SiliconBeat

Glu Mobile, the San Mateo maker of games for mobile phones, filed details today of its plan to offer its employees the opportunity to trade in their underwater options for new ones priced to reflect the stocks current trading value, which as of Wednesday’s close was 59 cents per share.

Glu is offering to exchange options for any employee in the U.S. and the United Kingdom — except for its executive officers and directors on its board — that are priced at $1.25 or more.

For options priced from $1.25 to $1.99, the company is offering a one-for-one exchange for shares to be priced in about a month. The exchange ratio gets progressively smaller as the option strike price grows higher, up to a one-for-four exchange on any options priced at $5.95 or more.

In December, Glu Mobile reported that it’s chief executive, Greg Ballard, had requested a 25 percent cut in his $375,000 salary, which basically undid the pay raise he’d received the year before. The news was delivered the same day the company announced it would be making an unspecified cut in the number of its employees. Glu had 550 employees as of Feb. 28, up from 417 the year before.

Part of that increase came from Glu’s $38.8 million acquisition of mobile-game publisher Superscape in March 2008. Glu wrote off all of the goodwill related to that transaction at the end of December.

Intel Capital, the venture investing wing of the semiconductor giant, announced eight investments totaling over $60 million at the first day of its ninth annual CEO Summit today in San Francisco. The companies invested in were: Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Cartwright, the founder and ex-CEO of Calpine, said Tuesday that a new company he has co-founded that employs technology to “produce reliable electricity and less greenhouse gas” has lined up its first round of venture funding from Sequoia Capital, who is leading the round with Bay Partners, with additional money from Redpoint Ventures.

Cartwright, who was fired from Calpine in November 2005 prior to that company’s bankruptcy filing, joined with another ex-Calpine executive Tom Mason to found Advanced Power Projects, a Fremont company that uses technology that captures “waste heat” from combustion gas turbines and turns it into additional power without the need for a steam turbine, condenser or cooling tower,” according the company’s Web site

The level of funding was conspicuously absent from the press release announcing the news and we have yet to hear back from the company as to why.

Other former Calpine executives working at the new company are its former vice chairman, Ann Curtis, who heads HR, and its former VP of operations, Fred Manuel, who is the company’s senior VP of engineering.

John Redding, formerly with General Electric’s nuclear energy division, heads up marketing and sales, while former Orrick, Herrington & Sutclif lawyer Mike Ross is the new company’s chief financial officer and general counsel.