Palm shares rise on Centro sales

Oakland Tribune, Aug 4, 2008 by Anonymous

Sunnyvale-based Palm Inc. said it sold 2 million Centro e-mail phones in less than a year, a sign the company is weathering competition from the BlackBerry and Apple Inc.'s iPhone.

The shares jumped 13 percent, the most in four years.

Palm sold the latest 1 million units in less than four months after offering the phone through carriers such as Verizon Wireless in the U.S. The device is available in more than 25 countries, Palm said today.

The $99 Centro is winning customers even amid competition from the $199 iPhone, which sold 1 million units in the first three days after its July 11 debut. Shares of Palm, which has posted losses for four straight quarters, rose 65 cents, or 11 percent, to $6.39 during midday trading. Before today, the stock had lost 9.5 percent this year.

High tech

Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Yahoo! Inc. forged a partnership to research cloud computing, technology that delivers programs and services over the Internet. The project initially includes six research centers at locations such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the companies said today. The facilities will use Hewlett-Packard machines running on Intel chips. Yahoo will contribute software. The research may help the companies boost interest in cloud computing, which gets its name from the idea of a ubiquitous network run using remote data centers dotted around the world.

MedeFinance Inc. of Emeryville has landed $50 million in venture financing. MedeFinance provides software systems to help health care providers improve the performance of their organizations. The software firm had raised $10 million in 2007 in a prior round of venture capital funding.

Fremont-based Network Equipment Technologies Inc. lost $9.8 million, or 34 cents a share, on revenue of $15.6 million, for its first quarter of 2009. The loss compared with a prior-year profit of $26.3 million. The telecommunications equipment maker said revenues fell 41 percent.

Compiled from staff and wire reports. Got Bay Area business news? Reach Drew Voros at 925-943-8099 or dvoros@bayareanewsgroup.com.