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Yesterday, Palm remarketed shares in Elevation in hopes to snag some extra cash for the Pre. Today that paid off, with Palm reportedly receiving $83.9M in net proceeds from the transaction. In total, the handset manufacturer sold 23.1M shares at $6 a piece, surpassing the initial 18.5M planned sale.

This should give Palm some extra funds for operating costs, including the launch of their webOS handset. Palm last reported $220M at most in cash reserves, consuming as much as $100M in the last quarter, so the injection of cash could not have come at a better time. Treonauts reports that the underwriters, Morgan Stanley, also have the option to purchase an additional 3.5M common stocks within 30 days to cover any over-allotments, valued at about $21.0M.

Over the weekend, cofounder of Elevation Partners and Palm investor Roger McNamee made some bold statements about the Pre and the potential for iPhone users to flock to the new webOS handset. However, Palm went out of their way today to make a document on their investor relations website, disputing his strong talking points in an interview with Bloomberg (see video), and in an article.

For example, Palm decided that his statements on how early iPhone adopters would cross over just to get the coolest new toy, and that the Pre would be several times faster than the iPhone, "running rings around it on the web", were too strong for their liking.

Last week, rumors were that tech-savvy late-night host Jimmy Fallon wanted to get the webOS Palm Pre on his show. That became a reality yesterday, when Fallon played host to Engadget editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, who toted the new webOS device with him onto the show.

Topolski had barely become comfortable before sliding the sleek handset out of his pocket. "You're going to show me something that I'm dying to know about.", Fallon said. "You've managed to get something that noone else can get...because you're you", Topolsky quipped back.

After successfully building a webOS application in the tutorial section of the webcast, Mitch Allen proceeded to uncover a few details about support for local storage, banner notifications, and services in webOS.

Local Storage

There will be three types of local storage available to applications in webOS:

• The HTML5 Database API
• Depot: A Mojo wrapper around the HTML5 database API. It will include basic functions to create and open databases and get and store simple objects. It's designed to simplify things for people not interested in "getting their hands dirty" in the full API. A few sample function calls were provided:

After posting dismal Q3 earnings, Palm was evaluating options to boost its budget for the launch of its webOS handset, which included remarketing common shares in Elevation Partners. Today, Palm exercised their right to do just that, remarketing 18.5M shares of the common Series C units of preferred stock and warrants acquired by Elevation Partners back in January.

The initial agreement was made when Elevation Partners infused the struggling handset maker with an investment of $100M in December of last year, allowing Palm to remarket 49% of its Palm shares tied to its series C preferred stock by March 31.

As a result, Elevation will recoup their $49M in original costs, with Palm receiving any net proceeds beyond that amount. Based on current market prices, the total value of the stock comes close to $105M, so Palm could be set up for a healthy allowance in excess of $50M for the launch of the Pre.

Palm shares fell after the news, closing down 2% at $6.02 today.

A few days ago, we reported on what Palm needed to do to become a leader in app stores over iPhone, Android, RIM, WM, and Nokia. Criteria included: time to market, developer attraction, store interface, number of apps and more. PalmAddicts have released their own summary entitled "(Prē)dicting Palm success", adding some good points to the app store discussion. Here's a summary of the points:

Better quality of apps: With a library of over 15000 apps and growing (25 000+ according to 148apps.com), how does this affect quality? Looking at the numbers, iPhone users tend to download an average of 5 apps per visit, but only 30% use them a day after purchase, and only 5% use them after 20 days. This gives the App Store "an ugly side on the back", and Palm needs to do a few things to avoid this.

Better pricing: Pinch Media CEO Greg Yardley advises developers to get their money up front, and stop depending on a free/ad-subsidized model. Last time we analyzed a chart of respective app prices among Apple, RIM, and others, with Apple far cheaper than their competitors. However, higher prices can mean more money for developers. RIM's audience of mostly business users are willing to pay more for "real apps that deliver". Palm needs to appeal to these customers as well.

Welcome to the second attempt at writing up Palm's first official webOS / Mojo SDK tutorial.  This incarnation is much shorter than the previous and is split into two parts; one for the application that was built during the webcast and the other for the more advanced stuff that was discussed briefly at the end of the presentation.  The second part will be posted tomorrow. Update: Will be posted Monday.

A great high-level overview of the material covered during the webcast by Mitch Allen was written up by Andrew last week. This article will get into the technical details of the code tutorial section. If you're new to web development, you may want to start with our beginner or intermediate tutorials before diving in.

Topics covered in this tutorial:

• appinfo.json - what makes this file so important
• index.html - what goes into this file
• stage assistants - a very simple example that demonstrates pushing the first scene of an application
• scenes - palm-specific css styles, UI widgets
• scene assistants - moving between scenes, passing data between scenes

If you're just here to grab the sample application code, you can find it here.   To view the actual webcast in which this material was presented, click here.

Here's a few juicy tidbits from industry sources this weekend to help satisfy your Pre cravings:

Bloomberg: Interview with Roger McNamee - Bloomberg recently had an interview with Elevation Partner's co-founder and Palm Investor Roger McNamee. In the interview, McNamee explains how the Pre and iPhone will be driving the rapidly expanding smartphone market (right now at 20%), and expects 50% smartphone adoption within 5 years. "They're aren't really fighting each other. They're really fighting Nokia, Motorola....the folks make the old fashioned phones".

In comparing the Pre to Apple's offering, he states he is a longtime Apple user, with Mac computers, an iPhone and iPod touch. "For media, they're fantastic...but our product is just going to run rings around them of the web". And while the competitors such as the Android and iPhone are based on current computer technologies, the Pre is truly a "next generation" device. In addition, Sprint has a more "mature 3G network" and so was a logical choice for the Pre over AT&T.

palmpreFIX: webOS Imitator Alert - A new program for the Android OS copies a lot of the features of the Palm Pre synergy. It consolidates social networks, daily activities and communications all through the address book. The software is also designed to be customizable, so users can choose what applications run through their contacts.