Two days before defaulting on $266 million worth of debt obligations, chip-maker Spansion agreed to give its newly hired chief executive, John Kispert, a four-month advance on his $900,000 annual salary, an advance he won’t have to pay back should he quit before four months have elapsed.
He was also guaranteed a $1.75 million bonus contingent upon Read the rest of this entry »
CV Therapeutics, the Palo Alto maker of the chest-pain treatment drug, Ranexa, said Friday the company’s board turned down an offer to buy it for $16 a share from Japan’s second-largest drug maker, Astellas Pharma.
We posted last month about the first offer Read the rest of this entry »
Putting a cherry on top of the 62 percent raise they gave Chief Executive Jeffrey Housenbold this year, Shutterfly’s board approved paying him a discretionary bonus (meaning they didn’t have to pay it and it wasn’t owed him by way of meeting pre-arranged performance goals) of $283,600 for his work last year. Three other top executives “still with the company” also got bonuses, ranging from $46,000 to $57,000.
The last time we posted about compensation for Housenbold, we received more than a dozen comments, many of them from ex-SFLYers who were, shall we say, a bit Read the rest of this entry »
The plug will be pulled early on a promotion deal Depomed, the Menlo Park drug developer, had with Watson Pharma for marketing Depomed’s extended-release formulation of ciprofloxacin for the treatment of uncomplicated urinary tract infections. The deal, which was to last until 2010, will end this year instead, on Dec. 31, and maybe sooner.
Watson had been given an exclusive right back in July 2007 to market the drug to doctors in urology and obstetrics/gynecology specialties in return for a promotion fee based on gross sales.
Starbucks, which wants to enact a “one-time stock option exchange” in light of its shares losing about three-quarters of their value over the last couple of years, decided to delete one sentence from its 2005 stock plan following “discussions with (shareholder advisor) RiskMetrics Group in connection with its review” of the shareholder approval it is seeking at the coffee retailer’s annual meeting next month.
You can read the offending sentence for yourself, but the gist is, Read the rest of this entry »
Social Media Networks, the provider of “word-of-mouth” marketing via online social networks, raised $6.5 million last month, according to a regulatory filing it made today with the SEC, and intends to sell $1 million more of itself in the offering.
While the Regulation D filing doesn’t detail the buyers and how much each spent in the offering, the list of “Related Persons” includes Read the rest of this entry »
It’s an iPod bottom-lift that has twice the storage capacity of the latest iPod Classic.
And it doesn’t come from Infinite Loop.
Rapid Repair is selling a 240-gigabyte hard drive upgrade for iPods. So iPod lovers can cram 60,000 songs, 300 hours of video or 50,000 photos on their devices. But the self-installed Toshiba drive, which sells for $294.99, is only compatible with fifth-generation video iPods. Each hard drive comes with an installation kit.
There’s a waiting list for the new hard drives. To sign up, go to http://www.rapidrepair.com/shop/3119-hard-drive-disk-mk2431gah.html.
Brian Halla, National Semiconductor’s chief exec since 1996, sees energy efficiency as a promising growth market for his computer-chip company.
So Halla, who’d been tooling around town in a Jeep Wrangler and a Hummer, recently decided to buy an all-electric Tesla Roadster, a vehicle that carries a $109,000 pricetag. And he dropped by the Mercury News to show it off the other day.
How’s it to drive?
“It’s awesome,” Halla declared. “It is unbelievable. You sit at an intersection three abreast. And you’re literally at the next light before the other two cars have crossed the intersection.”
But the tiny car is a bit of a tight fit for a big fella like Halla, he noted. And driving something that fast (he said it can hit 60 miles per hour in just under four seconds) is somewhat unnerving.
“I have nightmares. I’m not qualified to drive the thing,” he said. “I just need to figure out how to get in and out of it. Then I’m going to be a happy camper. And how to drive it safely.”
Yahoo is shutting down its Briefcase tool that allows users to store files online and then access them from anywhere. We know because Yahoo sent a message to our Yahoo mail account telling us.
We will be officially closing Yahoo! Briefcase on Read the rest of this entry »
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One Sunday earlier this month, Hansen Medical, the Mountain Mountain View maker of robotic medical devices, and Gary Restani, its chief operating officer, agreed that his employment would be coming to an end.
Restani, who joined Hansen’s board in September 2006 and was named COO a month later, was to remain on the company’s board of directors after his employment ends March 1, according to the company’s SEC filing Feb. 12 announcing the agreement reached Feb. 8.
His departure was somewhat surprising, given that Read the rest of this entry »
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