Following the announcement of HP CEO Mark Hurd’s departure, the attorney of Jodie Fisher, the contractor who made the sexual harassment claim against him released a statement from her client.

Fisher had the following things to say:

"I was surprised and saddened that Mark Hurd lost his job over this. That was never my intention."

HP has announced that Chairman, CEO and President Mark Hurd has resigned his positions. This comes following an investigation into sexual harassment claims made against Hurd and the company made by a former contractor.

The company says the investigation determined there was no violation of HP’s sexual harassment policy, but did find violations of HP’s "Standards of Business Conduct."

Apple’s iAds are making their way into the wild after weeks of hype. MacRumors.com says, "their presence appears to be very spotty on iAd-compatible applications at the moment with banners appearing only occasionally while at other times the apps simply show blank space in the banner location."

Update: The acquisition is now complete. See releases from HP and Palm.

Original Article (04/28): Hewlett-Packard just announced its intent to buy Palm for $1.2 Billion at $5.70 per share. The transaction has already been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors.

YouTube, HP, and the foundation behind some of the most famous museums in the world have teamed up to discover creative online videos.  Winners of the YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video competition will then get to see their videos presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, along with the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice.

Google has provided an update on the Google Cloud Print service it announced back in April. Google Cloud Print was described as a service that would allow any desktop, web, or mobile app on any device to print to any printer that the user sets up.

Google now says development is progressing quickly, and they’re testing the service internally. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that Google hopes to launch the service in the coming months.

Hewlett-Packard said today it is launching a subscription-based music service in Europe in partnership with Omnifone.

The service called MusicStation will be pre-loaded on 16 HP models across 10 European countries. The service will provide access to songs from all four major music labels and independent labels.

The global PC market saw double-digit growth in the fourth quarter, led by strong U.S. holiday sales of low-cost netbooks, according to the latest report by IDC.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote last night was one of the most anticipated events of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It was expected that he would unveil a device to compete with a supposedly upcoming tablet from Apple, but people anticipating such news were met with the unveiling of a different device – the HP Windows 7 slate device, which apparently doesn’t live up to some of the tech crowd’s expectations.

HP unveiled a few new mobile devices today at CES. These include a new TouchSmart notebook, and a handful of minis.

Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site so many people love, announced an important deal today as it named HP’s Snapfish its preferred photo printing and gift creation partner.  Thanks to the arrangement, printing pictures is about to become a lot easier for some folks, and for others, this will even be the first time a certain printing option has been available at all.

HP announced today that it is acquiring 3Com, makers of network switching, routing, and security solutions, for $2.7 billion in cash (at 7.90 per share). Both boards have already approved the transaction.

HP says the combination of these two companies will transform the networking industry and "underscore HP’s next-generation data center strategy." The company believes this will help customers simplify networks and improve IT service delivery capabilities.

Frequent flyers say staying connected via Wi-Fi is their top priority when traveling, according to a new survey by American Airlines and HP.

Nearly half (47%) of business travelers said Wi-Fi was the most important airport amenity, outscoring basic travel needs such as food by nearly 30 percent.

"We know that our business customers rely on technology to be as productive as possible while on the road," said Manuel de Oyarzabal, Director – Customer Research at American Airlines.

Yahoo has introduced a new partner program for third party advertising technology companies to use its Smart Ads platform.

Yahoo and Tumri worked with Hewlett-Packard to create a Smart Ad campaign that reached more than 140 million U.S. users. The campaign resulted in a return on ad spend that was more than 20 times higher than traditional display ad campaigns. HP has developed separate Smart Ad campaigns with Yahoo and Teracent that also produced better results than traditional campaigns.

On Black Friday, Microsoft Live Search along with HP promised a 40% refund on items purchased in HP’s online store. The only problem was that the site for what was called Microsoft Live Search Cashback experienced an outage and then started delivering 3% refunds instead of 40%. Obviously, there were some unhappy campers as a result.

Hewlett-Packard has an interesting new service that allows users to turn RSS feeds into deliverable, printable PDFs. The service is called Tablloid and works basically like other feed readers.

MySpace and HP have teamed up on a deal that will see HP printing technology used across multiple areas on MySpace, including all photo sections. You will be able to easily print pictures from not only people’s profile photos, but ones that are inserted into blog posts, comments, messages, etc. 

The first stage of the partnership is anticipated to include an HP branded print button enabling MySpace users to preview and print photos directly from their MySpace profiles.

Uber-geeks have been talking for a while about cloud computing and how it’s the future, especially the geeks at Google, and later, Microsoft. Today, though, it’s a partnership between Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo generating the next wave of cloud computing buzz.

Global PC shipments hit 71.9 million in the second quarter of 2008, a 16 percent increase over the same time period in 2007, according to Gartner.

PC shipments in the United States reached 16.5 million in the second quarter, a 4.2 percent increase from 2007. PC shipments rose during the quarter, despite the sliding economy. This was due to vendors cutting prices on PCs due to economic conditions.

Less than two years ago, Yahoo was on a roll and had just signed a deal with computer manufacturer HP that would see its search engine as the default on all new HP computers.

Consumer PCs from HP will arrive with default search and a toolbar from Microsoft in the browser, linked to the Live Search service.