SiliconBeat

   Last week, we paired up Kris, Elise and Roopa with Bay Area career coaches to see how, if at all, this expert advice might help our participants’ job searches. The story should run in the Merc this week, possibly on Wednesday, so keep an eye out for this next installment in Pink Slip 2.0. Until then, here are some notes from them about their hour-long sessions - first up, Roopa and her time with coach Tim Johnston of thenorth40network
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Kiva, the self-described “world’s first person-to-person micro-lending” Web site whose stated mission is “to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty”, has some of its participants fuming over an apparent change in the site’s business model that now allows loans to be made to people in the United States.

Kiva allows you to browse profiles Read the rest of this entry »

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd gave a short talk at Stanford this morning, and offered a few interesting comments on running the world’s biggest technology company.

First, on the sheer size of HP: The company’s annual sales grew from $79 billion in 2004 to $118 billion last year. The recent EDS acquisition gave HP nearly 320,000 employees. Hurd said HP’s supply chain now delivers three printers every second, two PCs a second and nearly one server every ten seconds.

Second, on the ethical challenges that face a global company which does 70 percent of its business outside the United States: Hurd said HP’s chief ethics officer and legal staff are constantly reviewing operations, but added, “There are lots of opportunities for things to not be exactly as we like it to be. We know something is not right this second, but we just don’t know exactly what it is.”

Hurd went on to say that HP has to be extra vigilant as it does so much business in emerging markets like Russia. “Nothing against Russia. But those emerging markets also have emerging cultures in the way they do business. We have people who grew up in cultures where they don’t do business the way we at HP like to do business.”

Third, on the personal demands of his job: Hurd, who reportedly collected about $42 million in salary, bonuses and compensation last year, said he spends nearly two-thirds of his time traveling and meeting with customers and managers around the world. When asked how that affects his family life — Hurd is married and has two children — he responded: “I don’t think you take these jobs if you’re not going to do them. I think you have to be willing to deal with the repercussions or you don’t sign on.”

He went on: “The minute you try to re-architect something to fit your personal life, when you have a company like ours, it won’t work. It’s non-sustainable.”

Hurd also outlined some of HP’s strategic vision for IT, which calls for building hardware around open, non-proprietary standards, and then adding value (and profit) by selling software and services on top of that.

Different segments of the hardware market are converging, he added, predicting that in five years, “you will not be able to tell a server from a storage device, a storage device from a networking device.”

I’ve often wondered about that - keep doing what you love doing until you’re not able for whatever reason to do it anymore? Or, develop a back-up plan now, just in case? I’m sure a lot of you right now who are still working are wondering the same thing, too. Read the rest of this entry »

KVO Capital Management, the investment firm that advised the management of Kana Software in November that it “would be well served to consider significant changes in business strategy and corporate governance,” today nominated its own candidate for the one director slot up for election to Kana’s classified board at its annual meeting scheduled for July 15.

KVO’s candidate, Melvin Keating, would face off against Read the rest of this entry »

I’m just catching up on some discussions I missed while traveling this week. One of the more interesting was the chatter around Facebooks announcement that it was finally going to do something about search on the social networking site.

I was just discussing this with a few folks this week. As things stand now, Facebook search is somewhere between horrible and useless. Facebook is great for seeing what I did the last couple of days. But if I want to find something I did two months ago, forget it. I have to manually click back through dozens of pages on my news feed.

Also, Facebook doesnt help me build a larger narrative about my life and online activity. So I hope this new search will help mine and understand my behavior to help create a better profile of me and my interests over time.

Anyway, here are a few posts I thought help the stage for this discussion. Here’s the Facebook blog post announcing the search plans: Read the rest of this entry »

Aruba Networks, which last November layed off 46 employees to reduce costs and “streamline operations”, last week granted its chief executive, Dominic Orr, a 33 percent raise in salary from $300,000 to $400,000, according to a filing it made with the SEC today.

Chief Financial Officer Steffan Tomlinson Read the rest of this entry »

Google tossed another $2.6 million into its investment in 23andMe, the privately held personal genetic testing  company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, who is married to Google founder Sergey Brin. The investment was part of a second round of funding in the company’s Series B preferred shares that included New Enterprise Associates, which negotiated the terms of the investment, according to a filing Google made today with the SEC.

Brin, who invested Read the rest of this entry »

Acquisition-hungry Oracle takes pride in its track record of successfully buying and integrating other companies into its very lucrative software business. So without pausing as it prepares to digest Sun Microsystems, in a $7.4 billion deal that could be finalized next month, Oracle said today that it has acquired the intellectual property of the much smaller Conformia Software, for an undisclosed price.

Conformia makes business software that helps scientific and pharmaceutical companies manage the design and development of new drugs. Ironically, just two years ago, the Sunnyvale start-up received funding from an investment fund created by SAP, the German software giant that is one of Oracle’s biggest competitors in the market for business software applications.

Oracle has been expanding from its original core business of database software, moving aggressively into applications and middleware. A year ago, Oracle announced it was creating a global business unit to focus on the health sciences industry, which is a growing market.

Earlier this year, Oracle added to its offerings in that unit by acquiring another small company, Relsys, that made software for tracking and analyzing drug safety data. Oracle now says it will integrate Conformia’s technology with its other software products.

Kana Software, the Menlo Park supplier of customer-service software whose auditor has raised substantial doubt about (its) ability to continue as a going concern, says it decided not to give its chief executive, Michael Fields, a raise over the last two years.  Instead it starting paying his rent, according to the company proxy file today.

Fields, who became chief executive in 2005, was paid Read the rest of this entry »