What did Steve Jobs do to his old buddy Bono?
The Irish rock star, once the Apple CEO’s adoring buddy, is funding the most credible threat to the iPhone yet. Bono is a founder of Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity firm named after the U2 song. And Elevation just sank another $100 million into Palm, the troubled smartphone maker. Palm, which waited too long to switch its product lineup from electronic organizers to souped-up cell phones and whose Treo smartphone is showing its age, lost more than $500 million in the most recent quarter. Bono’s firm now owns 39 percent of Palm. He’s also lassoed several former Apple executives into the Palm corral. Fred Anderson, a former Apple CFO and board member, is an investor at Elevation. Jon Rubinstein, a hardware executive who served as Jobs’s right-hand man at Apple, resigned in 2006 — one day before the company’s 30-year anniversary — and joined Palm a year ago. Rubinstein, the company’s executive chairman, is working on a new family of devices that will compete with App
New U2 Record Due in March with Five Versions EARVOLUTION — … room for the new one in the mix. However, Billboard reports that I’ll have to choose between five different versions, including one priced at $96. Yikes! And, there is a reported contribution on the record from the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am. Potentially double yikes! Beyond the multiple versions, another difference we may see for the new record is the lack of an iPod commercial like the one we seemingly endlessly saw featuring “Vertigo” from HTDAAB. That’s because Bono may have picked a fight with Apple’s Steve Jobs. Although Gawker via Valleywag is obviously trying to …
