Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) is for sale according to a report by Bloomberg according to three separate sources. Palm is reportedly working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer. As of right now Palm has a market cap of about $1 billion.

Although a sale has not been announced, rumor has it that HTC Corporation and Lenovo Group Ltd. have looked at making offers. If someone buys Palm, then they would have access to the WebOS software. Elevation Partners LP owns 30% of Palm.

Palm was founded in 1992 and launched a device called the PalmPilot. Palm was bought by U.S. Robotics. U.S. Robotis was acquired by 3Com Corporation and then Palm was spun off again in 2000. This past year Palm was highly depending on the success of the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi devices, but they have struggled to compete against Apple iPhones, Microsoft Windows Mobile devices, Google Android, Nokia, etc. [Bloomberg]

Google has acquired a mobile visual search UK startup company called Plink. Plink was founded by PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin. Plink’s flagship product was called PlinkArt.

PlinkArt was downloaded about 50,000 times in 6 weeks. The two founders of PlinkArt will work at Google Goggles, a visual search project.

Both of the students started Plink two years ago when they were students at the Oxford University mobile robotics and visual geometry groups. Google noticed the company when the application was at the Android Develop Challenge in December of last year. The two won $100,000 in funding.

“It picks out repeatable elements from the image you take and comes out with a statistical representation of them,” said Philbin when explaining out Plink’s technology works.

“We’re excited to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2010 with developers around the world today,” stated Microsoft president of the Server and Tools Business Bob Muglia “Customer and partner feedback was instrumental in shaping this release. The functionality of Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 creates a powerful and unique combination, opening up new opportunities for developers to build applications that take advantage of new and existing devices, as well as emerging platforms like cloud services.”

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. Silverlight 4 is also being released to the web. The new editor of Visual Studio uses Windows Presentation Foundation, which supports multiple monitors. SharePoint functionality is supported within Visual Studio for the firs time. There is a feature called IntelliTrace, which records an application’s execution history to provide information of when a bug has occurred.

The professional version of Microsoft Visual Studio has a starting MSRP of $799. Find out more information at the Visual Studio Support website. [Microsoft PressPass]

Incubator company idealab is launching a new startup company called Tweetup. The man behind Tweetup is Bill Gross. Gross is the original founder of GoTo.com. GoTo.com was renamed to Overture, a company that Yahoo! purchased. Yahoo! was able to leverage Overture patents by suing Google and settling for a settlement of 2.7 million shares.

Tweetup is a Twitter search engine that has an advertising platform. When you search for tweets using Tweetup, the search engine will use an algorithm to place important tweets at the top and contextual ads on the side.

If you integrate Tweetup into your own website, you can share 50-50 revenue with idealab. Tweetup already has an established partnership with Answers.com.

Investors have put in about $3.5 million into this idea. The investors include Index Ventures, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Betaworks, Jason Calacanis, Steve Case, and Jeff Jarvis. Danny Rimer of Index Ventures has a board seat at Tweetup. [TechCrunch]

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs replied to another e-mail. Twitter user ven000m sent an e-mail to Jobs that said:

Hey Steve!
is Apple supporting/updating the iPhone 2G in the Future?

Cheers Niko

Jobs replied:

Sorry, no.

That means that if you’re an early adopter and refuse to upgrade, you may want to think again. [MacStories]

Tax season is upon us! Its that time of year where you cannot help but think whether you have spent your money in the right places. Maybe you paid telecomm companies too much money for calling long distance. Or you spent more than you should have eating out rather than making dinner at home.

I like to splurge money on gadgets, but tend to be skeptical about spending a lot at bars. If you’re like me and are looking for better ways to budget using your iPhone, here are some apps that I recommend using.

1. Ace Budget

Cost: $0.99 [iTunes Link]

Ace Budget is a financial application that helps you track expenses and income. You can use the app to create a daily, weekly, monthly, semi-monthly, and yearly budget for an unlimited number of categories. The application can create graphs, historical data, and set reminders.

General Motors has resumed a deal to sponsor the center field fountain at Comerica Park. General Motors had been sponsoring the fountain since 2001, but was unable to renew the sponsorship last year due to bankruptcy.

General Motors did not say how much they are spending to renew the fountain sponsorship. Recently GM had to cancel marketing deals with PGA golfer Tiger Woods, documentary moviemaker Ken Burns, the Academy Awards, and the Super Bowl.

Detroit Tigers owner Mike Ilitch kept the GM name on the fountain and also added Ford and Chrysler to show support for the three car companies. He could have made $1.5-$2 million for it, but kept the names on there anyway. Ilitch is the founder and owner of Little Caesars Pizza. [Detroit News]

Michael Steele is the Chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). Steele runs a blog called “What Up?” on the GOP.com website and was most recently in the news for spending $1,946.25 to Voyeur in West Hollywood for “meals.” Voyeur is actually a strip club known for having a bondage theme.

Jon Stewart decided to question a puppet version of Steele on his show. If you have not noticed, people on the Internet really love videos that involve puppets. The Digg community decided to vote for the Stewart interview over 600 times.