SiliconBeat

Quantum (NYSE:QTM), the San Jose maker of storage products, received word from the New York Stock Exchange that it is “not in compliance” with its minimum $1 listing requirement. It has until Nov. 10 to explain to the stock market its plans for rectifying the situation, and it will have until April 29 to comply with the order by having its shares trade above $1 for 30 consecutive days, according to a filing today.

The company said in a release that should it be unable to lift its shares above the required minimum, it Read the rest of this entry »

Moody’s, the financial ratings firm who’s boss, Raymond McDaniel, testified before Congress earlier this month, along with the chiefs of the two other major ratings firms, about their agencies’ lousy performance in assessing the risks of mortgage-backed securities, named Stanford finance professor Darrell Duffie to its board. (That’s him in the photo, which we found on the professor’s home page.)

Among the documents uncovered by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was a board presentation delivered by McDaniel to Moody’s directors in October 2007. Read the rest of this entry »

The board of directors at Applied Micro Circuits (Nasdaq:AMCC) approved a $100 million stock repurchase program Wednesday, the company revealed in a quarterly filing today. Details of the program “are still to be determined.”

The amount is about a third of the company’s total market value as of Friday. It is also slightly more than half of the Sunnyvale chip maker’s total Read the rest of this entry »

Foundry Networks, which first postponed a shareholder vote to approve its proposed sale to Brocade Communications from last Friday to Wednesday, and then postponed it a second time to Nov. 7, has postponed it once again. Probably.

In a release today, Foundry said that should the two companies reach a new “definitive”
agreement, the shareholder vote would be Read the rest of this entry »

It’s become increasingly clear that the U.S. Department of Justice is building a case against the proposed ad deal between Google and Yahoo. And now there are rumblings that Google may walk away from the deal. Amid this speculation, there’s more talk that Yahoo and AOL are sniffing around each other again for some possible deal. If the Google deal collapses, Yahoo apparently feels it needs something to get its stock price going and buy it some time to implement its new “open” strategy.

All this hand wringing over the Google deal, however, has left me shaking my head.

Recall that Yahoo signed the deal with Google as a way to thwart the takeover bid by Microsoft. Not the greatest move in the world. But still, I don’t understand the firestorm of protest over it.

Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

Forrester Research Chairman & CEO George Colony is also a blogger. And earlier this week, he spelled out his argument for why this recession will be different for tech than the last one in 2001-2003:

“Tech suffers when GDP growth stalls — that is always the case. But the tech environment has transitioned since the 2001-2002 hurricane — meaning that this time around will not be as severe.”

My thinking has been similar. This time won’t be nearly as bad for Silicon Valley as a few years ago. Really, how could it be? We were ground zero back then. Now we’re just going to be collateral damage. Yes, we’re starting to see layoffs and slowdowns. But the sky won’t be falling like it was back then when we lost 200,000 jobs.

Still, I wanted to hear more from Colony on this. So I spent a few minutes with him on the phone Wednesday. First, let me summarize his overall thoughts on why this recession won’t hit tech as hard:

Read the rest of this entry »

When Kevin Kennedy joined JDS Uniphase in September 2003, the company was a train wreck. It had fired thousands of employees. It had taken massive write offs stemming from a series of overpriced acquisitions. It was, in short, the poster child for the telecom disaster.

With the news this week that Kennedy is stepping down as CEO, it’s hard to know how to grade his work, or the state of JDSU.

On the plus side, JDSU took a daring stand to fight a class action shareholder lawsuit and won a rare court trial. Losing likely would have crippled, if not killed the company. Fighting it was daring, but smart in the end.

And the company’s revenues have slowly grown since Kennedy took the helm:

2003: $675.9 million.
2004: $635.9 million
2005: $712.2 million.
2006: $1.2 billion.
2007: $1.3968 billion
2008: $1.53 billion.

On the downside, the company has still not posted an annual profit under Kennedy, though the losses have shrunk. I’m guessing the credit crisis and economic implosion is not going to help with things there . And the stock price has never recovered. Even with a reverse split along the way, the trajectory over the past five years is down:

So, it’s a mixed bag, at best. The company is still alive. And has a hefty chunk of change in the bank, so it will likely be around for awhile. But even if it can continue to keep the lights on, it’s harder to know whether it’s a company that will ever really matter again.

Welcome to the future of news:

A few weeks ago, the folks at Plantronics asked me to help judge a contest they were holding. The idea was that the term “telecommuter” was a bit dated given how our work habits and technology have changed. They wanted folks to help them select a successor. So they opened the door to nominations and got about 500. They sent those nominations to me and several other judges over the weekend and we each picked our 10 favorites.

Plantronics tallied those votes and have now posted the 10 most popular selected by the judges. Those are now online here.

Now it’s your turn. Cast your vote for your favorite. You have until Nov. 7. The winner will be announced Nov. 18.

StemCells (Nasdaq:STEM), the Palo Alot biotech company, said Thursday that preclinical results for its product candidate HuCNS-SC, derived from human neural stem cells, were able to protect the retina from progressive degeneration when transplanted into lab rats.

“The HuCNS-SC cell has proven to have very robust survival, preserving vision in our rat model at time points beyond six months,” said Raymond Lund, a researcher and professor at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University. “These data are very encouraging and suggest cell-based therapies for retinal degeneration can be a viable treatment approach.”

Shares of StemCells rose as much as 22 cents, or 22 percent, in Thursday trading after its news was released.