The Globe reports that Cisco slashes 25% of Canadian staff.

The majority of these layoffs stem from Cisco's decision to effectively shutter its Waterloo, Ont., video networking operation, formerly called PixStream Inc. San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco only bought PixStream in August of last year for $369-million (U.S.) in stock.

...Once upon a time a vice-president of the recently acquired PixStream emailed me. We spent days emailing since I was in Winnipeg and he was in Waterloo. When I arrived in London to begin the school year we played a little phone tag and eventually lined up a meeting for Friday at around I think it was 11:30 in Waterloo. Traffic ended up being bad on the 401 and I was late for the meeting and he had a meeting shortly after our meeting. Regardless there was still some time to meet so we went over to the restaurant in the building beside his and met. He asked all the usual questions and then asked if I had heard the news. I had. PixStream was to be acquired by Cisco for $369-million (US). He said that this made them millionaries and that they wanted to give something back to the community by forming an investment fund that invested in UW students. How would we like to exchange 30% of our company for $150,000? They'd get a board seat and we'd quit school to pursue Fairtunes full time. I told him that the offer was a generous one and but that I'd have to talk to my parnter John. As we walked back to his office so that he could give me a tour of their facilities I mentioned that his offer greatly exceed an offer that we had received from three friends in Winnipeg. Their offer had been $30,000 for 30%. We both had a good laugh about it.

The whole time Natalie had been waiting in the car and getting hungry. We went to Mel's (this was before we were addicted) made the calls to John and the parents and had a milkshake.

We continued to meet with our PixStream connection and on a Wednesday before the drop deadline John and I dropped out of school. Shortly there after PixStream was sued by Unique Broadband Systems for about $369-million (US). We fretted for a bit wondering how this would affect our deal. We finally emailed our contact who was in New York meeting with Cisco who was reconsidering their deal. He believed things would work out.

On October 31 PixStream settled with UBS for $25 million. Now during this time their lawyers were drafting documents for our deal. They were quite obviously stalling but after much pestering by our lawyers we received the documents on I believe a Thursday. That Friday I flew back to Winnipeg and meet with our lawyer to review the documents. We were generally pleased with them and were anxious to get them signed. A week after this we meet with our PixStream contact to discuss a couple of details relating to our deal. We discussed these and he then informed us that they had had to restructure their deal with Cisco in response to the lawsuit. As a result they were less liquid then they previously thought. Because of this they would no longer be able to invest in us. Needless to say we weren't please. We had both dropped out of school and spent a large amount of money in anticipation of the closing of this deal. And of course by now it was much too late to try and find another angel investor. The glory days of Fairtunes had passed. Our window of opportunity was closed. So began the depressing month of November.

Several weeks later we met again and feeling bad our contact offered us $30,000 for 30%. The same deal we had been offered back in July by the Winnipeg people before we even had a site and had been widely publicised. Oh the irony.

Now eight months after first meeting the guys at PixStream I wake up to find out that Cisco is laying off and divesting the entire PixStream operation. This saddens me. A good Waterloo company is disappearing because of Cisco's failure in the market place. If they hadn't been acquired I'm pretty sure that PixStream would continue to exist tomorrow.

59 Isabella is where hopefully we'll be living this summer in Toronto.

I went and visited our old house tonight. Instead of trying to describe the carnage I'll try and find a photo.

Donny is studying Quantum Cryptography. Thanks to Feed's Crypto Sees the Light I know what he's studying :). Now those entangled photons sound pretty interesting. Unfortunately I'd have to take a lot of very hard phsyics courses before I really understand any of this.
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