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Palm’s third-quarter results were worse than feared, possibly as a result of bad choices and the difficulty of launching a new platform. One fix could be to turn to Google’s Android mobile operating system, which consumers are embracing. However, some financial analysts are questioning Palm’s future viability.

Palm’s poor third-quarter performance may be the result of bad choices, paired with the difficulty of rallying support behind a new mobile platform. While an aggressive ad campaign could help, it can’t be the only answer to Palm’s woes, industry analysts say.
 
On March 18, the maker of the Pre and Pixi mobile devices reported selling only 408,000 smartphones during the quarter—a loss of 29 percent from the second quarter of the year and 15 percent year over year.

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• Palm Sold Only 408,000 Smartphones Last Quarter (PALM) (Dan Frommer/Silicon Alley Insider) (techmeme.com)

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• Zillow Adds Rentals, Social Networking to iPhone App (appscout.com)

Facebook overtook Google to become America’s most popular website. Figures for the week ending March 13th showed that the social-networking site accounted for 7.1% of the country’s traffic, compared with Google’s 7.0%, the first time it has had a weekly lead. However, with revenues of $23.7 billion last year, Google remains easily the more profitable of the two.

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• Facebook Overtakes Google as Most Popular U.S. Website (dailyfinance.com)

Google failed in its bid to own the “Nexus One” name for its Android 2.1 smartphone, as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected its application for a trademark on the moniker. That mark is currently commanded by Integra Telecom, which in December 2008 registered the trademark for its Nexus fixed bandwidth integrated voice and Internet T1 product. What does this all mean? Google could contest the ruling, pay Integra for the right to use the name, or change the Nexus One name.

Google failed in its bid to own the “Nexus One” name for its Android 2.1 smartphone, as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected its application for a trademark on the moniker.

“Registration of the applied-for mark is refused because of a likelihood of confusion with the mark in U.S. Registration No. 3554195,” the USPTO wrote in its March 9 ruling, according to theNexus One blog.

That mark is currently commanded by Integra Telecom, which in December 2008 registered the trademark for its Nexus fixed bandwidth integrated voice and Internet T1 product. Google only filed its application for the Nexus One trademark back in December 2009, making it a year too late.

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• Google’s Trademark Application for ‘Nexus One’ Refused (news.nexus-one.co.uk)
• Google Nexus One Trademark Refused (ubergizmo.com)

Amazon.com Inc said that John Doerr, a renowned venture capitalist who, early on, funded many of the Internet’s biggest names, will not run for reelection to the board at the company’s next shareholder meeting.

A spokeswoman for Amazon, where Doerr has served as a director for 14 years, said that the executive “will focus more of his time on new ventures.”

Doerr is a partner at Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, which typically invests in early stage start-up technologies.

The company is best known for investments in Google Inc, Netscape and Genentech, as well as Amazon.

On Doerr’s bio page on Kleiner Perkins’ web site, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying, “Doerr (and Kleiner) is the center of gravity in the Internet. here

Last year Doerr was part of a panel of experts tapped by U.S. President Barack Obama to help shape a response to the economic crisis.

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• GreenBeat: Doerr leads Kleiner Perkins to bold energy efficiency plays (green.venturebeat.com)

As rumors continue to swirl around a possible Google exit from China, that country’s government issued a reminder that it has no plans to back down. “We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations,” Ministry of Commerce spokesman, Yao Jian told reporters.

When it first entered the Chinese market, Google agreed to obey the country’s laws, Jian said. “Even if it pulls out,” he added, “it should handle things according to the rules and appropriately handle remaining issues.”

Google is currently in talks with China about its future serving that country’s 384 million Internet users. According to a number of reports, Google’s prospects for staying in that country are slim.

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• Google poised to leave China (v3.co.uk)
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Google March 12 formally launched its extensions for Google Wave, a move to fortify the real-time collaboration platform’s functionality and cultivate a large developer ecosystem.

Google Wave rolls e-mail, instant messaging, real-time document editing into one platform, which has grabbed more than 1 million users since its broader launch last September. Google launched Wave to open source because it wants to developers to write programs that augment that platform in ways that go beyond Google’s own application expertise.

Extensions, added as a link to the Google Wave navigation panel, are the fruit of this effort. The Wave Extensions gallery comprises a set of waves containing extension installers. This “Read me first” wave offers a tutorial on how to use extensions.

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• Google Wave Extensions Gallery Introduced (techie-buzz.com)
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Is Salesforce.com angry that Google launched its Google App Marketplace? The enterprise application and cloud computing provider isn’t saying so if it is and both Google and Salesforce.com claim they’re getting along great. Still, while Google and Salesforce.com integrate on Google Apps, Salesforce.com did not join the Marketplace. After all, it has its own AppExchange store to tend to. Despite cordial statements from both companies, analysts see the Google Apps Marketplace as a definite challenge to AppExchange.

News Analysis: Neither Google nor Salesforce.com will acknowledge any friction, but some industry watchers wonder whether Salesforce.com might be secretly chafing at the launch of Google’s Apps Marketplace March 9.

TheGoogle Apps Marketplace lets third party software developers sell applications that integrate with Google Apps, including Google Docs, Calendar and the Sites Web publishing app.

Google Apps customers, which include 2 million business and 25 million active users, can purchase project management apps from Atlassian Softare and Manymoon or billing and accounting software Intuit, among other services. This will provide third-party software developers a larger cloud computing channel into which to sell their applications.

This store, which trades entirely in Web-based or cloud computing applications, follows in the footsteps of Salesforce.com’s successful AppExchange cloud computing store.

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• Google apps market place (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)
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Enter Session Buddy, a Chrome extension that provides more predictable and more functional tab and session management. The extension also reliably saves your session when Chrome crashes, but it also allows you to choose when your session is saved, re-open a previously saved session with a few clicks, or modify saved sessions.
  Session Buddy doesn’t replace Chrome’s built-in session saving; it just bolsters it. Chrome still handles on-crash session saving all by itself, but if Chrome comes back up and hasn’t managed to save your session or doesn’t offer you a chance to restore your tabs, It’s a safe bet that Session Buddy caught it at some point before the crash, and Session Buddy even allows you to access those saved tabs before restoring them.

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Google’s Gesture Search feature for Android smartphones reignited the complaint about fragmentation and inconsistency among Google’s mobile operating system platform because it only works on devices running Android 2.0 or greater, such as the Motorola Droid and Google Nexus One. Laptop Magazine’s Mark Spoonauer said this means Google is favoring newer versions of its OS, punishing owners of devices running older flavors of Android, as well as Google’s partners. Kevin Tofel tried to diffuse the situation by arguing that Google isn’t the only mobile platform maker that faces this quandary.

News Analysis: When Google released its Google Gesture Search feature for Android smartphones March 3, it fanned the flames of a long-standing complaint about fragmentation and inconsistency among Google’s mobile operating system platform.

Google Gesture Search, which lets users surface contacts and applications on their devices by tracing letters on the screen with their fingers, works on smartphones running versions Android 2.0 or higher.

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• Google Gesture Search (ubergizmo.com)