. He also announced that Palm is creating its own cloud service -- the Mojo messaging service -- that will enable developers to have live interactions between users and applications both on and off the cloud.

You can get a taste of several upcoming apps for the Pre -- including Pandora and Fandango -- in a new video on Palm’s website. As the first mobile OS based on standard Web technologies (like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS), webOS is also accessible to developers comfortable with Web development, even if they’ve never created mobile apps before.

Here are a few first impressions from some of the first webOS developers working on apps for the Pre:

Jon Zilber

Watch this space: No foolin’

We thought about running a harmless little April Fool's Day prank on the blog today. Maybe leak a hint about a hush-hush rumor that Palm would be merging with that pomegranate juice company (the new company would have the ticker symbol POM-PALM, with a cheerleader as our corporate mascot, natch). Heck, there's already a video (created as a promotional tool for Nova Scotia -- go figure) showing off the first phone the combined companies would produce.

Maybe we'd disclose some bogus guidelines for naming webOS apps (“application names are encouraged to use only the vowels 'e' and 'o'; also acceptable are 'a' and 'u,' and sometimes 'y'”). Or issue a faux “Countdown Survival Guide” for everyone anxiously  awaiting the availability of the Pre.

But instead, we thought we'd give you a heads-up (for reals) to check back later today (or follow palm_inc on Twitter) for an update direct from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Jon Zilber