IT Buoy

[A] new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project examin[es] how people consume news. Ninety-nine percent of American adults get news each day, but they are getting it from a wider variety of sources and in many different forms. The Internet now outranks print newspapers and radio in popularity as a source of news. Sixty-one percent of Americans said they read news online, while 54 percent said they listen to news on the radio, 50 percent read a local newspaper and just 17 percent read a national newspaper. One-third of cellphone owners read the news on their phones. Read the rest of this story

A rising class of professional “angel” investors–who typically put sums of less than $1 million to work in a start-up company–is changing the venture-capital landscape. Now these angels and their smaller investments, dubbed “seed” stage investments, have their own set of legal documents to go with them. Ted Wang, an attorney at Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West, is on Monday launching a set of seed-stage documents– dubbed Series Seed docs–that he says will cut down the time and cost of making such investments. The problem: Legal documents associated with investing in a start-up–whether an investor is pumping in less than $1 million or more than $10 million–remains unchanged from years ago. A typical set of such documents usually weighs in at more than 100 pages, says Mr. Wang, which considerably drags out the length of time and cost in completing one of these investments. A seed-stage investment round of between $500,000 to $1.5 million shouldn’t need such a complex set of documents compared with heavy-duty venture-capital rounds of several million dollars, argues Mr.

Palm said on Thursday that its phones aren’t selling as well as it had hoped and that revenues for its fiscal year would be “well below” its forecasts. In an internal company-wide email, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein elaborated further about the reasons behind the disappointing sales and what the company is doing to change that. Bloomberg News Jon Rubinstein, chief executive officer of Palm, speaks about the Palm Pixi during the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Here’s the full memo: Team, This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion. As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being.

As Palm’s stock tumbles, a new report by mobile advertising firm AdMob sheds some light on the phone company’s troubles. AdMob The report details a survey conducted this month of how people use mobile applications and shows that 69% of people who use phones with Palm’s webOS would be likely to recommend their device to a friend or colleague, compared with 91% of iPhone users and 84% of Android users. WebOS users were also less likely to download apps to their phone, averaging 5.7 downloads per month compared with 8.8 for the iPhone and 8.7 for Android. Palm stocks fell Thursday after the company said its revenue for the fiscal year will be “well below” what it had hoped, because of weak sales of its new Pre and Pixi phones. The Journal described the news as a “blow to one of the company’s last chances to show it can compete in the brutal market it helped pioneer.” Palm’s phones have been well reviewed but have not caught on with consumers. AdMob, which is being bought by Google, also regularly gives data on the number of ad hits it gets from different devices. Its report showed that 1.7% of these ad requests in January of this year came from Palm phones, compared with 43.8% from Apple, 14.7% from Samsung and 14.4% from Motorola.

It’s like Groundhog Day for touch-screen PCs. Yesterday’s device of tomorrow (see Bill Gates’s 2001 prediction that tablet PCs would outstrip laptops and of course the Apple Newton ) is once again hot stuff, thanks to Apple’s iPad launch last month. Now, other PC makers are hoping they can finally create a market for technology that’s been languishing for years. But while Apple’s gotten the buzz , and H-P has gotten attention for its Windows-based Slate , which it previewed three weeks before the iPad, Dell has taken a different approach. The Texas PC giant has been showing its Mini 5 — a much smaller touch-screen gadget than Apple’s or H-P‘s — since early January. The device looks like a big iPhone and uses Google’s Android operating system. Dell says the Mini 5 will go on sale later this year. When that happens, it will end what John Thode, Dell’s vice president in charge of mobile devices, describes as a two-year process to figure out what people who’ve already got a smart phone and a laptop would be willing to buy