“The key thing was our CEO, Ed Colligan, had the insight that once the [BlackBerry] Pearl came out, the smart-phone business was going to be a consumer business, and Palm was not positioned for that and needed a major transformation, and that’s what we got involved in doing. The whole notion was you wanted to take that cultural legacy of innovation that created the Pilot and the Treo and then apply it to the next customer.”

–Roger McNamee lauds Palm CEO Ed Colligan at our recent D: All Things Digital conference

Now we know why it was Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein and investor Roger McNamee on stage at D last month talking up the Pre, and not CEO Ed Colligan: Colligan was on his way out.

On Wednesday, Palm (PALM) named Rubinstein as its new chairman and CEO. Come Friday he’ll succeed Colligan, who is leaving the company after 16 years to join McNamee at Elevation Partners. Apparently Palm, who recruited Rubinstein, a former Apple (AAPL) engineer, to turn the company around has decided it would much rather have him in its highest office than Colligan under whose leadership it was foundering.

In a statement, Rubinstein–who has spent the past two years quarterbacking the development of the Pre and its webOS–welcomed his new role. “I am very excited about taking on this expanded role at Palm,” he said. “Ed and I have worked very hard together the past two years, and I’m grateful to him for everything he’s done to help set the company up for success. With Palm webOS we have ten-plus years of innovation ahead of us, and the Palm Pre is already one of the year’s hottest new products. Due in no small part to Ed’s courageous leadership, we’re in great shape to get Palm back to continuous growth, and we plan to keep the trajectory going upward.”

Reached for comment late Wednesday afternoon, Roger McNamee offered up this rather canned statement on Palm’s leadership transition: “With Ed’s decision to step down, Jon Rubinstein is the natural choice to lead Palm into its next phase of growth. Jon has proven to have exactly the right mix of product vision, organizational leadership and operational capabilities to help Palm regain a leadership position. We are grateful for the leadership role Ed has played in initiating this transformation and getting through the successful launch of webOS and the Pre.”

Palm shares are up 3.75 percent at $12.44 on the news.

For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it. Well, that, and conversations with Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, and several Italian business leaders. Mark Zuckerberg, though, is most definitely plugged into the white-hot microblogging service. This week, he used his Twitter account, plus an appearance on “Oprah,” as a platform to herald the launch of Facebook’s own Twitteresque homepage redesign. In other news, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes laid off AOL President and COO Ron Grant and Chairman and CEO Randy Falco. BoomTown interviewed Falco’s replacement, Google (GOOG) ad sales exec Tim Armstrong, who’ll start at AOL as Chairman and CEO on April 7.

MediaMemo had the full memo from Time Warner on the Falco/Grant-Armstrong transition and also spoke with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen this week. Boxee is the start-up that lets you watch Web video on your TV, basically bypassing your cable box. Which is probably why it’s caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with Hulu, the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox that would much rather have you watch TV on the Internet instead. Guess who’s the mouse? Still, Hulu is down two networks, ABC and CBS (CBS)–though presumably, the aim is to offer all three. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.) MediaMemo also noted that Google rolled out its behavioral targeting functionality this week and points out that we all might be hearing a lot more from a man named Rick Boucher in the near future as a result.

Behavioral targeting wasn’t the only thing that Google rolled out this week–it also launched Google Voice, the initiative based on the company’s acquisition of voice communications start-up GrandCentral. Digital Daily covered the story. Elsewhere in the telecom world, major Palm (PALM) investor Roger McNamee made some bold (read: crazy) assertions about iPhone users switching en masse to the Pre, which later needed to be clarified (read: backed away from) by Palm itself. RBC analyst Mike Abramsky is also bullish on the Pre and its WebOS, but in a less crazy way. He gave it a glowing write-up on Friday. For a product that hasn’t yet been given a price or a launch date, it’s certainly building itself some high expectations. Of course, it’ll need to fulfill them to compete with the ever-evolving iPhone, which for which Apple (AAPL) is having a press event Tuesday to announce version 3.0 of the device’s OS.

Walt Mossberg reviewed the new version of Apple’s ever-evolving iPod Shuffle this week, which has the distinction of being the first mp3 player to “speak.” His verdict was in Wednesday’s Personal Technology column. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using a stylus with the iPhone and offered an explanation on how to change Apple’s Safari 4 beta so that it looks and works more like the previous version. And in this week’s Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at iSkoot’s Notifier, an app designed to endow basic cellphones with smartphone-like capabilities.

More next week. And beware the Ides of March. Or not.