SiliconBeat

Last week, Silicon Image doled out 450,000 stock options divided among  four executive and, in an unconventional twist, vesting on the lion’s share of the awards won’t take place until the fourth year, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday.

Ten percent of the restricted stock will vest on Read the rest of this entry »

Marvell Technology has offered to exchange options held by its employees with an exercise price of $12 or higher for a pro-rated number of shares of restricted stock. The exchange period, which began Tuesday, ends Jan. 23.

The exchange rate for options priced from $12 to $18 will be one restricted stock unit for every Read the rest of this entry »

Shutterfly, the Redwood City Internet-based digital photo sharing site, boosted the salary of its chief executive, Jeffrey Housenbold, by nearly two-thirds next year to $485,000 from the $300,000 salary he got in 2008, according to a filing the company made Monday with the SEC. That comes on the heels of a 9 percent salary increase he got last year. He’ll also get 10 percent of his new salary as a guaranteed minimum bonus to his cash compensation.

The company also served up a helping of Read the rest of this entry »

Cisco Systems, the San Jose networking giant, said Thursday that the compensation committee of its board of directors approved its “fiscal 2009 merit-based granting” to eligible employees of restricted stock units good for about 28 million shares. The committee also approved “merit-based right to receive future grants of performance-based restricted stock units for certain employees, based on Cisco’s financial performance in fiscal 2009, in a target amount of approximately 3 million restricted stock units.”

That adds up to approximately 31 million shares, which had a combined value of about Read the rest of this entry »

When Alfred Amoroso was named chief executive of Macrovision in June 2005, he was given an option to buy 500,000 shares and was guaranteed future option awards good for 125,000 shares each that were to be granted twice a year in each of 2006, 2007 and 2008.

A year later, however, Amoroso and/or Macrovision’s compensation committee evidently had second thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember back in August 2007, when VMware staged the most impressive initial public offering of a technology company since Google? The planned offering price for the 33 million shares it sold to the public for the first time was first estimated to be between $23 and $25, a range that was later raised to between $27 and $29. The shares finally went out at the top of the second range, and ended their first day at $51, up 76 percent.

In anticipation of the public offering, VMware directors authorized broad-based grants of options to employees totaling more than 35.6 million shares of stock with a price of $23.

Shares of VMware, which makes software to enhance the computing power and flexibility of servers, while controlling costs and energy consumption, soared to as high as $125 within less than three months of its debut. It was the best performing local IPO last year in the best year for initial offerings since 2000, the year the dot.com bubble burst.

That was then and this is now. Read the rest of this entry »