SiliconBeat

The board of directors at Electronics for Imaging apparently batted 1.000 at the company’s annual meeting Friday when all the directors were reelected and all the proposals the board submitted to its shareholders for a vote passed.

But the perfect record obscured the fact that Read the rest of this entry »

NetApp asked its shareholders to approve a proposal to allow a “one-time option exchange” for its employees at a special meeting held April 21. The measure was approved, according to a filing May 5 that detailed the terms of the exchange program. What wasn’t known until today was just how close the company came to losing that vote.

In its annual 10-K filing with the SEC Wednesday, the Sunnyvale supplier of data storage systems and services revealed the vote totals. The number of shares voted in favor Read the rest of this entry »

LeapFrog Enterprises, the maker of technology based educational toys, changed its bylaws at its annual shareholder meeting held June 4 to allow shareholders to fill vacancies that occur on the company’s board of directors.

The proposal, to which the board took no position either pro or con, was submitted by Read the rest of this entry »

Atmel CEO Steve Laub told employees of the San Jose chip maker that its board has agreed to ask shareholders to approve a “one-time” stock option exchange program at its annual meeting scheduled for May 20 that would commence sometime within 12 months following the vote.

“(L)ike many other companies in the technology industry, (Atmel) has recently experienced Read the rest of this entry »

Sunnyvale chip-maker Zoran’s board of directors last week approved a plan to exchange shares held in underwater options for a lesser number of shares of restricted stock, according to a preliminary proxy filing the company made today in advance of its June 26 annual meeting, where it will ask shareholders to approve the plan.

“Like many semiconductor companies, our stock price has experienced Read the rest of this entry »

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.

ShoreTel, the Sunnyvale telecommunications company, filed news today of a “restructuring plan to lower its cost structure and improve efficiencies by reducing its worldwide workforce by approximately 9 percent.” That would be equal to about 33 employees based on the company’s last published headcount of 365 as of June 30. The company expects the terminations, which are to be completed by the end of this quarter, to cost Read the rest of this entry »

Intel grabbed headlines today announcing its first-ever option exchange program that helped balance its implementation of an across-the-board salary freeze. But joining Intel today in announcing a plan to reprice employee stock option plan was NetApp, the Sunnyvale provider of network storage appliances, which is asking its shareholders to vote on a plan to reprice options with exercise prices of $22 or higher.

In its argument in favor of the measure, NetApp’s board said that Read the rest of this entry »

Add eBay to the list of  technology company seeking to rescue its employees underwater options. Last week, the online auctioneer’s board of directors approved putting two proposals before shareholders at the company’s annual meeting on April 29 that would facilitate the exchange of underwater options for a smaller number of restricted shares  that will retain value as long as eBay’s stock price does.

“Like many companies, we have experienced a significant decline Read the rest of this entry »

Starbucks, which wants to enact a “one-time stock option exchange” in light of its shares losing about three-quarters of their value over the last couple of years, decided to delete one sentence from its 2005 stock plan following “discussions with (shareholder advisor) RiskMetrics Group in connection with its review” of the shareholder approval it is seeking at the coffee retailer’s annual meeting next month.

You can read the offending sentence for yourself, but the gist is, Read the rest of this entry »