Raise your hand if you recently quit your job and in the process got a severance package that was bigger than what you’d have gotten if you were let go by your employer?
Avistar Communications, the San Mateo company that was delisted from the Nasdaq stock market last month, reported today that Read the rest of this entry »
Gerald Burnett, chairman of the board of directors at Avistar Communications, personally guaranteed the repayment of funds borrowed and interest accrued under a $10 million line of credit the San Mateo maker of desktop videoconferencing and online collaboration tools has with JP Morgan Chase Bank, according to a regulatory filing Friday.
Avistar, which received a warning last month from Nasdaq that its stock was in danger of being delisted months after it regained compliance from a separate warning issued earlier this year, has been in a patent fight with software giant Microsoft and holding its own. The board voted its chief executive, Simon Moss, a bonus despite the fact that the company failed to achieve pre-established performance goals.
Avistar Communications was warned again by Nasdaq last month that its shares are at risk of being delisted from its stock market listings. It was warned earlier this year that its stock would be delisted unless it could lift its per-share price above $1, which it finally managed to do on a consistent enough basis in August, when it won a reprieve from Nasdaq.
Now the San Mateo supplier of desktip videonconferencing and online collaboration tools, which has been in an intellectual property battle with Microsoft over numerous patents has seen its market value sink below Read the rest of this entry »
Back in April, the compensation committee on the board at Avistar Communications (Nasdaq: AVSR), approved a bonus structure for its chief executive, Simon Moss, who joined the company in January. Under it, his target bonus was set at $200,000, payable in quarterly installments based on the achievement of certain financial performance targets.
Moss also gets to participate in Read the rest of this entry »
Avistar Communications got a letter from the Nasdaq stock market last week telling the company that it is back in compliance with the rule requiring companies it lists to have a minimum stock price of $1 a share.
Its share price shot back above $1 back in June Read the rest of this entry »
Avistar heard from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that, as of Friday, it had rejected nearly half of the patent re-examination requests made by Microsoft regarding Avistar’s patent portfolio. Its shares jumped 21 cents, or 21.7 percent, Monday to close at $1.18. Read the rest of this entry »
Avistar Communications will cut its U.S. and European workforces by 25 percent, blaming the move largely on Microsoft’s legal challenge of patents held by the San Mateo videoconferencing company, according to a press release it issued Wednesday. It had 88 employees as of the end of 2006, the most recent figure available.
Microsoft moved to challenge all of Avistar’s 29 U.S. patents through the U.S. Patent
Office’s re-examination process after “in-depth licensing discussions” failed to produce a result the software giant was satisfied with, according to Avistar’s release.
“This single action against Avistar’s complete US patent portfolio represents over 5% of the entire 2007 third-party re-examination challenges at the USPTO,” stated Simon Moss, Avistar’s CEO, in the release. “”This leads to only one logical conclusion … Microsoft must be taking our patent portfolio very seriously in regard to it’s relevance to their present or future products. Why else would it take such a dramatic action?”
Avistar, which was notified in November that its stock was subject to de-listing by the
Nasdaq market because its market value fell below $25 million, said March 20 it regained that compliance. Avistar shares have more than doubled so far this year. They fell three cents Wednesday to close at 88 cents.
Can one person make a difference?
In the case of its stock price, Avistar Communications is hoping that its founder and chief executive, Gerald Burnett can. The San Mateo company put out a press release Monday announcing that Burnett “intends to purchase additional shares of Avistar’s common stock in the open market during the balance of the month of November”.
“I believe that the current price of our shares does not reflect the appropriate valuation of the company,” said Burnett in a statement included in the release, “I will be entering the market to acquire shares during this current “open trading window’, demonstrating my own confidence in the prospects of the company.”
Burnett currently owns about 14.8 million shares of Avistar, or about 43% of the outstanding shares.
Shares of Avistar rose more than 40 percent Monday after the announcement to 90 cents, lifting the company’s market value to $30.9 million. That was shy of the $35 million in market value that is one of the conditions for Avistar’s continued listing on the Nasdaq stock market. Last week the company reported receiving a deficiency letter from Nasdaq that pegged Avistar’s market value at $27.8 million as of Nov. 1.
The maker of video communication networks also fails to measure up to two other listing requirements: a minimum of $2.5 million in stockholder equity and minimum of $500,000 in net income from continuing operations in its last fiscal year. In its most recent financial filing with the SEC it showed a stockholder deficit of $3.5 million as of June 30. It has also failed to record a profit in any of its last three fiscal years.
Subscribe via RSS all feeds