In a release today, Palm announced it was lowering sales expectations for the year due to slower than expected customer adoption of the new WebOS platform. As CEO Jon Rubinstein put things, “driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated.”

His wording seems to suggest that the company still thinks consumers will pick Palm, but that it’s going to take more time. I’ve got news, fellas. It ain’t happening. It’s now nearly eight months since the Pre launched, eight months in which the company has failed to build a strong developer base, to say nothing of mediocre sales. We’re just weeks past Palm’s launch with Verizon, about which we’ve heard nothing. That rarely means good things.

Now everyone has just one question in mind – who’s going to buy Palm? The only other possibility would be for the company to develop yet another device, which I highly doubt it has the money to do. We know RIM and Nokia could both use a better platform, and Dell has been making passing attempts the cell phone market for years. None of them have actually expressed interest, though, and I would think only Nokia or RIM would be in a position to really capitalize on that kind of acquisition.

In any case, Palm is in trouble. We’ll see if it can dig itself out by year’s end.

Source: Business Insider

If you live in any major metropolitan area, you’re probably familiar with OpenTable. The restaurant reservation service seated its millionth reservation this past October, a year since the iPhone application launched. The company has since branched out to other smartphone platforms and seated another million restaurant-goers – quite a feat for four and a half months.

The news came alongside an earnings report, which showed $19.2 million in revenue for Q4 2009. Those are some damn fine numbers for an internet startup. The company is about more than just reservations, though. It also offers management software to restaurants for a monthly subscription. The company increased its number of participating restaurants by 17% this past year and estimates it has helped generate more than $100 million in sales for the restaurant it serves.

Verizon said it would cut 13,000 jobs from its landline unit in a conference call today. The company missed sales estimates by less than one percent, which prompted it to axe approximately 11 percent of the land-line division’s workforce.

The company cuts are really to hedge losses in other divisions. Though the landline division was up almost 10% in sales over last year, enterprise and FiOS TV and Internet sales were down in the face of the poor economy. Most analysts predict that things will improve little in 2010. Verizon’s CFO is optimistic about the Apple tablet, though. “It will attract more and more data customers, more and more usage over the network,” he said. “Devices like that will be, long term, very positive for the wireless industry.”

Guess we’ll know more about whether Verizon is a part of Apple’s plan tomorrow.

Source: Bloomberg

Microsoft’s Bing continues to show market growth, and not steadily. It’s actually accelerating with each new month, as the latest statistics show.

For December, query totals at Bing were up 49.4%, up from June’s opening totals of 11.6%, with every month increasing in between. Barclay’s Capital attributes the growth to Bing’s ad push, along with the draw of Bing cashback. A fresh ad market is always going to bring a lot of help from affiliates, something Microsoft has used to its advantage.

Bing hasn’t really slowed Google, though. It’s searches were up more than 20%, which was also above average. Yahoo, on the other hand, continues to lose market share, though more slowly than in previous months.

Source: TechCrunch