SiliconBeat

Atigen Communications of Fremont is cutting the size of its board in the wake of a decision to not renominate Eric Wanger after learning that he traded in the company’s stock during blackout periods that prohibit insider trading. The change becomes effective at the company’s next annual shareholders meeting on Feb. 9, according to a filing with the SEC Monday.

Altigen also reported in its proxy that was also filed Tuesday, that Wanger failed to timely file 32  separate forms, including 25 covering 67 transaction related to the acquisition of 785,973 shares of the maker of telecommunications server products.

Wanger revealed his increased holdings in an amendment to a 13D filing on Dec. 12 in which he reported “a material increase” in his Altigen holdings that was due months earlier. In the filing, Wanger characterized his failure to file promptly as “inadvertent.”

Wanger, who was named to Altigen’s board two years ago and serves on both its auditing and compensation committees, manages his own investment firm. He has a law degree from Stanford, received his B.S. in math from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a chartered financial analyst and a member of the California bar.

On Tuesday, Omnicell’s vice president of sales “informed” the company that she would be resigning, effective Feb. 15, according to a filing the company made Tuesday with the SEC. The company hastened to add that her resignation “is due to personal reason and not the result of any disagreement with Omnicell.

The same day, Alcoa said it would be laying off 15 percent of its work force, or about 14,500 employees, helping make Luhr’s resignation seem like a pretty gutsy move, given the current business environment, no?

Well, no.

Imagine our surprise when in the next paragraph the company explains that it will pay Luhr her base salary for 14 months after she leaves (cost: $277,667) as well as the premiums for her health insurance over that period.

“In return Ms. Luhr has agreed to provide Omnicell with a general release of claims.”

What claims? She has no disagreements with the company, right? Perhaps we lack a certain business sophistication to understand this, but as more people are let go from their jobs against their will, this kind of arrangement will seem even harder to understand.

For those who care, we thought we’d provide an update on Planktos, the carbon-credits business formerly located in Foster City.

It’s now based in Palm Desert and has a new majority shareholder — an entity known as Maidon Services Limited bought 45 million shares of Planktos, or 53.1 percent of its outstanding stock, for $200,000, from Solar Energy. $125,000 was delivered on the deal’s closing date, with the rest payable within the next 14 months. Solar Energy maintains the option of converting the final $75,000 it owes into Planktos shares for 25 cents each.

We have posted about Planktos a few times over the last year, first in September 2007 after the company said it had secured up to $2 million in a private placement from an investor it didn’t name.

A year ago Planktos said it was considering “winding down” its operations, and in March the company said it was forced to indefinitely postpone its ocean fertilization efforts once intended to restore marine plant life and generate ecological offsets for the global carbon credit market .

JDS Uniphase revealed that it will pay Kevin Kennedy, its departing chief executive, a $400,000 bonus within seven days after he leaves on Dec. 31. That was the minimum bonus guaranteed him, no matter what the performance of the company was that year.

Kennedy, who informed the company in October of his plan to step down, will also be paid Read the rest of this entry »

EHealth, the online marketplace for health insurance based in Mountain View, said today that its board of directors approved a stock repurchase program that would allow the company to buy back up to 10 percent of its outstanding shares or up to $30 million of them, whichever is less.

The move came after shares of eHealth, which the company first offered to the public two years ago at $14 each, traded at a new post-IPO low Tuesday of $9.56, before closing at $10.55. The buyback news failed to cheer investors Wednesday when they drove its shares down 59 cents, or 5.6 percent, to close at $9.96.

The company reported earnings for its 2008 third quarter last month that showed a 19 percent  drop in net income on a 24 percent increase in sales. Results included a non-cash charge of $955,000 for stock-based compensation that was 173 percent higher than the year-ago quarter.

When Kevin Kennedy joined JDS Uniphase in September 2003, the company was a train wreck. It had fired thousands of employees. It had taken massive write offs stemming from a series of overpriced acquisitions. It was, in short, the poster child for the telecom disaster.

With the news this week that Kennedy is stepping down as CEO, it’s hard to know how to grade his work, or the state of JDSU.

On the plus side, JDSU took a daring stand to fight a class action shareholder lawsuit and won a rare court trial. Losing likely would have crippled, if not killed the company. Fighting it was daring, but smart in the end.

And the company’s revenues have slowly grown since Kennedy took the helm:

2003: $675.9 million.
2004: $635.9 million
2005: $712.2 million.
2006: $1.2 billion.
2007: $1.3968 billion
2008: $1.53 billion.

On the downside, the company has still not posted an annual profit under Kennedy, though the losses have shrunk. I’m guessing the credit crisis and economic implosion is not going to help with things there . And the stock price has never recovered. Even with a reverse split along the way, the trajectory over the past five years is down:

So, it’s a mixed bag, at best. The company is still alive. And has a hefty chunk of change in the bank, so it will likely be around for awhile. But even if it can continue to keep the lights on, it’s harder to know whether it’s a company that will ever really matter again.

A few weeks ago, the folks at Plantronics asked me to help judge a contest they were holding. The idea was that the term “telecommuter” was a bit dated given how our work habits and technology have changed. They wanted folks to help them select a successor. So they opened the door to nominations and got about 500. They sent those nominations to me and several other judges over the weekend and we each picked our 10 favorites.

Plantronics tallied those votes and have now posted the 10 most popular selected by the judges. Those are now online here.

Now it’s your turn. Cast your vote for your favorite. You have until Nov. 7. The winner will be announced Nov. 18.

Hewlett-Packard announced plans to occupy an “advanced manufacturing complex” in West China to both “serve the fast-growing Chinese market and accelerate economic development in the region,” according to a press release put out today by the world’s biggest manufacturer of personal computers. HP plans to make “”state-of-the-art notebook and desktop PCs” at the 20,000-square-meter facility in Chongqing (its skyline at night is pictured) starting in 2010.

Chongqing is one of the fastest growing cities in China, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, which put its GDP last year at $410 billion with a growth rate of 15.6 percent over the prior year. The city has 500,000 university students and more than 1,000 research and development institutions.

“In addition to the educated work force, development conditions offered by the local government made the development attractive to HP,” said the company.

My Sunday column (”We need to stop sending our e-waste overseas“) called on the U.S. to take two direct steps that would address the export of our e-waste to poor communities around the world.

The column came out of a conversation I had with Sheila Davis, the executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

I had several thoughtful e-mails from readers. But there was one in particular that I wanted to highlight. Ed Malley, of Aptos wrote:

Read the rest of this entry »

In my latest column, I wrote about my visit to Current TV last week for its “Hack the Debate” event. Current TV was co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt. And last Friday, Current teamed up with Twitter and Adobe to broadcast the presidential debate. But if you were watching on Current, you also saw anyone’s Twitter posts if they included #current in the tweet.

Before the event, Gore welcomed visitors to the event. I added a short video clip here of his remarks.