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Los Angeles, October 5, 2011 – The American Film Institute (AFI) announced today that Chris Dodd, former United States Senator of Connecticut and Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA), and David Rips, President of Verizon Digital Media Services, have been elected to the AFI Board of Trustees, which will next meet on Thursday, October 6 in Los Angeles. Voted to return to the AFI Board of Trustees for new three-year terms are leaders of the motion picture and television communities and leaders from global goods and services companies, including Lisa Arpey (American Airlines), Todd Bradley (Hewlett-Packard, Co.), Brad Grey (Paramount Pictures), Jonathan Miller (News Corporation), Frank Pierson (Writer/Director and Artistic Director of the AFI Conservatory), Anne Sweeney (Disney-abc Television Group), Thomas Tull (Legendary Pictures) and Michael Wright (Turner Entertainment), as well as Roger Enrico (DreamWorks Animation Skg), who was re-elected to the AFI Board of Directors for a new term.

How well the new WebOS-powered devices that Hp launched Wednesday will do in the marketplace remains to be seen. But underlying the various features and bells and whistles Hp rolled out were two main themes that point to the direction tablets are going--themes that are worth keeping in mind as we watch the evolution of mobile in the months and years to come.

Our devices will one day be nothing more than portals

Hp execs demonstrated how activity on one device--a smartphone, for example--could easily be routed to another device, such as the tablet. It makes sense: You use your smartphone at work, but you like to futz with your tablet at home. Shouldn’t it be easy to route activity and content from one to the other, so that you can work on your work (or play with your games), no matter what physical device you happen to be holding at one particular time?...

A tablet, a phone, and more--we hope.

[Update: They're likely revealing this.]

At an invitation-only event in San Francisco today, Hp is expected to unveil its first webOS hardware since buying Palm in April 2010 for $1.2 billion. What exactly might we be seeing today, at 10 Am Pacific?

We hope it will be Hp's answer to the iPad, the "PalmPad" (not, probably, it's real name). We don't know much about Hp's tablet, but here are some of the rumors being bandied about.

It looks like Hp actually has two tablets in mind, a larger, nine-inch model called "Topaz," and a smaller seven-inch one called with the codename "Opal." The design is rumored to be button-free, to have a front-facing camera, a micro Usb port, and three speakers (two on the left, one on the right, enabling a stereo effect in both landscape and portrait). WiFi-only, At&T 3G, and Verizon Lte versions of Opal could hit stores...

1. The WikiLeaks saga has taken a new, bizarre government-level twist: E.U. lawmakers are pushing to see if U.S. "snooping" on Twittering E.U. citizens involved with WikiLeaks is illegal under privacy laws, especially given the lack of a proven crime and any form of judicial enquiry. If it proves so, the influential MP group may be able to try to push for legal action against the U.S., or at least for some serious political hassling.

2. Apple may be about to leap aboard the social gaming/networking bandwagon by its backdoor: Coders, digging through a new test edition of iOS for iPad and iPhone have found references to a "find my friends" Api hook. Instantly this has set the technosphere wondering if Apple will leverage its Mobile Me and "find my iPhone" technology into a service that rivals Loopt or Google Latitude.

3. Nasa just did something fascinating: Among the political,...

Hopefully not too many miscreants used the night-time hours to break out of jail, but one jailbreak has just been completed that many folk will be pleased by: Industrious hackers, no doubt propelled through the wee small hours of coding on a diet of Red Bull and pizza, have jailbroken the new Apple TV. Should you care? Yes! Apple Apps on your TV! While you ponder how Doodle Jump will work on the big screen, here's some real news:

1. Hp cheated yesterday, when the interim CEO Cathie Lesjak gave the impression a CEO was far from chosen--he actually had been, and he's just been announced: Léo Apotheker. He's the former CEO of Sap--the huge German business software outfit--and he beat out internal candidate Todd Bradley in the board's minds. The thing is, Apotheker is a unknown quantity at the helm of a big manufacturer like Hp. He's also a mystery quantity to Wall Street types.

On the one side: The iPad. On the other: The upcoming Hp, LG, and BlackBerry tablets, each having its praises sung loudly, and each to a different tune--so that it stands apart from Apple's million-selling runaway success.

Hp Bought Palm for a reason: WebOS tablet in 2011

People have been pondering what Hp's tablet PC strategy will be after its first effort got a glitzy show-and-tell by Microsot's Steve Ballmer himself, before being indefinitely delayed. With Hp's surprise purchase of the ailing Palm--and the subsequent talent flight from among Palm's top team--the mystery deepened.

Now Todd Bradley, head of Hp Personal Systems Group, has said "You'll see us with a Microsoft product out in the near future, and a webOS-based product in early 2011." That's a direct confirmation that Hp will be using Windows 7 in a slate PC as well as a Palm-based system. Windows 7 is, according to Microsoft, ready to be...

Hp announced today that they will acquire (and presumably save) Palm, for a price of $1.2 billion. This is a pretty unexpected move--Palm had been put up for sale a few weeks ago, but Hp was not one of the rumored buyers. Given that its flagship WebOS mobile operating system (appearing now on the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi) is one of only three currently available modern consumer mobile OSes (the others being Android and iPhone), the company was viewed as a slightly risky but valuable property.

The two companies most strongly rumored to be in the running to buy Palm were Htc and Lenovo--htc may have wanted an Os it could call its own, to match with its top-of-the-line hardware, and Lenovo may have wanted Palm to kickstart its presence in the mobile market. Or they both could have been used to goose the asking price for Palm. Hp never...