SiliconBeat

Heads up! The Pink Slip 2.0 project officially gets underway this Sunday with the first installment chronicling the lives of three recently laid-off Silicon Valley workers. I think you’ll find each of their stories compelling in its own way, with some common themes inter-linking their pink-slip experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Vermillion, the Fremont company formerly known as Ciphergen Biosystems that develops medical diagnostic tests, lost its chief scientific officer March 19. Dr. Eric Fung told the company he wished to pursue “another career opportunity.” The resignation was for personal reasons, the company assures us, and was “not the results of any disagreement with the company.”

Fung, 38, joined the company in 2000 as a lead Read the rest of this entry »

Micrel, the San Jose chip maker that won a nasty proxy battle last year with its then-largest independent shareholder, Obrem Capital, decided it better extend its poison-pill defense against hostile takeovers by one more year. The shareholder rights plan  set up a year ago was to have expired today, but will now live on until March 24, 2010, according to a regulatory filing.

On March 19, Micrel entered into a Read the rest of this entry »

The compensation committee at Electronic Arts is evidently not as confident about the companies near-term prospects as they were last year, judging by their decision March 18 to extend the performance period for some restricted stock awards it doled out to executives at the senior vice president level and above last May.

According to the original agreement, the awards were to vest Read the rest of this entry »

Shareholders at Google have put forward three proposals of their own to be voted on at the company’s annual meeting, according to the search-engine’s proxy filed today with the SEC.

One,  offered by the Teamsters, proposes that the company Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, Tesla Motors CEO, Chairman and Product Architect Elon Musk fairly bristled when critics noting production delays and some CEO turnover at his Silicon Valley electric car company compared it to two of the most well-documented failures of U.S. car-making history, Tucker and DeLorean.

It’s now safe to say that Tesla has easily passed Tucker, and seems headed on a path to leave comparisons to DeLorean behind, too.

Tucker was the dream of Preston Tucker. But only 51 of his 1948 Tucker Torpedo models were built before the company folded.

DeLorean was the name of another eponymous dreamer, John DeLorean. The ex-Pontiac chief saw about 9,000 of his DMC-12s built in Northern Ireland before production ended in 1982.

Tesla’s production of its Roadster has reached 250 deliveries, and later this week, it’ll unveil its second car, the Model S sedan. The company hopes to produce 20,000 of these vehicles a year once assembly starts in 2011.

It’s worth noting that Tucker, DeLorean and Tesla do share something: screen time.

Both Tucker and DeLorean are probably more famous with movie buffs than car fans. Jeff Bridges starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.” It gets 6.8 stars (out of 10) on imdb.com.

And the DeLorean was Doc Brown’s time-traveling machine in the “Back to the Future” triology (8.3, 7.4 and 7.0 on imdb.com) that ran from 1985 to 1990.

And it was his 2006 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” (7.7 stars on imdb.com) that led film-maker Chris Paine to Tesla. There’s a glimpse of the first Tesla at the end of his documentary.  He now owns one of the electric rides, and has been seen at various Tesla events with a film crew as he puts together a sequel called “Revenge of the Electric Car.”

You can read Paine’s blog item on his first week driving a Tesla here.

(Photo of the 2009 Tesla Roadster Sport courtesy of Tesla Motors.)

The $1.4 billion deal that Foster-City based Gilead Science’s announced March 12 to buy CV Therapeutics of Palo Alto has triggered a class-action shareholder lawsuit.

The legal action, which CV Therapeutics disclosed today in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was filed March 19 in Santa Clara County Superior Court by a group called Superior Partners. It accuses CV Therapeutics and its board of failing in their fiduciary duty to stockholders.

Among other claims, the suit alleges that CV Therapeutics’ board limited the number of potential buyers for the company and had a conflict of interest  because they will receive monetary compensation from the sale.

CV Therapeutics denied the claims.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit, the National Inventors Hall of Fame will honor 16 people who helped pioneer computer-chip technology during a ceremony Saturday, May 2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Andy Grove, who formerly served as Santa Clara chip-maker Intel’s chief executive and chairman, will be given a lifetime achievement award. In addition, 15 other chip innovators will be recognized for their contributions to the industry.

But you wouldn’t want us to spoil the surprise by telling you who they all are and what they did, would you? Of course not. So if you’re curious, go here.

In case you missed it, Applied Materials of Santa Clara, the world’s biggest manufacturer of equipment used to make computer chips, has trimmed its board members’ pay again in light of the dismal economy.

Following on its decision in December to cut the annual cash retainer of its non-employee directors by 10 percent, Applied recently reduced the retainer by another 10 percent.

For those of you counting, that whittles the board member’s individual retainer from $65,000 to $52,000.  Applied also has slashed 20 percent from the base salaries of its senior executives.

As IBM kicked the tires at Sun Microsystems this weekend, Sun’s assistant general counsel, Bruce Kerr, was busy putting the finishing touches on his latest song parody — “It’s Cloud Computing Now” — madly sung to the tune of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.

Very fun, of course, with witty lyrics aplenty, concluding with:

It’s cloud computing I want now
Who needs a server farm anyhow?

Kerr plays a nice guitar and has nothing to apologize for vocally. Looking into the new song brought us into contact with a couple of his other parodies, including Any Lane, a plaintive cry against bad freeway driving that we couldn’t agree with more.