Telus Management take note.. it’ll be a bunfight.

-Ian.

——– http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid93&e=2&u=/ap/ 20030712/ap_on_hi_te/verizon_layoffs&sid•573418 Verizon Ordered to Rehire 2,300 Workers

Fri Jul 11,10:44 PM ET

Add Technology – AP to My Yahoo!

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Business Writer

An arbitrator has ordered Verizon Communications Inc. to rehire 2,300 people in New York state who were laid off in December, striking a blow against the phone company’s cost-cutting efforts and racheting up the tension surrounding Verizon’s talks on a new labor contract.

Verizon had argued that the layoffs were justified because of a weak economy and toughening competition in the phone business from rival companies and new technologies.

But in a decision received Friday by the company and the Communications Workers of America, arbitrator Shyam Das ruled that those trends did not amount to discrete “external events,” as Verizon’s union contract specifies, that could justify the layoffs.

Verizon must reinstate the workers and give them back pay, minus the severance payments and unemployment benefits they received. Employees who were forced to transfer can return to their original locations.

“I’ve been in this business now since 1966 — 37 years — and I would say it’s the greatest victory in my lifetime,” said Larry Mancino, a Communications Workers of America vice president who represents the Northeast.

“The impact it’s going to have on our members’ lives is unbelievable. These people were living with very little hope of getting their jobs back.”

Another 1,100 employees in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Massachusetts have filed similar complaints with other arbitrators.

Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis said the company would comply with the arbitrator’s ruling in New York but would wait to see how the cases in the other states play out.

“We’re obviously disappointed with the arbitrator’s decision,” Thonis said. “We believe we followed the language of the contract.”

The decision will loom large over talks already underway between New York-based Verizon, the CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on a new contract for 75,000 of Verizon’s nearly 230,000 employees. The existing deal, which was reached after an 18-day strike in 2000, expires Aug. 2.

Verizon management is pressing the union to make concessions in job-security language, to enable Verizon to better compete in the turbulent telecommunications industry. Verizon says that would save jobs in the long run.

The union counters that such a demand “would rip the heart out of our contract.”

Now the arbitrator’s decision could make it harder for both sides to compromise.

Thonis said the ruling “doesn’t change the need for us to face the challenges facing our business.” But union officials said the ruling shows just how valuable the existing job-security language is to their members.

“I think my life will be in jeopardy if I ever give up that language,” Mancino said. “Now an arbitrator has given meaning to the language. I don’t think there’s any way we’d ever give it up.”

Verizon cut 18,000 jobs in 2002 — mainly through attrition and voluntary buyouts — which helped lower the domestic telecom division’s “operations and support” expenses to $22.3 billion from $23.6 billion the previous year, according to a March filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission ( news -web sites ).

Mancino said rehiring the 2,300 laid-off New York workers would cost Verizon $100 million. Thonis said the cost was less than $25 million, but he would not disclose the exact number because he said it was immaterial to Verizon’s bottom line.

 

Wall Street didn’t appear fazed. Verizon shares were up 67 cents to

Service Providers suck. They hire guys like me to figure out how to maximize the share-of-wallet while containing the growth and supporting their other, boneheaded, legacy products. Generally speaking, carriers are obstacles to the adoption of technology, rather than instigators of it.

What this article hints at is a mesh of ad-hoc mobile phone users each sharing their network capacity and organically frequency-hopping to avoid network trouble zones. Whereas it has proven impossible for mobile phone network dweebs to engineer reliable wireless services in North America, this could be the answer.

More and more spectrum will be made available to the general public around this world, or we will figure out better ways to use that which is already allocated. In the end, the Return On Investment that carriers expect for their 3G licenses, which already has an event horizon measured in decades, may never happen.

Regulatory bodies will be faced with bolstering floundering wireless carriers, which are clearly obstacles to growth, or enabling an ecosystem of radical technologies to flower into a jungle of new technologies, applications, and networks. The trend of technology and invention clearly favours the latter.

-Ian.

——— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncidR8&e=4&cidR8&u=/ap/ 20021125/ap_on_hi_te/the_new_spectrum

New Gadgets May Spark Deregulation Mon Nov 25, 7:38 AM ET Add Technology – AP to My Yahoo!

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) – It almost sounds too “Star Trek” to be possible: A multipurpose cell phone that also serves as an FM radio, walkie-talkie, garage door opener and TV remote control.

And what if every time you made a call with that handset it increased the performance of other phones already in use — instead of competing for airwaves with them?

While such wireless wizardry remains a few years off, those days could be coming faster now, thanks to a rare confluence of technology breakthroughs and a rethinking of airwave regulation by the federal government.

“It is kind of an interesting point in time when it comes to wireless networks,” said Dallas Nash, co-founder of Mississippi-based SIGFX LLC, a player in the impending wireless revolution.

SIGFX figured out how to transmit cell phone calls in a thin part of the airwave spectrum already used by TV stations. By dramatically reducing the cost and increasing the range of wireless phone networks, the invention could bring reliable service to rural areas and developing countries.

Vanu Bose has big dreams, too: to create that new generation of radios — that’s really all that cell phones and garage-door openers are — that can move between various functions with an icon click. The trick is to replace much of the circuitry found in radios with flexible software.

Bose began working at it in a military-sponsored communications project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news – web sites). After graduating in 1998, he started his own company, Vanu Inc., to further develop the technology.

Now Cambridge, Mass.-based Vanu Inc. has created an all-software base station — which relays calls from wireless phones on cellular networks. Vanu also has built a prototype handheld computer that can make calls on different kinds of wireless networks and work as a walkie-talkie, baby monitor, FM radio — “whatever you want,” Bose said.

The big challenge is that the device is limited to 10 to 20 hours of battery life. Bose — son of the stereo engineer who founded Bose Corp. — believes that with more development and improvements in low-power microprocessors, the device could be the size of a cell phone and have a much longer battery life.

At the same time, other researchers are making progress in developing “smart” radio receivers that can, on their own, determine instantaneously when and where a bit of spectrum is going unused and switch their communications accordingly to avoid interference. (A method of doing that is already employed in cellular networks and cordless phones).

In fact, advocates of an “open spectrum” or a “commons” policy believe new generations of radio receivers will routinely handle their own conversations and help relay others at the same time.

“If every radio is both a transmitter and a receiver, as you add more, you add capacity to the network,” said David P. Reed, a former chief scientist at Lotus Development Corp. and a leader of the “open spectrum” movement.

“My gut feeling,” Reed said, “is that in 10 or 20 years this will be as big as the Internet.”

That may seem a wide-eyed prediction, but ideas like this are not just grass-roots dreams.

Intel Corp. backs software-defined radio in hopes it will ignite an explosion of demand for wireless chips. The military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on several ways to “increase spectrum usage by dynamically sensing and adapting in frequency, time and space.”

Researchers at Bell Laboratories, part of Lucent Technologies Inc., recently announced a breakthrough in their BLAST technology, which takes advantage of interference on a network to increase the rates at which data can be sent.

Many technology experts say such breakthroughs should force a revolution in how we treat the airwaves. Since the 1920s, electromagnetic spectrum has been handled like real estate. The government licenses use of slices of spectrum and tightly regulates what can be done in those bands.

Much of the spectrum is tied up — largely by the military — and there’s only so much room for experimental and innovative new technologies in unlicensed bands, such as those occupied by cordless phones and the wireless networking system known as WiFi.

But in what looks like the beginning of a historic policy shift, the Federal Communications Commission (news – web sites) has been listening closely to the technology crowd — and to cellular carriers that spent tens of billions of dollars for spectrum licenses and want more freedom to use or trade them as they see fit.

“We have perhaps the most interesting debate in spectrum governance taking place in America since the 1930s,” said Adam Thierer, director of telecommunications studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

This month, a task force appointed by FCC (news – web sites) Chairman Michael Powell — and headed by the former leader of DARPA’s communications research — offered a framework for a spectrum policy overhaul expected to begin next year.

The group said the government should grant wireless carriers more flexibility with their expensive spectrum licenses so they may lease portions of the airwaves that go unused at certain times, for example.

It also endorsed the “commons” concept in some circumstances, saying new technologies should have more freedom to operate in regulated bands — as long as they don’t interfere with cellular conversations or radio broadcasts — and in unlicensed parts of the spectrum as well.

In essence, the FCC finally would be treating spectrum like real estate in the physical world, where the public has easements and parks alongside private property, and airplanes can fly overhead.

Such monumental changes probably will provoke some fights in Washington.

“Certain ossified licensees will inherently be resistant to change,” said Bryan Tramont, Powell’s senior legal adviser.

Even parties who are clamoring for change are circumspect. Wireless phone carriers, for example, praise the FCC’s efforts to modernize spectrum policy. But some say technologies such as software-defined radio might be too unproven to form the basis of policy changes.

They also worry that low-power transmissions by rival technologies on or near already-licensed frequencies could interfere with wireless phone conversations.

“It’s hard to oppose looking at spectrum policy anew,” said Doug Brandon, AT&T Wireless’ vice president of federal affairs. But, he added, eventually, “someone will say, `My ox just got gored.'”

———–

AT&T doesn’t HAVE any more money to plunk into E@H, and since they’re in the process of saying Bye-bye to the Cable unit, there’s some question as to why they NEED @Home anymore.

The company’s too expensive to buy (plus the losses are SCARY), the individual service elements are each (at best) 2nd or 3rd place in the market, and they don’t have a single market leader among the whole lot.

Not good.

-Ian.

——— http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010820/tc/exciteathome_outlook_3.html

Monday August 20 6:03 PM ET

Auditors Doubt ExciteAtHome Survival

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Business Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) – High-speed Internet access provider ExciteAtHome, formed in one of the biggest mergers of the dot-com heyday, could be on the verge of joining the growing list of high-tech flameouts.

The Redwood City-based company updated its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (news – web sites) on Monday to add a note from its auditors expressing “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

The report sent ExciteAtHome shares down 40 cents, or 46 percent, to 47 cents in trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

ExciteAtHome, which lost $7.44 billion in 2000 and $346.3 million in the most recent quarter, already had said it needed substantial funding to stay alive into next year. The company is controlled by AT&T Corp., which owns 23 percent of ExciteAtHome stock but has a 74 percent voting stake.

In June, ExciteAtHome helped avert a major cash crisis by selling $100 million worth of notes that can be converted into company stock.

That deal required ExciteAtHome shares to stay listed on a major stock exchange. However, ExciteAtHome has fallen below the Nasdaq Stock Market’s minimum requirements for net assets, stockholders’ equity and share price.

If the stock were to be delisted, ExciteAtHome would be forced to speed up its repayment of the notes, auditors Ernst & Young pointed out in the refiled annual report.

ExciteAtHome spokeswoman Alison Bowman said the company has not yet gotten a delisting notice from the Nasdaq.

ExciteAtHome said its stockholders have approved a reverse stock split that would increase its trading price above $3, the minimum for a company that does not meet Nasdaq’s minimum requirements for assets and shareholder equity. But there are no assurances the price would remain above $3.

To conserve cash, ExciteAtHome is cutting 200 jobs this month, plus another 90 at its MatchLogic subsidiary, an online marketing company. That follows at least 630 layoffs at ExciteAtHome earlier this year, and the SEC report said even more jobs could be cut in the current quarter. The company has 2,200 employees.

ExciteAtHome was born in 1999 out of the $6.7 billion merger of At Home Corp., a leading provider of fast Web access over cable TV lines, and Internet portal Excite Inc. – which just happened to be headquartered across the street from each other in Redwood City.

By linking Internet access and Internet content, the deal was supposed to make the company a strong competitor to America Online, now part of AOL Time Warner Inc.

But while the company’s cable-modem subscriber base has risen from 330,000 at the time of the merger to 3.7 million now, the network has required costly investments.

In June, cable TV providers Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc. decided to end their deals to offer Internet access exclusively through ExciteAtHome.

And the Excite portal has suffered severely from the plunge in Internet advertising, a market not expected to recover this year.

ExciteAtHome executives have said since April they were looking for someone to buy its media properties, which in addition to Excite include the Blue Mountain greeting cards site and Webshots, a site devoted to online photos.

Wednesday March 7 7:00 PM ET Yahoo! CEO Tim Koogle To Step Down

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Business Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) – Tim Koogle is stepping aside as chief executive of struggling Internet bellwether Yahoo! Inc., though he will stay on as chairman.

The company also announced Wednesday that its first-quarter operating earnings will come in at “approximately break-even,” well short of Wall Street’s expectations. Full-year results also could miss targets.

Koogle, who will remain CEO until a replacement is found, said he felt Yahoo needed an infusion of new talent.

“I’m looking over the horizon, and saying, when the economy starts to firm and Yahoo has weathered through this, what do we need to have in place so that we’ve got enough bench strength to scale continuously as we grow for the next five to 10 years?” Koogle said in a conference call with financial analysts. “I think it’s a great time to be proactive about that, and bring in and extend our team.”

The news followed a day of intense speculation after trading in shares of Yahoo were halted shortly after the markets opened Wednesday. The company had canceled an appearance at an Internet conference in New York.

Shares dropped fell $1.38 to $21 before trading was halted on the Nasdaq Stock Market. After the news was released, shares fell another $2.31, or 11 percent, to $18.69.

Koogle – known as “TK” around the company – joined Yahoo after serving as president of Seattle-based Intermec Corp. and spending nine years as an executive at Motorola Inc. He became Yahoo chairman in 1999.

“This guy has a lot of background here, been there from very early on, and has done a real good job,” said John Corcoran, an analyst with CIBC World Markets Corp. Finding a replacement will be difficult, like “getting someone to step in front of an avalanche,” Corcoran said, considering the downward momentum of the company’s stock and the Internet economy.

After starting as a search engine in the mid-1990s, Yahoo grew into a full-service information and shopping portal and at one point became the world’s most popular destination on the Internet. Yahoo also was one of the Internet’s biggest financial success stories for a while, with revenue nearly doubling last year, to $1.1 billion, and profits of $291 million.

But the company’s dependence on advertising – which accounted for nearly 90 percent of last year’s revenue – has proven to be problematic in the dot-com meltdown and the overall slowing of the economy.

“It’s been a real tough quarter for Internet advertising,” said Abhishek Gami of William Blair & Co.

Yahoo had more than 55 million unique visitors in January, behind America Online Inc.’s and Microsoft Corp.’s sites, according to Jupiter Media Metrix. It was the first time since July 2000 that Yahoo trailed Microsoft.

By comparison, AOL had more than 64 million unique visitors and Microsoft had 56.2 million. The number is a count of total distinct users who visited a Web site or online property at least once in a given month.

Yahoo said it expects to break even in the first quarter, which ends March 31, excluding one-time charges. Analysts surveyed by First Call/Thomson Financial had been expecting earnings of 5 cents per share, down from 10 cents per share a year ago.

For all of 2001, analysts were expecting earnings of 36 cents a share. Yahoo stopped short of issuing formal guidance for the year because business conditions for the final six months are unclear, but chief financial officer Susan Decker said Yahoo was “committed to achieving break-even levels of profitability.”

Yahoo, which will formally announce earnings on April 11, also said it expects first quarter revenues of between $170 million and $180 million; a year ago, Yahoo posted revenue of $228.4 million. Even worse, deferred revenue from 2000 will account for a whopping $117 million of this quarter’s sales figure.

Yahoo said it was being hurt as the weakening economy forced advertisers to cut back on their marketing. The company also is encountering difficulties as its advertising base shifts from Internet businesses to more traditional companies.

“All businesses in the United States are facing challenging economic conditions that have weakened further in recent weeks, and as consumer confidence and spending has deteriorated, a broad range of customers have delayed their spending across all media formats until their economic outlook improves,” Koogle said.

Yahoo also has been suffering turnover in a number of its top divisions – in recent weeks, the company’s heads of operation for Asia and Europe have resigned.

For months, rumors have circulated that Yahoo would merge with another company, most likely an entertainment titan such as Walt Disney Co. or Viacom Inc. that could help it compete with the AOL-Time Warner Inc. behemoth.

Koogle, however, has been saying a deal like that actually could reduce the site’s highly valued breadth of content. And last week, Yahoo adopted a shareholder rights plan, known as a poison pill, that would likely deter any attempt at a hostile takeover. The company said the plan was not “in response to any effort to acquire control of Yahoo,” however.

Yahoo also announced a stock repurchase program Wednesday of up to $500 million of its outstanding shares over the next two years. Shares of Yahoo are trading more than 90 percent off their 52-week high of $205.63, set last March.