Palm Inc. executive Jon Rubinstein is a former Apple executive.  Earlier this week he had become the CEO of Palm from the Chairman position.  The previous Palm CEO Ed Colligan will be moving to Elevation Partners.  Elevation Partners is a major investor in Palm.  Elevation invested $100 million into Palm this past December.

Rubinstein joined Palm around 2007 and helped the company develop the Pre phone.  The Palm Pre had helped Sprint break a sales record and helped Texas Instruments boost their revenues.  Rubinstein joined Apple around 1997 when Steve Jobs returned to the company.  In 2001, Rubinstein was given credit for helping invent the iPod.

As the new CEO, Rubinstein will receive about $1.7 million per year.  For leaving the company Colligan will receive $1.2 million payable in several chunks over the next year.

[via mocoNews]

Microsoft confirmed this past Friday that Corporate VP Sanjay Parthasarathy will be stepping down after 19 years. Parthasarathy was the Corporate VP in charge of the company’s Startup Business Accelerator program. Parthasarathy will be retiring in September.

Amit Mital will be taking over Parthasarathy’s responsibilities.  Mital currently runs the “Unlimited Potential” division.  Parthasarathy and Mital both report to Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie.

Parthasarathy has previously managed Micrsoft’s developer and platform evangelism team Channel 9 and the Image Cup competition.  Parthasarathy joined Microsoft in August 1990 as a Windows multimedia group product manager.

[via CNET]

For those of you that are in your mid-20′s like I am right now, you probably spent your high school afternoons watching MTV’s Total Request Live (TRL) TV show to find out what the hottest music is.  Starting this Monday, MTV will be starting a new show called “It’s On With Alexa Chung” that will replace TRL’s time slot.  The show will have Facebook and Twitter integrated.

Many TV shows already have Facebook and Twitter integrated already, but Chung’s show will be using the services as one of the main highlights.  The audience will be able to ask questions to the celebrity guests on the show using Facebook and Twitter.

Chung, a half Chinese and half British 25 year old model is from Britain and has hosted music and pop culture programs on Channel 4 in Britain.  ”It’s On With Alexa Chung” will be filmed in the same studio that was used in TRL.  TRL was cancelled last November.

The studio audience will add MTV producers as a friend on Facebook temporarily so that the show will have access to their status updates and pictures they take from their seats.

[via The New York Times]

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine.  Microsoft is currently making the transition from Live Search to Bing.  Microsoft has also gone as far as advertising on TV to hosting a 3 hour special on Hulu.

The New York Post is reporting that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is so upset by the launch of Bing that he has put together a team of Google’s top engineers to work on an urgent upgrade to their search engine.  Brin is leading the team to figure out how Bing’s search algorithm differs from Google.

“New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey,” stated an NY Post source.  Usually Brin is not as involved at day-to-day operations at the company, but works more on the high-level operations.

When Microsoft launched Bing, they put aside about an $80 to $100 million marketing budget together.  This is not a bad amount compared to the failed bid for the acquisition of Yahoo!  Microsoft offered Yahoo! to be acquired for $44.6 billion, but Yahoo! turned down the offer.

Bing’s market share helped Microsoft’s search market share jump from 9% to 11%.  Bing’s homepage is similar to Google, but features a colorful image on the homepage everyday.  There is not much of a difference between Bing and Google, but what gives Google the advantage of their major investment in Mozilla and close-knit relationship with Apple.

Google is the default search engine for both Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari.  Google is also the default search engine Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch.  Google gets a lot more hits due to being the default.  It will not be surprising to see Bing become the default search engine for all future versions of Internet Explorer and for Microsoft Windows 7.

On Friday night, there was a Facebook user name rush.  By yesterday morning there were about 3 million user names registered.  Within 15 minutes, over 500,000 user names were registered.  And within an hour, about 1 million were registered.

“Traffic was a quite a bit higher than usual,” stated Facebook spokesman Larry Yu in an e-mail. Facebook was “able to handle this quite smoothly” because of rigorous testing beforehand.  Twitter should learn a lesson from Facebook in this situation.

Facebook has over 200 million users.  Each user was given the opportunity to choose one unique name.  The reason why Facebook has given the option to register user names is so that search engines will be able to index the profiles of users seamlessly.

[via Bloomberg]

Technology company Aetrex and shoe company GTX are two companies that are getting together to resolve a problem that Alzheimer’s patients tend to have.  Many Alzheimer’s patients tend to suffer from “critical wandering incidents.”  About 60% of Alzheimer’s patients have found themselves in this type of incident at some point in their life.

“The technology will provide the location of the individual wearing the shoes within 30 feet, anywhere on the planet,” stated George Mason University assistant professor Andrew Carle.  Carle assisted with the project.  Carle said that embedding a GPS into shoes works pretty well because Alzheimer’s patients tend to remove unfamiliar objects from their bodies, but remembering to get dressed is one of the last few memories that they have.

The shoes can even have a “geo-fence” feature activated.  A concerned party will have the ability to be notified to a home phone number, cellphone number, or e-mail sent when a boundary is crossed by the patient.

“The shoe we intend on developing with Aetrex should help authorised family members, friends, or caretakers reduce their stress and anguish by enabling them to locate their loved ones instantly with the click of a mouse,” stated Chris Walsh, COO of GTX.

[via Gizmodo/ABC.NET]

Social networking company Facebook has just poached another executive from Google.  Google’s Senior Director of Engineering Greg Badros will be stepping down to become the Facebook Director of Engineering.  While Badros was at Google, he was the head of the AdSense team.  He was there from the start of AdSense in 2004 up until the company started making billions in revenue.

Badros also led the Google Calendar, Google Reader, and GMail engineering teams for some time.  Around March 2009, Badros became head of the Application Platform group.  Badros will be directly reporting to Facebook VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer.  Badros has previously worked for Go2Net which InfoSpace acquired.  He was the Chief Technical Architect at both companies before joining Google.

This is the second AdSense executive that Facebook poached from Google this month.  Earlier this month, Facebook hired Google’s advertising operations head in Ann Arbor, Michigan Grady Burnett.

[via TechCrunch]

[Horowitz: left, Andreessen: right]

Back in April it was rumored that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz was seeking $250 million for an early stage fund.  It turns out that the two have raised a bit more than that: $300 million.  Andreesen and Horowitz started a company together called OpsWare which sold to HP for $1.6 billion.  Before that Andreessen and Horowitz worked at AOL together.

The fund was nicknamed Project A, but now it is called Andreessen-Horowitz.  The fund was built through the support of several major institutional investors along with several universities.  Some of them have invested as high as $20 million each while others have put in $1 million or less.

Andreessen started Netscape and serves on the board for Facebook and eBay.  Andreessen is an adviser in Twitter and an angel investor in Facebook, Digg, and LinkedIn.  Both Andreessen and Horowitz invested in Qik together.

[via AllThingsD]