Some of you might remember Foldera (FDRA).  The company enjoyed a brief moment of prominence and seemed poised to be a Web 2.0 darling that was breaking the rules and suceeding brilliantly.  So charmed was the company that at one point they could even boast that the “Don of Web 2.0″ Michael Arrington was on their board of directors. (Disclosure: I was the SVP of Business Development and Chief Mobility Officer for Foldera from Jan 2006 to July 2007)

Alas, twas not to be.  The combination of an audacious goal, a talented but immature senior engineer who had never shipped a product, overblown promises and slipping deadline after deadline turned the company from darling to deadpool candidate in less than a year.

Over the past 12 months the company has been languishing with a $0.02 to $0.03 stock price, no sales, no product to sell, no real deals in the pipeline and what seemed to be little in the way of any prospects.  All this has apparently changed with a completely surprising letter to the shareholders that the company released yesterday.

It looks as if the company is mainly just providing a shell for an entirely new organization.  CEO Hugh Dunkerely – now being referred to as Interim CEO, although when they announced his promotion to CEO a few months ago the word “Interim” was conspicuously absent from the press releases – has stepped down and slid back into his prior  role  as SVP of Investor Relations.

It appears that Reid Dabney, Foldera’s CFO will retain his position in the new entity leading me to believe that he had some significant role in this new deal.

Aside from those two familiar faces – everything else about the reconstituted organization looks piosed to change.  No longer about collaboration and organization software, the company will now be the developer of software and hardware for the carrier class 10 Gigabit switch market.

Along with the new management team and new direction the company is adopting a new name; CeCors, an acronym for Carrier Ethernet Core Switch and pronounced ‘SeaCores.’ This will become effective in the coming weeks as the Company’s legal name, registrations, trading symbol and marketing materials are changed.

Another change looks to be the capitalization structure of the company.  According to the letter they say they sent, the company intends to do a 10 for 1 reverse split of the stock which could have very significant repercussions for those people that purchased stock when the share price was several dollars as well as for those employees now sitting on fully vested options that have been left un-exercised because they have been worth less than the strike price established to exercise them.

At present I’m not sure what to make of this information.  There are a lot of unanswered questions that I’m sure are shared by the hundreds – perhaps thousands of shareholders that were left holding the bag when the brokerage firm that underwrote this security, Brookstreet Securities abruptly folded do to unregulated trading of CMO’s in mid 2007.

There are certainly a lot of hard feelings among the investors that feel that they were screwed by  Brookstreet and in particular by Neal Dabney and Steve Kerr, two savvy Wall Street raiders that managed to bank tens of millions apiece while allowing the people that made that possible- both the early investors and the employees of the original Foldera to take it in the shorts while they sold the stock right out from under us.

It is my  understanding that there is already a class action lawsuit that has been filed against Brookstreet although I don’t know at this time if Dabney or Kerr (Not sure of the spelling; please correct me if you know it) have been named in this suit or in which court it has been filed.

It is interesting as well that this leader was released via PR  Newswire before it had even reached the shareholders whose money has been paying the salaries of Reid and Hugh for more than two years now.  You’d think that such a major change in direction – particularly when accompanied by a complete management change and a ten for one reverse stock split is the sort of thing that the shareholders deserve to hear about directly rather than from a Google alert turning up the “Letter to the Shareholders” on Yahoo Finance.  Classy guys.  Off to a great start.  Are you going to write to those of us holding worthless options to explain our rights given this turn of events or has that somehow slipped off the radar too?
What a costly and frustrating experience. One I am sure is shared by more of you than I even want to think about.  For what it’s worth, while I was AT Foldera I did my best to make something happen but it is awfully tough to generate deals that produce any revenue when you never have a product that is ready for sale.

And, as Forrest Gump says; “that’s all I have to say about that”.

TwitterFone, a new service that allows you to post to Twitter via voice by calling a number on your mobile phone has just been lit up. The application is currently in an invite-only beta so if you want to use it any time soon I suggest you hustle on over and get yourself on the list.

I’m finding the proliferation of voice to text applications interesting. While some are more useful than others what is becoming clear is that we’ve finally reached a point where reliable translation of the human voice into intelligible text messages has reached the point where we can make it work reliably – even over a mobile phone and even without the ability to see what the results of our utterances are coming out like on the other end.

This might result in some embarrassing and surprising things happening because I’ve yet to see any program that was even 85% at doing these translations and that’s sitting right in front of the computer and watching in real time as the system decoded my own voice speaking clearly and slowly which is hardly what I’d expect from someone posting a quick message to Twitter while using a cell phone in traffic. I guess if we start seeing less than sensible posts to Twitter we’ll realize that there are still some bugs to be ironed out of the whole speech to text thing. On the other hand, if we don’t see any difference it either means people aren’t using the interface that much or all the kinks have been worked out and it’s time to start brushing up on our dictation skills.

I just received an invitation from my friend Alec Saunders , CEO of Iotum to join in on a free conference call to discuss AT$T and AMEX’s deployment of auto-dialing technology that, according to Alec, has the potential to desensitize consumers to the very tactics that criminals are deploying to gain bank and credit card information from the unsuspecting.

From what Alec says, the recent use of auto-dialers by AT$T and American Express closely duplicates the method that is currently in vogue where criminals use auto dialers to leave messages on a victim’s voice mail with instructions for them to contact their bank to deal with a security issue. When the consumer calls the number provided they are instructed to provide identifying information including social security numbers, bank information, PIN codes, etc.. Of course once a consumer falls for this it’s open season on their funds, their identity and their security.

The call, which is scheduled for this coming Monday is free to join and open to all. More information is available here. Learn more about what crooks are doing and how to defeat them – if the corporations don’t care to look out for us, we’ll have to do a better job of it ourselves.

Nokia has a great deal of news this morning including announcing several new phones, improved maps – Nokia Maps 2.0, as well as the first new service based upon their purchase of TWANGO last year: Share on OVI.

First,
Nokia’s newest promo video.

I just spent the last few hours engaged in conversation with Stephen Kelly, the Founder and CEO of Peepel. This application was released a few months ago and has been profiled on a number of popular blogs including Mashable, however, if you haven’t done so already, it really is really worth the time to take a look at it. If you haven’t you really should check it out.

Peepel is an online collaborative office suite that includes a desktop environment that has multiple window capability, built in RSS, a notifier, file management, email, word processing, a spreadsheet, contact management, file sharing/collaboration, a mini-web browser, pre-defined document templates and even a workspace manager that sits on top of your desktop and changes functionality depending upon which component of Peepel you are using.

Looking at Peepel (having come from Foldera, a company that operates in a similar space) I expected to hear that dozens of developers had been working on this application for a couple of years. I was shocked to find that this was not the case – it has been some time that they’ve been building this impressive application but the team is tiny. It just goes to show what sort of magic the best developers can produce when they really do understand agile development and know their stuff absolutely cold.

It does take a little getting used to the interface but once you sort out how to navigate and understand a few of the program’s limitations it is an eminently suitable environment for 90% of what the average student or office worker needs to do every day.

One limitation is that you can only import a limited number of document types, these being .xls and .doc and a few other similar file types. While this may seem like a bad thing to an advanced user, for a teacher deploying this for a class or for a small business that needs to keep employees on task these built in limitation may actually prove to be more boon than bane.

Although we didn’t talk about plans for generating revenue with Peepel, it seems obvious to me that it could certainly be advertising subsidized and perhaps offer a premium, ad free version for a monthly subscription fee or a per user seat agreement.

Currently the application is free and you really ought to take a few minutes to check it out, if nothing else, at least to see just how much a disciplined development team can accomplish.