Ex-Palm CEO and Handspring co-founder Donna Dubinsky has stepped down from her position on Palm’s board of directors, as a response to investor Elevation Partners’ plan to nominate their own candidate to the board. Dubinsky’s offer to withdraw, which is being described by the company as “not the result of any disagreement”, was made on January 26th, with Elevation putting forward ex-eBay exec Rajiv Dutta four days later.
The corporate shuffle was revealed in Palm’s recent 8-K filing. Dutta stepped down from the eBay board of directors in July 2008; his nomination, and Dubinsky’s resignation, will be considered by the board shortly.
It was while at Handspring that Dubinsky helped develop the original Treo smartphone, prior to the company’s merging with Palm in 2003. More recently she co-founded Numenta, which produces an Intelligent Computing platform reliant on embedded learning algorithms, system self-training and pattern recognition.
