HP’s CTO of Global Gaming and one of the chief evangelists for webOS in the company, Rahul Sood, has announced in "the most difficult letter I have ever written" that he’s stepping down from HP. webOS fans have known Sood as one of the most vocal proponents for the potential of webOS from within HP and he was sure to include a message to the webOS community in his letter:

Your loyalty and dedication is truly inspiring. Many companies are just starting to understand the value of communities and the impact they can have on brand awareness and the bottom line. Very few companies are lucky enough to have a grassroots movement evangelizing their brand. HP Palm should be proud to have you as vocal critics and evangelists. I’m a big fan of webOS; I think Palm did some amazing things in a very short period of time. Your community reminds me of the old Voodoo community. I want to thank you for inspiring me with your thoughts, passion, loyalty, and camaraderie. I hope you will still allow me to participate in your discussions.

Sood notes that he "can’t wait to be directly involved in a product pipeline again," though just where he’ll be doing that remains to be seen. Sood, of course, came to HP along with the Voodoo acquisition.

Best of luck to you, Rahul, we’ll hold you to your promise to continue participating in the webOS community.

Update: HP CTO Phil McKinney (no stranger to these parts) has also said a fond farewell to Sood, calling him a ‘pirate’ (in a good way) and noting that "his entrepreneurial spirit is guiding him in a different direction."

Source: Rahulsood.com

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We’ve been keeping a close eye on HP’s Rahul Sood, who has been the most vocal of HP’s executives about the potential of webOS in the future. In addition to a recent blog post on Palm’s official blog where he waxes on about how great hardware can generate excitement, Sood also has been engaging in a discussion on Palm’s Facebook page where he notes that what we’ve seen of webOS 2.0 thus far is "just a taster" and that using it is "like wearing velvet."

That confluence of new features in webOS 2.0 and exciting new hardware is just what Palm needs right now to help solve another vexing problem for the platform: getting more and better apps. Sood himself just tweeted as much, saying that "everyone [developers] will want in once the presentation of the hardware is in front of them."  We like that sound of that, though citing the roadmap "over the next 12 months" isn’t exactly the time window we were hoping to hear.

Which do you think comes first in the chicken and egg game of sweet apps and sweet hardware?

Update: In case you were feeling optimistic about imminent new webOS hardware, we’ll let Sood’s own words bring you down a notch:

… don’t expect anything soon, please stop asking "when" — i’d rather be straight with you. these things take time…

Update 2: Ah Twitter, how you strip away context and nuance. Sood’s ’soon’ above refers to not expecting an announcement soon, as he clarifies in a blog post. As we wrote in the original post, that window of releasing devices is still a very large 12 months:

You will certainly see products released over the next 12 months, some sooner than others, and some which are very exciting to me. The stuff that excites me the most are the new form factors. Now, when I said "over the next 12 months," I really mean over the next 12 months. Not at the end of 12 months, not tomorrow…but over the next 12 months we will see the makings of a new portfolio and the beginning of something great again. There is no predefined window of opportunity in the technology business; lack of innovation is the only thing that closes the window.

Whether "sooner than others" translates to "two thousand ten" is another vexing issue.

Source: @rahulsood

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HP’s gaming guy and all around guru – Rahul Sood – was on the PalmCast a week or so back and we had quite the time chatting it up. In particular we had to look at Sood’s perceived focus on mobile gaming. After all, he was the founder of awesome gaming machines builder VoodooPC (bought by HP in 2006). But Sood will be the first to admit that while his title at HP is CTO, Global Gaming, “gaming” per se is not his focus.

In a guest post on the Official Palm Blog, Sood dropped this line that wraps how we hope his interest in Palm will be expressed: “While I believe gaming drives innovation, what I really love is creating amazing experiences that customers gush over.” In short, while gaming is fast becoming more and more of a reason to buy a Pre (and hopefully whatever comes next), Sood’s focus with Palm isn’t in making webOS a gaming platform. The reason VoodooPC machines were made for gaming was a simple one: intensive 3D games push the limits of computing power, which in turn makes engineers build “more efficient, faster, and more capable” chips.

We’re all for faster and more capable, and we’re definitely for experiences that customers gush over. Especially if that experience involves webOS. Sood, being a practical guy, had some photos put up on Palm’s Facebook page that show just what kind of experiences VoodooPC customers were gushing over, and dang if we couldn’t get some of that design and experience voodoo injected into Palm. We haven’t even touched the machines in those pictures and we feel like gushing.

Source: The Official Palm Blog, Palm on Facebook

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We’re joined by HP’s Rahul Sood for a stellar interview. We also bring you a bonus PalmCast: our postshow as a separate download, wherein we let our hair down a bit.

• Download it directly with this link
• Download the postshow directly with this link
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Subscribe directly to the Podcast feed with your favorite Podcatcher here
• Listen to it here with the player above

Thanks to everybody for writing in as well as everybody that participated live in the chat! (Update: fixed the flash player, sorry about that!)

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We’re reminding you about PalmCast Live a day early today again because we’ll have a special guest, HP’s Rahul Sood. Sood’s been very active in the webOS community of late, darn near everything he’s said about webOS has found its way to these pages (the running joke is that when Rahul eats a sandwich with his Palm Pre nearby, it merits a blog post). In fact, Sood just posted up a short video explaining why he loves him some webOS – catch it after the break.

We’ll have plenty to talk about (sandwiches included), so be sure to get your questions in by tweeting out questions to us with the #palmcast hashtag. 

The action happens right here Tuesday night at 8pm Eastern.

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Here’s a thought to brighten up your Monday afternoon – next time you’re invited into the upper echelons of HP and find yourself seated in one of their boardrooms, you just might have a Touchstone on the table. So says HP’s Rahul Sood, who is increasingly becoming CWE at HP (that’s Chief webOS Evangelist, for the AA (Acronym-Averse)).

Now guys, just don’t forget that we’d still like to see some battery optimization in the future – not everybody gets a Touchstone in their meeting rooms.

Source: @rahulsood; Thanks clutch1222!

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Welcome to Point Counter Point, wherein Derek vents his spleen like the dour misanthrope we’ve all come to know and love, Dieter consoles us all with rainbows and unicorns, and the truth lies – as it always does – somewhere in the middle.

Today’s topic: What to make of all the pie-in-the-sky future talk we are hearing from HP instead of actual product announcements.

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What would you expect the founder of HP-acquired gaming computers building VoodooPC to talk about with regards to webOS? Gaming, of course. And Rahul Sood dug up a blast from the not-that-distant past: a video HP put together to show off their vision of the future of gaming – a mix of role-playing, augmented reality, and geocaching (video after the break).

Obviously the concept was ahead of its time then, and is still a bit out of reach today (at least in the remapping of cityscapes as the video envisions). But bringing it back to webOS, Sood couldn’t help but wax poetically about HP’s latest acquisition:

I’m glad we finally bought Palm and now the possibilities are truly great. If you have not tried webOS you truly owe it to yourself just to try it. It’s so freaking awesome. The biggest complaint right now is people want to see more hardware choices – I think we all know that.

So game developers, this was HP’s vision 3+ years ago. If you could think about using our hardware and future hardware — think scalable resolution, multiple cameras, fast graphics, awesome screens, touch, accelerometers, GPS, Bluetooth, WIFI, always connected, etc.

Just put it all together and create something truly unique.

We are in great concurrence with everything Mr. Sood has to say here, and we can only hope that HP’s guidance and giant bags of money will make this kind of awesomeness possible.

Source: RahulSood.com; thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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Rahul Sood, founder of luxury PC maker Voodoo, HP’s CTO of gaming and recent champion of webOS has finally sat down with Palm’s directors of dev relations Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer.  Discussion in this rare, audio only podcast includes: Rahul’s background with Voodoo, his passion for design, what HP has to offer the webOS community, his thoughts on where mobile gaming is going, and more.

Great to see execs like Sood fired up about Palm and webOS!

Source: Palm’s Developer Blog 

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We’ve mentioned before that the CTO of HP’s gaming unit, Rahul Sood, was excited about webOS. He’s not letting up and making a good point better in his personal blog by pointing out that there’s a big opportunity with webOS for game developers because the market for apps is still relatively small, in terms of competition, while the potential market of devices to play those apps on has the potential to explode into something huge once HP puts its cash and marketing muscle behind the platform:

So I’m calling out to all game developers. It’s time you followed the money and looked to the future. Opportunity is in scale. Web OS will have tremendous scale and reach. [...] rather than trying to stand out in a store with millions of apps in front of you, it’s probably a good time to get in while the getting is good on the ground floor. Feel free to contact me personally for the right contact within Palm.

+1 Mr. Sood. We’re liking the idea of getting more iPhone ports like Angry Birds, sure, but we’re also liking the idea of getting some games that take advantages of the unique features in webOS even more – how about an RPG that uses multiple cards, one for each character in your party? What webOS features could a developer take advantage of in a gaming scenario?

Source: rahulsood.com; thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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