This time last year, Derek, Dieter, and Riz were running around San Francisco's Fort Mason Center covering what turned out to be the biggest planned event in the history of webOS. It was the coming out party for webOS under HP, and it came to be known as "Think Beyond." One year ago, HP SVP and Palm Global Business Unit manager Jon Rubinstein got up on the stage to introduce, in order, the tiny HP Veer smartphone, the HP Pre3 - larger, thinner, and more powerful webOS smartphone that the faithful had been waiting for - and the first webOS tablet, the HP TouchPad, all slated by the end of Summer 2011

That day brought more than hardware announcements. We got our first look at webOS 3.0 on the TouchPad, met the new VP of Developer Relations Richard Kerris, found out that HP was not going to update older handsets to webOS 2.0, and said goodbye to the Palm brand. Things were looking up - even if the TouchPad wasn't a mind-blowing piece of hardware, it was the first of what we hoped would be several products to take the market by storm.

The Veer shipped to middling reviews in May and the TouchPad followed in July. And then everything went downhill from there. After just a month on the market, HP cut the TouchPad's price by $100, and ten days after that pulled the rug out from under the webOS community by canceling all webOS hardware development. Since then we've gone through a hardware fire sale, a fired CEO, the loss of Kerris, Rubinstein, and many others, questions about the future of the platform, and emerged on the other side with plans for going open source with a new Open webOS.

My, what a year it has been.

HP's Senior Vice President and General Manager, Palm Global Business Unit (say that ten times fast), Jon Rubinstein, has joined Amazon's Board of directors, reports All Things D. Rubinstein received 5,000 shares of limited Amazon stock as well.

Good to see Palm making more connections in the industry. Let's hope that Palm is making one more connection with Amazon - getting their Kindle ebook app available for webOS devices - the Android Kindle app is looking mighty nice after the update.

Source: sec.gov; via: All Things D

After Jon Rubinstein (former CEO of Palm, now SVP and General Manager of the Palm Global Business Unit) left the stage the other night at All Things Digital's D: Dive Into Mobile conference, he sat down for a more detailed interview with AllThingsD's John Paczkowski. Although Ruby did not reveal too much more than the little we've heard in recent appearances, there were a few tidbits scattered in the interview that were of interest.

First, in response to a question about bandwidth, Ruby all but confirmed that there will be 4G devices coming from Palm:

I am very excited to [be] getting to LTE and HSDPA+ (two faster cellular networks). We have some really interesting visions on where webOS can go as you get more and more bandwidth.

There was also a fair amount of discussion about cloud services, no surprise given webOS' deep integration with the cloud, but it wasn't just about webOS devices. Paczkowski asked Rubinstein, "A lot of data is going to be on laptops and desktops. Do you need to build a cloud device to have webOS talk to them?" Rubinstein's cryptic (but intriguing) response? "Stay tuned," his usual answer for products and services that are coming but may not be ready for announcements.

Ruby gave a nice shoutout to the new generation of webOS developers (like these fine young men):

We have a lot of really interesting ways to develop for webOS. It’s very easy to develop for and people like developing for it. We are getting a whole new generation of developers.

We had this developer conference in New York. If you look at the audience, a lot of them were under 17 and they were making enough money selling applications to come from wherever they were–they weren’t from New York–to bring one of their parents or both of their parents to come to the developer conference.

He also directly addressed questions and concerns about Palm's staffing in the wake of the HP acquisition:

Since we closed the deal we have hired over 70 people. Two hundred-plus people from HP have joined us and other divisions at HP are busy working on helping us make webOS successful. So while yes, we lost a few people along the way, we gained a lot of people.

There's more from Ruby via the source link below. Here's hoping we don't have to "stay tuned" a whole lot longer for some real information.

Source: AllThingsD's Mobilized Blog

HP Senior Vice President and Palm Global Business Unit General Manager Jon Rubinstein, formerly CEO of the independent Palm, Inc. (let’s see all that on a business card) sat down with the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher for a chat about Palm at the Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco. The discussion was wide-ranging, touching on where Palm went wrong, where Palm is going, and how things work with the new HP overlords.

The discussion started with Swisher touching back on something that struck us as surprising from the last time she and Rubinstein were on stage: the then Palm CEO had not even touched an iPhone. Apparently that has since changed, with Rubinstein noting that many Palm employees use iPhones, and the iPhone is reviewed by their competitive analysis groups. But yes, he has now touched and used an iPhone. It’s not something that ever became his primary device, as he doesn’t “want to be tainted by another experience. I want to come at this with a fresh perspective and I think what we’re seeing now in this industry is that everyone is copying the iPhone.”

But would having used an iPhone saved Palm? We doubt it. In fact, Rubinstein admitted that though webOS and the Pre were great products, “market moved too fast and when we looked forward we saw a very clear way to where we could get the company to profitability, but we didn’t see a way to get it to scale.”

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The Churchill Club, which describes itself as "Silicon Valley's premier business and technology forum," is presenting a panel, "Wireless is the Biggest Tech Platform in History, Now What?" this evening at 7:00 pm Pacific time. The two speakers are Paul Jacobs, Chairman & CEO of Qualcomm, and HP/Palm's own Jon Rubinstein, and the event is moderated by AllThingsD.com's co-executive editor Kara Swisher.

While tickets to the event, held at the San Jose Fairmont, are limited, you can watch from the comfort of your own screen via FORA.tv. Whether or not we get any juicy new revelations (we're not counting on any), it should be an enjoyable chat.

Source: Qualcomm on Twitter

Want to hear Palm Global Business Unit chief Jon Rubinstein chat with John Battelle about webOS, life at Palm and HP, and what’s next for all of the aforementioned items? Sure you do, you want to hear Rubinstein say for himself stuff about tablets and smartphones and his history with HP, Apple, Palm, and HP (yes), then just head on past the break and hit play.

Source: Livestream; Thanks to Karl for the heads up!

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Jon Rubenstein took the stage at the webOS 2.0 conference without his boss, Todd Bradley, for a nice conversation about his personal history in the computer industry and some high-level overviews of where webOS is and will be in 2011. Rubinstein noted that Palm is "where we've always been" in Sunnyvale and that the integration with HP is going well despite the inevitable slow-downs that come with a major acquisition.

Rubinstein noted that they expect the number of apps for webOS to grow as HP / Palm invests more resources into the App Catalog and as it becomes obvious that the pool of webOS devices to target grows dramatically over the 12 to 18 months.

Rubinstein also noted that webOS 2.0 would be rolled out to the installed webOS customer base "over the next few months," a timeframe that's a bit longer than we'd been hoping for.

webOS fanatics looking for clear-cut hints of upcoming devices will find precious little to go on. Rubinstein promised a big 2011 when they will "aggressively" roll out new devices from a "great roadmap" of smartphones, tablets, printers, and other devices they're not quite ready to talk about yet (though we'll note that Ruby has mentioned webOS-based netbooks in the past). Asked if the upcoming hardware would put "muscle" behind webOS, Rubinstein noted that he likes to do products that are on the leading-edge of technology.

His message to the "very loyal install base" of webOS users about upcoming devices: "Be patient, they're coming."

Source: Web 2.0 Summit

As we mentioned Sunday, Jon Rubinstein and Todd Bradley will be having a "A conversation" with Federated Media CEO John Battelle at 9:10am Pacific / 12:10 Eastern. We'll be curious to see what they have to say about the roll-out of webOS 2.0, the relative lack of carrier-support for the Pre 2, and whatever else they have on their mind (the PalmPad is probably a safe bet). There's also a "special announcement" planned immediately after their chat, but it's not clear whether that's related to Palm and HP or not.

So join us as we watch their talk and if you miss it, fret not, we'll be bringing you the news as it happens. 

Update 2: it's over and there wasn't much new, stay tuned for a quick summary.

Source: web 2.0 Summit

Jon Rubinstein, the leader of Palm, now a unit of HP (with Rubenstein serving as a Senior Vice President) is listed as number 41 in the 2010 Tech 100 list by T3.com. Last year Rubinstein was ranked at 17th, but due to the Pre not selling as well as had been expected, plus the fact that Palm barely stayed alive long enough to be snapped up by HP, meant that Rubinstein’s ranking suffered accordingly. That said, it doesn't mean that Mr. Rubinstein can't rebound next year. Palm is in position with HP to make waves in the technology world, with the PalmPad and new smartphones due early next year, plus webOS 2.0 and a variety of other devices on the way.

Rubenstein was ranked ahead of a number of well-known tech names, including Kevin Rose of Digg (#80), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (#59), Michael Dell (#54), and Apple designer Jonathan Ive (#50). There was also only one other HP employee on the list, CFO and interim CEO (at least until Léo Apotheker takes over on a more permanent basis) Catherine Lesjak at ninety-six on the roster. Unsurprisingly, the list was led by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, followed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt sharing third-position with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Source: T3.com

HP recently held a presentation / webcast for employees and Palm Exec Jon Rubinstein discussed both Palm and the future of webOS during the presentation.

Rubinstein was typically bullish about Palm's future given that he (and we) expects the mobile web to become "10 times larger than today's PC internet." Palm now has the resources to deal with a scale of that size, Rubinstein said that "more than 200 HP employees have joined the Palm team, including many sales people."

Some of those HP employees on-site for the presentation received Palm Pre phones. One such question was from an HP employee looking to find out how soon webOS would be able to handle the (probably pretty secure) Enterprise intranet the company uses. Rubinstein noted that "We do have VPN capability and that type of thing coming online soon. We do have enterprise-class security coming in the future as well."

VPN is no surprise after the gigantic webOS 2.0 screenshot leak earlier this week, but we'll be curious what other enterprise features will be coming. More generally, we're glad to see that HP is facilitating engagement between Palm and the larger company.

Thanks, anonymous!