A Silicon Valley executive spent countless hours constructing an elaborate plan to cheat local Target stores out of collectors Lego blocks, prosecutors say. Thomas Langenbach, a vice president at the software company SAP Labs in Palo Alto, crafted fake bar codes and pasted them over the real thing on Lego packages in Target stores, Santa Clara County prosecutors said. The fakes gave Langenbach a steep discount, prosecutors said. After purchasing the Legos, Langenbach allegedly sold them for a profit on eBay. At least some of the Legos were valuable collectors items featuring “Star Wars” characters, prosecutors said. Hundreds of unopened Lego boxes were found in Langenbach’s San Carlos home, authorities said. Prosecutors said the thefts were puzzling, because the scam was extremely labor-intensive and not ... Continue reading →

Facebook Raises $16 Billion in I.P.O. By EVELYN M. RUSLI and PETER EAVISJoel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFacebook pulled it off.As investors raced to get shares, the sprawling social network raised $16 billion on Thursday, in an initial public offering that values Facebook at $104 billion.The I.P.O. signals a rapid evolution for the company. In just eight years, Facebook has gone from a scrappy college service founded in a Harvard dormitory to the third-largest public offering in the history of the United States, behind General Motors and Visa.Investors, who are paying $38 a share for the offering, now consider Facebook more stalwart than a start-up. At $104 billion, the social network’s market value is higher than McDonald’s, Citigroup, Amazon.com and all but a handful of ... Continue reading →

It's no secret that HP is considering layoffs and soon. Meg Whitman has even publicly hinted at them. Question is, how many employees will be axed? One source at HP claims the job cuts are going to be massive. While this is just one source, we know that tension inside the company is running high and so is the rumor mill. Here's what our source told us: Layoffs are going to be significant. At least, they'll be bigger than what Whitman has said so far. She's said that layoffs would NOT be "broad-based" at least in China (whatever that means), but she didn't say anything about the rest of the worldwide workforce. Our source said HP wants to trim its workforce by 10%-15%. Given that ... Continue reading →

While California, the world's ninth-largest economy, is still looking to have one trade and investment office in China, San Francisco is planning on No. 3. ChinaSF, which already has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, has its sights set on Guangzhou, a megacity of 41 million people, which is also the capital of the country's most economically open and robust region, Guangdong province. "It's the next logical step," said Darlene Chiu Bryant, executive director of the public-private agency. "Everybody goes to Shanghai because it's the financial center, then Beijing, the nation's capital. Step three for us is Guangzhou because it's the entrepreneurial center, and it's the hometown for many San Francisco residents." But ChinaSF is not there yet, despite Mayor Ed Lee letting slip the news ... Continue reading →

Swoosh! Just like that, NikeTown will soon disappear from San Francisco. The 50,000-square-foot store, an anchor tenant in Union Square for the past 15 years, will be closing within the next 12 months for a complete remodeling, according to two company sources. When it reopens, it will be called NikeSF, or Nike San Francisco, I'm told, as part of a nationwide rebranding exercise by the Beaverton, Ore., athletic apparel giant. Similar changes are taking place at the NikeTown in Chicago, which closed for remodeling in March, and will be called Nike Chicago, said the sources. A company spokeswoman said she was "unable to confirm any information at this time" about the San Francisco store, and would not comment on the Chicago store, except that it's ... Continue reading →

What strikes Phil Angelides the most about the $2 billion (and counting) loss sustained by JPMorgan Chase on a big trade gone bad, is how little has changed since the financial crash of 2008. "The big banks continue to be casinos," said the chairman of the government-appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which laid out how such trades, referred to in some quarters as "bets," contributed to the crash that the country is still struggling to pull itself out of. "It has to be stopped," he said. Trouble is - as Angelides, the former California state treasurer, and others point out - no one is stopping them. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's CEO, dismissed initial concerns about the trades last month as a "complete tempest in a teapot." ... Continue reading →