Mountain Valley-based D-Link Systems Inc., a maker of networking gear for consumers and small businesses, has a potential hot seller on its hands.
D-Link, part of Taiwan’s D-Link Corp., is seeing growing sales for the Boxee Box, a television set-top box that it launched a year ago. The company began taking pre-orders in September and started selling it in stores in October.
D-Link markets the Boxee Box with Oklahoma-based Boxee Inc., which provides software and co-markets the project.
Boxee Box is a glossy black cube that delivers movies, TV shows, music and photos from a computer, home network and the Internet to a high-definition TV with no PC in between.
Boxee software also has a social component—it allows users to post reviews and share photos via Facebook and Twitter from their TVs.
“The Boxee software platform has a very loyal following,” said Dan Kelly, associate vice president of consumer marketing at D-Link. “It’s different from other media boxes because it crawls the Internet for content and allows you to share it.”
It also has a variety of apps for grabbing content, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Flickr, MLB TV and NHL GameCenter as well as music video services Vevo and Pandora.
Boxee Box has nabbed mixed reviews from various gadget blogs and magazines.
Engadget said it “looks good on paper” but fails to live up to the hype. Crunchgear gave it a “strong buy” recommendation with a small caveat—the reviewer said the device is “teetering between awesome and odd.”
Sales have been better than expected, according to Asian tech news website Digitimes.com.
A Taiwan-based D-Link executive told Digitimes that the company has been caught shorthanded due to an increase in orders and “sell through” at Amazon.com.
Boxee Box is set to start selling in the Middle East this month and then Asia later in the year.
D-Link said it expects to sell some 100,000 Boxee Boxes this year at about $200 a pop, the Digitimes report said.
Local.com CFO
Irvine-based Local.com Corp., which runs online search engines for finding local businesses, made its finance chief pick permanent after a bit of reshuffling.
Local.com appointed Ken Cragun as interim chief financial officer in late December.
Cragun had been the company’s vice president of finance since 2009 and took on CFO duties after Brenda Aguis stepped down.
Cragun previously was chief financial officer of Modtech Holdings Inc., a supplier of modular buildings.
He held other finance posts at Miva Inc., ImproveNet Inc. and NetCharge.com Inc.
Aguis departed after she was named in a critical probe of the company in August that sent Local.com’s shares plummeting.
TheStreetSweeper.org published a story that raised questions about the credibility of the company’s current and past executives and its way of doing business.
Local.com refuted the assertions, calling them “loose implications” designed to benefit investors who’ve shorted the company’s shares and profit when they fall.
The story charged Aguis was involved with several small technology companies that were plagued with accounting problems. The story also said she headed a strategy of rapid-fire acquisitions to bulk up numbers.
Local.com’s shares have since recovered from the fallout and are roughly flat in the past 12 months with a market value of $115 million.
Lantronix Moves On
A squelched board fight at Irvine’s Lantronix Inc. came to a quiet resolution earlier this month.
The maker of networking electronics announced a new board lineup that satisfied the demands of a cofounder who had sought big changes and threatened a proxy fight.
Shareholders voted on Larry Sanders to replace Lew Solomon as chairman.
Bernhard Bruscha, Lantronix’s cofounder and largest shareholder, had pushed for the ouster of Solomon and Chief Executive Jerry Chase, as well as changes to bylaws and business strategy.
Chase kept his job and retained a board seat.
Sanders first joined Lantronix’s board in 2007. He is the former chief executive of Sunnyvale-based Sanera Systems Inc., which was bought by Colorado’s McData Corp. in 2003. He’s also an IBM Corp. veteran who has served on various other boards.
As part of a deal to avoid a proxy fight, Lantronix agreed in November to re-elect Bruscha, who’s currently a director, for a new term.
The company agreed to another Bruschca-backed board member, Hoshi Printer, a former chief financial officer with Irvine’s Autobytel Inc.
Bruscha also advocated shrinking the board from nine members to seven, a move Lantronix adopted. That gives Bruscha and his two allies a larger share of the board.
Other board members include John Rehfeld, Howard Slayen and Thomas Wittenschlaeger.
