It definitely took a while for HP CEO Meg Whitman to find a home for the company’s beleaguered WebOS unit.
And that home is called Gram. What is Gram? According to the WebOSNation Web site, Gram is a new company rebranded from the original Palm Computing. Palm was acquired by HP back in 2010 for roughly $1.2 billion.
Late last week HP introduced Gram to the remaining WebOS employees, according to WebOSNation. From the flyer at the announcement, the name Gram has a marketing slogan of sorts: “Potent. Light. Nimble. At the bottom of the flyer it read: At the core of all things big and small…Gram is a new company leveraging the core strengths of WebOS, Enyo and our cloud offerings as well as the firepower of our products to create a technology that will unleash the freedom of the Web.
WebOSNation also reported that Gram’s focus will not be hardware and will instead develop software, end user experiences, cloud solutions, and will partner with other vendors. But the Web site criticized the focus unclear.What WebOSNation has been able to uncover is that Gram will be a separate company from HP even though it’s funded by the hardware giant.
The Web site speculates that Gram would be able to get outside funding it needed.
According to WebOSNation, the public roll-out for Gram hasn’t been given a timeline, nor do we know who is in charge, but its coming soon maybe by the end of August. Palm’s old building is being remodel for Gram.
Earlier this year Whitman announced the webOS group would be turned over to the open-source community.
HP stopped making devices that use the operating system which was developed by Palm for phones and tablets, and later decided to release the software under the Apache License 2.0.
As webOS continues the transition to open-source software, HP no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. “This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP’s commitment to the software over the long term,” it added.