SiliconBeat

FormFactor has sued Spansion for $8.1 million it says the Sunnyvale flash memory maker owes it for product ordered and delivered but never paid for, according to information found in the Livermore company’s 10-K annual financial report filed with the SEC Friday. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Half International, the staffing services firm based in Menlo Park, was named as a defendant in a court case brought by a (we’re-presuming) former employee that alleges that temporary employees in California were “improperly denied expense reimbursement and wages for time purportedly spent preparing for interviews, and traveling to and attending interviews with, alleged clients of” Robert Half’s, according to a filing with the SEC last month.

The complaint was filed Read the rest of this entry »

A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 was filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by four affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Joining as plaintiffs in the action was Tom Campbell, a former U.S. Congressman who represented a portion of Silicon Valley for five terms and who recently stepped down as dean of Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, as well as Read the rest of this entry »

Security software supplier McAfee reported losing a jury verdict in patent infringement case brought againt it by Dallas-based DeepNines in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The jury found that some of the applications in McAfee’s IntruShield network security appliance did infringe on DeepNines’ patents, and award a one-time lump sum payment for “past and future damamges” of $18 million, according to McAfee’s SEC filing today.

The jury also found the infringement to be “willful,” Read the rest of this entry »

My column in the Mercury News today takes a swipe at Boots Del Biaggio. But near the bottom, I also turn an eye toward Biaggio’s one-time friend Doug Bergeron, the chief executive officer of VeriFone:

“By the way, Bergeron - who sold $134 million worth of VeriFone stock from September 2005 to November 2007 - ran into his own problems in December when it was disclosed that his company had overstated its pretax profits by 80 percent. Oops.”

But apparently I was a bit behind the curve on that. In April, my colleague Steve Johnson posted a story about VeriFone’s disclosure that its misstatement was larger than originally thought, and that its CFO was stepping down. Johnson wrote:

“The maker of store checkout-counter devices that process credit card transactions announced Dec. 3 that it had found accounting errors that would require it to cut its previously stated operating profit for the nine months that ended July 31, 2007, by $29.7 million. But after a further investigation by its audit committee, which reviewed more than 5 million documents, the company said Wednesday its operating profit will have to be scaled back by $36.9 million.”

Yikes. Bergeron also said he was giving up the chairman’s role, but would stay on as CEO. But there was no word on whether he planned to give back any of the money he made from selling stock during the period when the company was overstating its profits (and enjoying a nice run up in the stock price).

The involvement of Bergeron with Del Biaggio is much bigger news in his native land of Canada. On Monday, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran a story recalling that Bergeron was supposed to be part of Boots’ group buying a stake in the NHL’s Nashville Predators. Last Fall, Boots told a Globe and Mail reporter:

“I don’t mind telling The Globe and Mail I’m very excited to have a Canadian billionaire as part of my group.”

The paper said it never confirmed that Bergeron was a billionaire. But it remains unclear why Bergeron dropped out of the group. And whatever the reasons, his finance firm DGB is now suing Boots for obtaining fraudulent loans.

I’m guessing the friendship is long since over. But I’m still left wondering what happened last fall. And how these two characters hooked up in the first place.