Looks like Darl McBride, SCO’s “sue-happy cowboy” CEO, has seen his last roundup. In a new 8-K filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, the company reveals that, under the order of a bankruptcy court, it has eliminated the chief executive officer and president positions and consequently sacked McBride.
EBay’s plan to sell a 65 percent stake in Skype to a group of private investors is going to be a bit more difficult to pull off than expected. This afternoon, Joltid, a company owned by Skype’s founders, filed a copyright suit against eBay and the consortium of investors that just paid $1.9 billion for a majority interest in it.
For a company whose business is built on the recession-brutalized fine-dining industry, OpenTable’s IPO last week was impressive. Must have made for quite a windfall for the company’s larger investors. Especially those who took the opportunity to dump their stakes in their entirety.
Blockbuster in a Monday filing told the Securities and Exchange Commission what anyone who’s observed its fast-declining fortunes has known for some time now: The company isn’t sure it can stay in business much longer. In a PricewaterhouseCoopers assessment included as part of its latest 10-K, Blockbuster acknowledged that its financial situation raises “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
Here’s further confirmation that Time Warner is looking to spin off AOL. In an SEC filing Monday, the company said it is seeking to amend debt agreements that restrict it from unloading the struggling business. Coming as it does after the hiring of Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive, as AOL CEO and chairman, the move would seem to suggest that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has given up on the idea of an AOL merger with Yahoo and is pushing ahead full-bore with a spinoff.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini has confirmed what “people familiar with the matter” and industry observers have been saying for months now. Sun is eager to find a buyer and has offered itself for sale to IBM and pretty much anyone else who might have the cash to acquire it.
A few weeks back, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Sue warned that Nortel is facing a very bleak future. “Considering the worsening macro environment, Nortel’s challenged industry position, and concerns related to liquidity while the capital markets are basically closed, we think bankruptcy is a distinct possibility down the road,” Sue wrote in a note to investors. Looks like Sue was right, and the road to which he referred was a short one.
Macworld 2009 is still about a month away and already, Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry is frantically turning the hand crank on the rumor mill. In a note to clients today, Chowdhry claims Apple will debut an entirely new device category next year.
Yahoo’s attempts to rally shareholders in advance of its annual meeting on Aug. 1 are going about as well as its attempts to rally its business. Which is to say, not well at all.
Get this: Yahoo’s merger talks with Microsoft collapsed because the software giant wasn’t fully committed to them. This, presumably according to the same folks at Yahoo who would have us believe the company didn’t learn of Microsoft’s offer of $33 per share until Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s kiss-off letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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