SiliconBeat

Openwave of Redwood City announced “Phase 2” of its “Product Portfolio Rationalization and Restructuring Strategy” Monday in a filing with the SEC. “Phase 1” worked so well over the last year — it pared expenses by some $70 million — that the company has decided to go on to the next step in its strategy to “create long term sustainable growth and profitability for employees and shareholders.”

Well, some employees, that is. But not the 200 Openwave plans to let go as part of this round of its seemingly endless “restructuring” — we think the latest one is the sixth the company has announced since 2002.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Profile

CNET Networks and its nemesis shareholder, JANA Partners, exchanged words Thursday, a day after the online news site said it would lay off 120 employees and appoint a task force led by its chief financial officer in an effort to streamline its operations.

In a statement filed with the SEC by JANA Partners Managing Partner Barry Rosenstein, the investment firm issued said:

“It is astounding that it has taken years of shareholder value destruction for CNET to even start examining the basics of reversing its ongoing underperformance, and even then only after we began calling for change. Fundamental issues like these that we have raised should have been addressed years ago.”

The letter goes on to question the ability of CNET’s current management to successfully
address the “fundamental issues” facing the company, given that Read the rest of this entry »

Carl Icahn — shareholder activist or corporate raider, you decide — sent out a variation of his cage-rattling letters to the board of Motorola the same day it made its “much delayed and long overdue” (his characterization, not ours) announcement that it would spin off its mobile devices division into a separate company.

The letter, contained in a filing his Icahn Associates made with the SEC today, expresses”concerns about the speed and manner in which a new management team is selected for the Mobile Devices business and the separation transaction is consummated. Time is of the essence and decisive action is required,” Icahn wrote.

He then asks some questions, two of which seem a bit rhetorical: Read the rest of this entry »

Finisar rearranged the repayment of $15.6 million it borrowed last year to pay for its acquisition last year of AZNA, a privately-held developer of photonic components and
subsystems based in Boston, according to an SEC filing today.

The original loan was due to be paid, along with the interest on it, on March 26. The revised
terms of the loan, now pegged at $16.5 million to account for the interest through the
original due date, calls for payment in three installments, the first of which for $4.5
million was paid on March 26.

The second installment for $6 million is due June 29, and the final payment is due Sept. 22.
These last two payments may be paid in cash or shares of Finisar or a combination of the two. Finisar, a Sunnyvale maker of fiber optics, has set aside up to 3.4 million shares for this
purpose. It’s shares, which have traded in the last year as high as $4.21 and as low as $1.11,
are currently trading around $1.33, down about 9 percent so far this year.

Nvidia said today that its chief financial officer, Marvin Burkett, told the company last week he wants to retire, according to an SEC filing. Burkett, 65, has been with the Santa Clara maker of video graphics chips since 2002. Prior to joining Nvidia Burkett was a financial consultant and served as CFO of Arcot Systems, a security software company. From 1998 to 1999 he served as CEO of Packard Bell NEC.

The bulk of Burkett’s career was spent at Advanced Micro Devices, where over the course of 26 years he worked in a variety of positions including CFO and corporate controller. AMD purchased Nvidia’s arch-rival, ATI, in 2001. In January, AMD started selling a new graphics card designed to boost performance for better computer games and videos.

Burkett will remain with the company until his replacement is found, and “”may continue in some capacity” with the company after that. Which would probably give him more time to vest and exercise any options he’s been granted, especially a grant covering 150,000 shares that were granted in March 2006 at a strike price of $28.74. Those are currently underwater in light of the 42 percent drop in Nvidia’s stock so far this year.

Avistar Communications will cut its U.S. and European workforces by 25 percent, blaming the move largely on Microsoft’s legal challenge of patents held by the San Mateo videoconferencing company, according to a press release it issued Wednesday. It had 88 employees as of the end of 2006, the most recent figure available.

Microsoft moved to challenge all of Avistar’s 29 U.S. patents through the U.S. Patent
Office’s re-examination process after “in-depth licensing discussions” failed to produce a result the software giant was satisfied with, according to Avistar’s release.

“This single action against Avistar’s complete US patent portfolio represents over 5% of the entire 2007 third-party re-examination challenges at the USPTO,” stated Simon Moss, Avistar’s CEO, in the release. “”This leads to only one logical conclusion … Microsoft must be taking our patent portfolio very seriously in regard to it’s relevance to their present or future products. Why else would it take such a dramatic action?”

Avistar, which was notified in November that its stock was subject to de-listing by the
Nasdaq market because its market value fell below $25 million, said March 20 it regained that compliance. Avistar shares have more than doubled so far this year. They fell three cents Wednesday to close at 88 cents.

Can it be true? Google, a company that says it “does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains”, is opposing proposals put forward by Google shareholders that seek to establish policies against Internet censorship and create a new board committee on human rights, according to its proxy filed Tuesday afternoon.

Read the rest of this entry »

Micrel started playing defense Tuesday against a growing challenge from Obrem Capital Management, an investment firm that has amassed almost 10.7 million shares of the San Jose chip maker, which represents 14.9 percent of its shares outstanding.

The company set up a”limited duration shareholder rights plan,” more colorfully known as a poison pill intended to be swallowed should some entity — say Obrem Capital — were to acquire 15 percent of Micrel’s shares outstanding.

Read the rest of this entry »

Agilent Technologies disclosed on Monday that it had received a notice from Merrill Lynch requiring the company to repay $1.5 billion three years ahead of schedule.

The notice does not signal a liquidity crisis at Agilent, which has $3 billion in restricted and unrestricted cash on hand, according to Rodney Gonsalves, an Agilent spokesman. However, the notice marks one of the first signals that the broader credit crunch
is beginning to be felt by Silicon Valley companies.

Read the rest of this entry »