Sony Ericsson, the London-based mobile handset maker, is shutting its Seattle-area office, as first reported by Engadget and Triangle Business Journal. Sony Ericsson is cutting about 2,000 out of 9,900 jobs globally, including closing offices in Research Triangle Park, San Diego, Miami, Kista, Sweden, and Chennai, India. The moves are part of a company-wide restructuring that includes moving its North American headquarters from Research Triangle Park to Atlanta, GA.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It turns out that Don Dodge—famous among entrepreneurs for putting a personal face on Microsoft’s operations in New England, until his unceremonious termination earlier this month—was only in job limbo for about about an hour and a half. Dodge sends Xconomy word this morning that he has been hired by Microsoft archrival Google.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, was the first person to contact him with a job offer, “90 minutes after the news of the layoff hit” on November 4, Dodge says in a blog post about his move.

At Microsoft, Dodge was director of business development for the Emerging Business Team. In an e-mail, Dodge says he’ll have a similar role at Google: “My main job will be working with developers helping them build apps on Google technologies and platforms. Startups will always be my first love, so I will spend as much time as possible with developers at startups.”

Dodge says he will spend his “20 percent time”—the one day per week that Google employees are encouraged to spend on personal projects—working with Google Ventures, the venture funding wing led by Rich Miner from Google’s Cambridge office and Bill Maris from the company’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters. “There are some obvious synergies there,” Dodge writes.

Dodge’s job shift will ultimately take him away from Massachusetts. But he says he’ll be working from Google’s Cambridge office through the holidays, and that he will be “back in Boston so often people will think I still live here. It was the same after I left Silicon Valley…they think I still live there.”

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch broke the story about Dodge’s new job last night, and Dodge himself shared more details about it this morning.

In previous public statements about his departure from Microsoft, Dodge has been diplomatic to the point of saintliness. But in today’s post he takes the gloves partway off, writing that “laying off 5,000 people when you have $37B in cash and huge profits is not cool.”

He also takes a few jabs at Microsoft products—calling Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail management program “tired,” saying that his Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone “didn’t measure up,” and commenting that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is too slow. At Google, naturally enough, Dodge will be using Gmail to manage his e-mail, getting an Android-powered mobile phone, and using the Google Chrome browser. And it’s probably safe to assume he won’t be doing many searches on Bing.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

We’ve all been wondering how the Adobe layoffs, reported earlier this week, may affect the Seattle area—especially given the slew of other recent cutbacks in the local tech industry. Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), which is headquartered in San Jose, CA, has a strong presence in Seattle. As of recently, it employed some 500 people, focused on product development, operations, and advanced technology and research, at its Fremont offices.

Well, one prominent executive who’s leaving the company locally is Bill McCoy, Adobe’s general manager of ePublishing Business. McCoy is Adobe’s main e-book person. He made key contributions to Adobe’s PostScript and PDF technologies, and his team has helped lead projects like Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, and Adobe InDesign. He’s on the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, and has been heavily involved in the EPUB standards movement. (You can read more about McCoy at TeleRead.org.)

In a blog post this week, McCoy said he’s leaving Adobe “in the near future” to pursue other opportunities yet to be determined. “I will be taking a little bit of time off, but there is no doubt that I’ll continue to be involved in the future of digital books, especially where that future intersects with web standards and open source,” McCoy writes. “I believe that Adobe will continue to play a critical role as an enabler of interoperable solutions, but I also believe that the community needs to stay vigilant to ensure that for-profit corporations don’t just talk the talk about being open, but also walk the walk.”

It sounds like Adobe is overhauling its efforts in the area, as its competition with Amazon and other e-publishing companies heats up. In a blog post, Adobe said it “has made the decision to expand its investment in digital publishing, creating a new organization focused on delivering products to increase digital revenue opportunities for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. This organization will combine the efforts of Adobe’s eBook business responsible for the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, and PDF and EPUB authoring support in Adobe InDesign with Adobe’s digital newspaper and magazine efforts.” The company added, “We are particularly excited about what we have in store for 2010. We plan to further our reach to emerging mobile reading platforms to allow readers to read anywhere, on any device.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

It was big news here in New England last week when Don Dodge announced on his blog that he had been laid off from Microsoft as part of some 800 layoffs at the software powerhouse. Dodge had been a regular on the innovation scene here in New England—and around the world, really—and was known as Microsoft’s enthusiastic ambassador to the startup world.

In his initial post about being laid off, Dodge, who was based in New England with the formal title of director of business development for the Emerging Business Team, said being laid off was “a total surprise” and that his bosses “offered no explanation.” But he kept his comments at a high level.

Since being laid off, Dodge has reported that he has picked up more than 1,500 Twitter followers. But other than that, I haven’t spotted much from him. That all changed today. Dodge not only posted (turns out he posted it yesterday, but I didn’t see it until today) a thoughtful piece on his blog about leaving Microsoft, he did a roughly 11-minute videotaped “exit interview” with TechCrunch.

To me, the more interesting of the two was Dodge’s own heartfelt post, called “Pay It Forward, give and you shall Receive.” He talks about the many friends, old and new, who reached out, the job offers the poured in, and more. Some excerpts:

“I want to publicly say thank you to all my friends. You know who your friends are when times are tough. I heard from hundreds of friends last week and it meant a lot to me. Social media has created a whole new set of “friends” who know a lot about you and care about you, even though you may have never met in person. Hundreds of these friends took the time to write to me. Over 400 emails on my new Gmail account. There were also hundreds of comments on blogs and news sites that carried the story of my separation from Microsoft. It was almost like I had died, but got to read my obituary and hear the tributes. It was surreal, uplifting, humbling, and very gratifying. Thank you. I had no idea…really.”

“Then of course there were the job offers or offers to discuss opportunities. They came from everywhere. The big tech companies, the biggest names in the business, were very quick to reach out, within hours of the news. I was pleasantly surprised. VC firms wanted to talk about opportunities at their firms and within their portfolio companies. Startup founders were also quick to act. Thank you all. I appreciate every single one of you.”

TechCrunch has done nothing to disguise its opinion of Microsoft’s decision; founder Michael Arrington, who conducted the “exit interview,” has called it a “huge mistake.” You can find TechCrunch’s post here. I’ve embedded the video below.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based RealNetworks is cutting 4 percent of its worldwide staff today, about 70 out of 1,700 jobs, according to All Things Digital. The report cites the economic downturn and cost-cutting as reasons for the move. Last week, RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) reported a small profit for the third quarter, the company’s first profitable quarter since the first three months of 2008.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Don Dodge, admired by many technology entrepreneurs as Microsoft’s enthusiastic ambassador to the startup world, is one of those swept up in today’s big round of layoffs at the software giant. Dodge was director of business development for the Emerging Business Team, working from Microsoft’s offices in Cambridge, MA.

Dodge revealed the news in a post on his own blog today. He said the termination came as “a total surprise” and that his managers, who include corporate vice president for strategic and emerging business development Dan’l Lewin, “offered no explanation.”

As Greg reported earlier, the layoffs announced today affect some 800 people across the company, including employees based in Washington and Massachusetts. The company hasn’t revealed specifics about which locations were affected most severely, so it isn’t known whether Dodge is part of a larger contingent of Cambridge-based Microsoft employees being let go.

Dodge is a veteran of Web and software companies Forte, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove, who joined Microsoft as a result of its acquisition of Groove in 2005. He is extremely well known in the technology community in Boston and around the country as a booster of startup-based entrepreneurship.

Dodge was philosophical in his blog post about getting a pink slip. “Today I start thinking about the next chapter in my life,” he writes. “Being totally consumed with my job and traveling every week has left no time to think about other opportunities. That changes today. I couldn’t be more excited about the future….I will be blogging more often now, and that excites me. There are lots of topics that I have wanted to dive into but just haven’t had the time. I will be seeing more friends too. Again, I have been so busy traveling that I haven’t had time to connect with friends all over the world. It’s all good.”

Reaction to Dodge’s dismissal from the blogosphere has been swift, incredulous, and angry. Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, is calling the decision “a huge mistake for Microsoft,” since Dodge was “the face of Microsoft” to many in the startup community. “He travels constantly, speaking at events whenever he’s asked, and makes a big effort to give young startups the attention they deserve. This is a guy who gives a heck of a lot more to the community than he ever takes back…Don invested years of his time making Microsoft seem more human. He wasted all that time, apparently.”

Dodge said in a Twitter post today that his “phone has been ringing off the hook” since he posted the news.

Dodge has been a guest blogger for Xconomy, contributing a piece on the Web 2.0 investing bubble in June 2008 and a piece on venture capital fundraising in September 2008.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Microsoft has confirmed it is cutting 800 positions across the company today, in its third round of layoffs this year. About a quarter of the jobs are in the Seattle area, and an unspecified number of employees in Massachusetts are impacted, among other regions. It is not yet clear which product groups and divisions will be most affected. The news was first reported by TechFlash, and confirmed by PaidContent.

Back in January, Microsoft announced 1,400 layoffs and a plan to eliminate up to 5,000 jobs over the course of 18 months. That was followed by a second round of cuts (an unspecified number) in May. But today’s cuts seem to push the total number of job losses beyond the originally stated 5,000—though with the company continuing to hire in some areas as it cuts in others, it is hard to track the exact number. The latest round of layoffs comes on the heels of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) announcing an 18 percent quarterly decline in profits as compared with the third quarter of last year.

Microsoft is also leaving the door open for additional cuts—a move that seems honest, but could be demoralizing to employees and prospective hires. In a statement given to Xconomy (and to PaidContent first), a Microsoft spokesperson wrote: “Earlier this year, we announced that in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and prioritize our focus areas, we would eliminate approximately 5,000 positions by June 2010. Today, we are eliminating around 800 positions spread across multiple businesses and locations and have completed our reduction plan sooner than we had anticipated 11 months ago. At the same time, we continue to hire in priority areas, but also understand that continuing to manage our businesses closely, as we always do, can mean additional headcount adjustments.”

The spokesperson added, “We are not breaking out figures by location, but I can confirm that Massachusetts was impacted by today’s job eliminations. We are working with the individual employees to assist them through this transition.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

GamerDNA, the Cambridge, MA-based startup building an online community where avid gamers can find recommendations for new games, has cut its staff nearly in half, shrinking from 13 employees to seven, according to a story today in Mass High Tech. Jon Radoff, the company’s founder and CEO, confirmed the layoffs in an e-mail to Xconomy, but declined to discuss them further, saying he was “trying to focus more on the future than the tough decision we just had to make.” GamerDNA, formerly called GuildCafe, raised $3 million in Series A funding from Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners in April 2008.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Wilmington, MA-based Charles River Laboratories (NYSE: CRL) has eliminated 115 positions at subsidiary CTBR Bio-Research in Senneville, Quebec, according to an article yesterday in the Montreal Gazette. A spokesperson quoted in the article attributed the cuts to the postponement of contract clinical research and development projects by the company’s pharmaceutical-industry clients. It’s not Charles River’s first round of layoffs since the recession began—the company cut about 3 percent of its global workforce back in February. We’ve updated the Boston Tech Layoff Tracker with the newest information.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

On Monday, Seattle-based Daptiv, a maker of project management software, announced Chase Franklin has joined the firm as its new chief executive. Franklin, the former co-founder and CEO of Qpass (now owned by Amdocs), succeeds Jeff Pancottine, who stepped down as Daptiv’s CEO this summer.

I reached Franklin by e-mail this week to hear his thoughts on his new job, as well as a little more context around the transition. After all, if there’s a “Qpass mafia” throwing its weight around at local tech companies (as we’ve been tracking over the past month), Franklin might well be considered the Don Corleone of the family.

“At the risk of overextending the ‘Mafia’ metaphor, Daptiv made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Franklin says.

“Seriously, the company has tremendous potential, and in spite of the fact that I wasn’t looking for a full-time gig, after numerous discussions with the board and key execs, this opportunity was just too good to pass up,” Franklin says. “It has some parallels to my experience at Qpass, but of course it’s also different in many ways. As I considered what type of company I wanted to be involved with, I knew it would center around serious software delivered through a [software as a service]/cloud metaphor. I also felt that my management experience would be helpful at Daptiv, which is working its way through an awkward moment in its development.”

Franklin couldn’t say anything more specific about the company’s priorities and challenges just yet. “I’m spending all my cycles getting up to speed on the business,” he says.

Venture capitalist Bill Bryant, a fellow Qpass co-founder, offered some more perspective. “Chase is at heart a keen product strategist who is going to drive a forward roadmap for Daptiv that corresponds to what customers want in a [project portfolio management] solution,” Bryant says. “He is equally an inspirational leader who is unflappable in crises, and will lead from the trenches with the kind of bold actions that Daptiv needs to reinvigorate itself. I have no doubt that Chase will attract talent to Daptiv; he knows how to get the very best of that talent.”

Asked for his thoughts on the company’s challenges, Bryant says, “Daptiv’s fundamental issue is common to first-to-market entrants: they were early, but now are facing a number of competitors like @Task, Clarizen, and Liquid Planner, who are offering an up-to-date product and business model. But it’s a large multibillion [dollar] market that I’m quite sure Chase will navigate with aplomb.”

Daptiv was founded in 1997 (as eProject), and has raised about $21 million in venture funding since 2007. Its investors include Bay Partners, Kennet Partners, King Street Partners, and Wolf Bay Holdings. The company went through layoffs earlier this year and had about 100 employees as of March.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Kirkland, WA-based Digeo, a 10-year-old home entertainment company backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has been sold to Arris, a broadband communications firm based in Suwanee, GA, for about $20 million in cash.

Digeo is known for its high-definition digital video recorder, called Moxi. The acquisition gives Arris expertise, intellectual property, and talent in video networking and multimedia services delivery. Arris will gain about 75 Digeo employees (mostly engineers) in Kirkland, which will raise its R&D costs by about $3 million per quarter, the company said.

“Arris delivers the market position necessary to take the Moxi vision to the next level,” said Digeo’s CEO, Greg Gudorf, in a statement. “I am extremely pleased that the Digeo team will continue to drive the evolution of the Moxi platform.”

But observers point out that the purchase price means a substantial loss on the investment for Allen. PaidContent reports Digeo’s total funding was more than $110 million. In an interview with TechFlash, Gudorf said fewer than 10 Digeo employees would lose their jobs in the acquisition, and that he will stay with Arris during the transition. The news of Digeo’s layoffs was first reported by the Seattle Times.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

When a startup company raises a big wad of venture capital, logic would say they are likely to hire a bunch more smart people.

That may have been true in the past, but lately we’ve spotted a disturbing trend: Some of the Northwest companies with the biggest recent VC cash infusions have instead been cutting jobs or imposing hiring freezes. (It also may be a smart business strategy, since who knows what the economy will do, and these companies need to maximize their runway.)

We’ve seen these kinds of cuts happen in at least two of the three local innovation sectors we cover at Xconomy Seattle—cleantech and biotech. Some examples:

—Calypso Medical Technologies. This Seattle-based medical device company raised $50 million last week in the Northwest’s biggest venture capital financing of the year. It had almost 200 employees before it cut one-fifth of its staff in December. The company now has 136 people on the payroll. When I asked CEO Eric Meier if he’s going to staff up again because of the new financing, he didn’t commit to any numbers. The company’s website lists just seven openings for people with expertise in mechanical engineering, clinical affairs, and software engineering.

—Pathway Medical Technologies. The Kirkland-based medical device company cut one-fifth of its workforce, about 39 jobs, back in May. The company raised $42 million in venture capital two months earlier, but the company said it needed to make the cuts because it couldn’t secure the full $55 million it was shooting for, and sales of its device for clearing blockages in leg arteries weren’t pouring in as fast as projected. The company has one job listing now on its site, for a controller.

—3Tier Group. This Seattle-based company raised $10 million in venture capital last December to support its vision of offering predictive climate models to help developers find the best locations in the world for renewable energy projects. 3Tier had about 85 employees at the time. But last week, Xconomy broke the news that 3Tier axed 19 people from the payroll, to cope with what a spokesman called “uncertainty” in the renewable energy market.

—Calistoga Pharmaceuticals. This Seattle-based developer of cancer drugs raised its profile on the local biotech scene with a one-two punch of news in May. Calistoga raised $30 million in venture capital, and a few weeks later, it produced some eye-opening results from its first clinical trial. But despite that positive momentum, Calistoga CEO Carol Gallagher told me that she wasn’t looking to hire anyone, at least right away. She wasn’t kidding. The company, which had 22 employees at last count, doesn’t currently list any job openings on its website.

Know of any other examples of layoffs? Pass the word to editors@xconomy.com. If we can confirm it, we’ll add it to the layoff tracker on Northwest technology and life sciences companies.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based 3Tier Group, the company that raised $10 million in venture capital last December to help developers find ideal locations for renewable energy facilities, had a staff layoff today, according to a company spokesman.

Xconomy received a tip today that 19 employees were let go. The company had 85 people on the payroll the last time we counted in December, meaning today’s layoff would represent a 22 percent staff cut from that position. Todd Stone, a spokesman for 3Tier, confirmed the company laid off employees today but wouldn’t say how many.

“While this does reflect some temporary uncertainty in the renewable energy market, the reduction also aligns our headcount with the strategic transition that we’ve been making over the last 12 months toward a more scalable and efficient information services business model,” Stone said in an e-mail.

The 10-year-old 3Tier, which I profiled back in November, is based at the Westin Building in downtown Seattle. At the time I wrote that story, about one-third of its employees had expertise in atmospheric science, one-third were software programmers, and the rest were in business, said CEO Kenneth Westrick. The company uses supercomputers to forecast the ebbs and flows of wind, solar, and hydropower at different times of day and in different seasons, for example. This is supposed to give investors more confidence in the reliability of the source of renewable power, over decades, that is needed before they will plunk down hundreds of millions of dollars for a new facility, Westrick said at the time.

3Tier’s $10 million venture investment round last December was led by Good Energies.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

London-based drug giant AstraZeneca (LON:AZN) plans to eliminate 113 jobs at its Westborough, MA, plant next month due to generic drug competition for its asthma drug budesonide (Plumicourt), the Boston Globe reports. Our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker has been updated accordingly. AstraZeneca also has a large R&D operation in Waltham, MA, where the company recently completed a major expansion to its facilities, according to the newspaper.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

At a time when semiconductor startups seem to be an endangered species, San Diego’s cleantech sector continues to show unusually strong growth. Get the lowdown on that and more.

—The shutdown of San Diego’s Sequoia Communications is a sign of broader problems that are making it harder to build new fabless semiconductor design companies, according to Sequoia CEO Dave Shepard. As the complexity of system-on-a-chip technology increases, Shepard says U.S. startups are getting squeezed by sharply higher costs and dramatically lower valuations. He says the venture-backed model for semiconductor startups is broken.

—Wade sat down with Boston lawyers Tom Burton and Lewis Geffen to discuss their cleantech corporate practice at Mintz Levin. Partner Carl Kukkonen, who helped open Mintz Levin’s San Diego office in 2006, says he likes to tell people he was working with alternative energy startups before he ever heard the term “cleantech” to describe them.

—San Diego now counts more than 20 startups that are specializing in developing advanced algae biofuels, according to Lisa Bicker, the executive director of Cleantech San Diego. That’s more than double the number of algae biofuels startups found in an informal survey nine months ago. Many of those companies, though, remain in stealth mode.

—TheFunded Founder Institute is looking to expand its training camp for startup CEOs in San Diego, and eventually other cities, including Boston and Seattle (where Xconomy operates). The program, which is part-training and part-technology incubator, was launched in San Francisco earlier this year by Adeo Ressi, a founding member of TheFunded, an online community for venture-backed CEOs. Jeanine Jacobson and Cliff Currie are heading the startup of the institute in San Diego, and Currie says they plan to enroll their first class and launch the program in November.

—Dennis Mudd has stepped down as CEO of Slacker, the San Diego-based online music streaming service founded three years ago. Mudd is handing over his duties to Jim Cady, Slacker’s president and chief operating officer.Mudd plans to remain on Slacker’s board.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego’s Sequoia Communications, a venture-backed semiconductor company founded in 2001, has shut down—ending the startup’s effort to develop an innovative microchip for cellular phones. The company’s demise was reported yesterday by the website SoCalTech.com, which noted that Sequoia has raised more than $50 million from BlueRun Ventures, Cadence Design Systems, Gabriel Venture Partners, Huntington Ventures, Motorola, Nokia Venture Partners, Tallwood Venture Capital, and Third Point Ventures.

Rory Moore, CEO of CommNexus, the San Diego non-profit wireless industry group, confirmed the closure in a terse e-mail to me, saying simply that Sequoia’s VCs “pulled the plug.” Additional details were not available late yesterday, including the number of employees who lost their jobs. (The chipmaker had about 50 employees two years ago.) Sequoia’s former CEO, Dave Shepard, could not be reached for comment.

In a 2007 Q&A with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Shepard said the wireless chip under development at Sequoia was intended for the high-end phone market. “Our chip actually makes those high-end phones have much better battery life, much better cost, and much smaller form factor, so they get into a smaller phone size,” Shepard said at the time. He also described the wireless chip as “multi-mode,” saying, “It works in GSM, Edge and wideband CDMA, which are all the different phone modes.”

The Woodland Hills, CA, auction firm Cowan Alexander has scheduled an auction of Sequoia’s test and measurement equipment, computers, printers, flat-panel monitors, lab benches, and other equipment at the company’s headquarters. The auction, which begins at 11 a.m. PT Tuesday, is being webcast.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

If you’re fortunate enough to be gainfully employed, you may have joined the droves of other Boston-area innovators who have headed for the Cape, the White Mountains, or another summertime retreat in recent months. Or perhaps you’ve been busy looking for your next career challenge. Either way, with Labor Day fast approaching, we thought it’d be useful to tie together labor trends and some of the larger layoffs that have occurred at technology and life sciences firms in New England since Memorial Day.

First, it’s been encouraging to see that our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker has not been as busy this summer as it was over the previous spring, winter, and fall seasons. Perhaps this is another sign that the worst of this economic recession is behind us. Since June 1, we’ve recorded that Massachusetts-based life sciences and tech firms announced a total of 718 jobs would be cut in their organizations. Now, that doesn’t include the small startups we follow that have been cutting jobs without officially announcing the layoffs: For example, we reported this month that Chelmsford, MA-based online music startup OurStage downsized its ranks from 38 to 17 workers last fall after some investment dollars failed to come through. But this summer’s layoff total to date marks a significant falloff from the 971 layoffs we recorded at Massachusetts life sciences and tech firms in the spring months of April and May.

It’s been a tough year for innovation companies here and everywhere, but layoffs seem to have peaked in the first quarter of this year. State figures show that the impact of layoffs among tech and life sciences workers in the Bay State is consistent with the impact on workers in the rest of the economy. (Of course, the state says that jobs in industries such as construction and financial services have been hit the hardest by layoffs in the commonwealth.) According to the most recent employment figures from the state’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, the number of professional, scientific, and technical jobs in the commonwealth fell from about 258,200 in June 2008 to 249,700 this June, a 3.29 percent decline. (Admittedly, these figures are just an indication and the job category the state uses does not reflect all the jobs in tech and life sciences firms.) The state labor agency reported that year-over-year employment levels for all non-farming jobs in June were down about 3.2 percent, meaning that the layoff trend has far from spared local innovation-based firms.

Here is our recap of the summer’s largest tech and life sciences layoffs in the Boston area:

—Just last week, Sonus Networks (NASDAQ: SONS), a Westford, MA, company helping cable, wireless, and telephone companies with the transition to Internet-based communications, announced a fourth round of layoffs as part of its ongoing “rightsizing” effort, this time affecting 93 people. Sonus let go 50 workers in December, 40 in January, and 60 in March, for a total of 243.

—Analog Devices (NYSE:ADI), the Norwood, MA-based maker of micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) chips for multiple industries, told the Boston Globe earlier this month that the company plans to cut …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Investor Jeff Schrock calls Seattle-based EVO Media a “ramen profitable” startup. Co-founder and CEO Geoff Nuval calls it “roast beef sandwich” profitable. Two guys, two spellings of the same first name, two different food analogies. But the message is clear: these guys are hungry.

Call it what you want, EVO Media is turning a profit some six months after launching DevHub—a free Web publishing platform that helps companies and individuals manage and monetize niche websites—and after going through a strategic downsizing. The company, founded in late 2007, had raised money from Monster Venture Partners and prominent angel investors including Alex Algard, John Cunningham, and Geoff Entress.

But early this year, EVO realized it would not be able to raise a favorable round of venture funding. So what did it do? Focused on getting revenue. Schrock, a tech entrepreneur-turned-executive-turned-investor (he co-founded Seattle-based Activate before his time at Yahoo, RealNetworks, Monster Venture Partners, and now Intel Capital), has overseen the company through this formative period as its chairman. (See more on DevHub in this TechFlash piece.)

The story goes back to the fall of 2007, when Nuval, a Stanford grad, moved to Seattle from Silicon Valley, where he had worked at Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, doing mobile and Internet investments. He had been introduced to fellow EVO co-founders Daniel Lee Rust (a tech expert) and Mark Michael (a sales expert) through his assistant at Lehman, a childhood friend of theirs. Rust and Michael were running a Web development shop for startups, but together with Nuval, they conspired to make a Web platform for themselves—one that customers could use to create sites. “The chemistry was awesome, the idea was compelling enough,” Nuval says. “I threw as much stuff as I could into my SUV and drove up here.”

Schrock met the team in early 2008, and was duly impressed. “One of the investment themes of Monster Venture Partners was capital-efficient development of technology businesses,” he says. “The founders here, they had a lot of the attributes I really admire and look for in startups. They were young, aggressive, intelligent, hard-working, and they had this set of tools and a balanced skill set. They figured out a way to turn blank domains into real working websites.”

It was a way to lower the cost of creating websites and content, Schrock says. WordPress had done something similar for blogs, but there was still no built-in way to make money from those sites. So Nuval and his team focused on tools for building and managing commercial sites. They raised …Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:        

Sonus Networks (NASDAQ: SONS), the Westford, MA-based maker of voice-over-IP software and equipment for wireless, cable, and telephone companies, announced today that it has cut 93 workers, or approximately 10 percent of its global workforce. Richard Nottenburg, Sonus’s CEO and president, called the layoffs “the final phase of the restructuring initiative we began at the end of last year with the goal of re-aligning our business to market needs and opportunities.” Sonus laid off 50 workers last December, 40 in January, and 60 in March.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Where I grew up in the Midwest in the 1970s and early 80s, Cray was synonymous with supercomputing. Back then, a supercomputer was a top-flight machine that could perform a few hundred million floating point operations per second (”flops”). That was good enough to help scientists do intensive calculations in areas like weather forecasting, climate modeling, and nuclear weapons simulations. Cray’s first supercomputer, the famed Cray-1, was bought by Los Alamos National Laboratory for $8.8 million in 1976; eventually, some 80 of the machines were sold, for $5 million to $8 million a pop.

Today, your average desktop computer is far more powerful than a Cray-1, and so the definition of “supercomputer” keeps changing to keep up with the times. But one thing has not changed. Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) is still a major player in the space, despite a long history of ups and downs. The company, which began in 1972 as Cray Research in Chippewa Falls, WI, was bought by Silicon Graphics in 1996 for $767 million, and then was reborn in Seattle in 2000 following a $50 million merger with Tera Computer (which was renamed Cray). Since then, it has been a long uphill climb to get back near the top of the supercomputing heap against heavyweight competitors like IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Nobody better to tell that story than Peter Ungaro, the chief executive of Cray. I recently had a chance to speak with Ungaro by phone at his Spokane, WA, office about his company’s strategy and recent history, the technical challenges involved in modern supercomputing, and innovative ways of gaining new customers (how do you sell someone a $10 million machine?). What impressed me was his ability to lay out the financial concerns of his company while also diving deep into the technological aspects of supercomputers—how they will interact with cloud computing, how computational records will continue to be broken, and when computers might exceed all processing capabilities of the human brain.

First off, I wanted to know how Ungaro (left) defines a “supercomputer” these days. Some would say it should be one of the 500 fastest machines in the world. Others would say it’s a machine used for scientific and technical problems that costs more than a certain amount. Ungaro’s definition is simple and focuses on the bottom line. “We like to think of supercomputers as costing more than a million dollars,” he says.

Ungaro, a Washington State University alum, joined Cray in 2003 to run sales and marketing as senior vice president. He had been at IBM for 13 years, most recently running its high performance computing group, a $2 billion business inside Big Blue. Why did he make the jump to Cray? “I really loved the supercomputing space,” Ungaro says. “Customers are doing really interesting things. I really wanted to try and see what a smaller company was like. Even at $2 billion, you’re only 2 percent of IBM’s revenues.” In short, like many entrepreneurs, he wanted to have more impact. “There was no better place to go than Cray. It was a natural move.”

But Cray had its share of problems. The company had struggled to get its next-generation supercomputer product ready, and 2004 was “really rough,” Ungaro says. Cray was losing money and …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share: