SiliconBeat

When Google reported its earnings a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people who didn’t pay close attention hailed the results as a sign that the company had truly created a transcendent business model. I even heard people invoke the term “New Economy.” Funny, because when I start hearing that term, I figure trouble lies ahead.

In fact, if you parsed what Google said in its results, a lot of its profit increase came from cost savings and paring back its torrid hiring pace. Hardly the stuff of a “new economy.”

But I’m wondering now if there’s even more trouble brewing based on an email I received today about AdSense.

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Chip sales worldwide grew to $23 billion in September, up 1.1% from the month before and 1.6 percent higher than September 2007, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. That was the lowest sequential growth in three months and the smallest year-over-year gain in seven months.

The sales figures were dragged down by a Read the rest of this entry »

We doubt there are many U.S. followers of Docu-Drama who aren’t invested in at least some Bay Area companies, if only through holdings in an S&P500 index fund. But if there were before today, there aren’t any now.

That’s because Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based banking giant, announced Wednesday that it had issued to the U.S. Department of the Treasury 25,000 shares of its “Fixed Rate Cumulative Perpetual Preferred Stock, Series D.” Price per share: Read the rest of this entry »

As the price tag for bailing out the world’s banks approaches $3 trillion, governments around the globe are cranking up the printing presses for their respective currencies to provide emergency liquidity. The explosion of government lending has raised the cost for those who’d like to hedge against losses on investments in government debt, according to a Bloomberg News story by Abigail Moses and Shannon D. Harrington,

The cost to hedge against losses on $10 million of Treasuries is about Read the rest of this entry »

Pillar Data Systems, the San Jose storage company backed by billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, said Wednesday it would layoff 150 employees, or about 30 percent of the company’s work force. The step was taken to help the company “weather the storm” of the current economy, company spokesman Chris Drago told Mercury News reporter Scott Duke Harris, who writes for Thursday’s paper about “triage efforts” to help companies survive the current downturn.

The pace of layoffs in Silicon Valley seems to be picking up, according to Janice Shriver from the state’s Employment Development Department. She says that efforts Read the rest of this entry »

Atmel (Nasdaq:ATML) said late Wednesday that its board of directors decided to turn down an unsolicited proposal from Microchip Technology (Nasdaq: MCHP) and ON Semiconductor  (Nasdaq: ONNN) to buy it for $5 a share, saying the offer is “inadequate in multiple respects, including value, conditionality and complexity, and is not in the best interests of Atmel’s stockholders.”

Atmel Chief Executive Steve Laub wrote in a letter addressed to Steven Sanghi, Microchip’s chairman and chief executive, and Keith Jackson, ON Semiconductor’s CEO, that Atmel’s board had, “concluded that your proposal is inadequate in multiple respects, saying it “significantly undervalues” Atmel, is “unacceptably conditional” and subject to “significant execution risk”.

Laub then took his counterparts to task, writing: Read the rest of this entry »

Oracle placed a bet Wednesday that the future will bring about more regulation and a greater demand for software that increases the efficiency of social service agencies, as well as other “highly regulated” industries. Hmmm, which ones could those be?

Oracle said Wednesday it agreed to buy RuleBurst Holdings, the parent company of Haley Limited, a provider of Read the rest of this entry »

Asyst Technologies said Wednesday that that it “As a result of the current economic environment and recent decline in the market value of the company, Asyst currently is conducting an interim goodwill impairment analysis, which the company anticipates will result in a non-cash charge of $85-$90 million for the quarter.”

It also revealed that the non-cash charge would Read the rest of this entry »

Less than two years after a policy was approved to reimburse him for the use of his private aircraft on business trips, JDS Uniphase Chief Executive Kevin Kennedy sold his plane, according to the company’s proxy issued in advance of its Nov. 12 annual meeting.

The audit committee of the company’s board of directors approved the policy in June 2006. The policy limited the reimbursement to $2,100 per flight hour plus a 12.5% fuel surcharge rate. The policy limited the amount of reimbursement to $800,000 per year. The rates were established “following review of fair market rates applicable to the rental and use of similar aircraft.”

We could find no Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using LinkedIn for so long, I can’t really remember when I first signed up. You can find my profile here. At times, I take it for granted, and at other times I find it to be the most useful social networking service I use.

I was drawn back to it Tuesday night when I got an email me alerting me to a new application directory:

“Today we’re announcing many more ways to interact with your network on LinkedIn. Whether it’s a new way to create projects and collaborate, share information, customize your profile, or gain key insights, the new LinkedIn Applications deliver.”

The first app I tried to add was a Wordpress application. But for some reason, all I got was an error message saying it was “unable to fetch my blog.” Hopefully, that’s just a beta glitch.

Will these applications get me to spend more time at LinkedIn? We’ll see.