VOIP player Vonage gets reprieve
Hours after Internet phone company Vonage Holdings was barred from signing up new customers for its Internet phone service by a federal judge in Alexandria, another federal appeals court gave the company a temporary stay on that injunction, allowing it to continue to enroll customers while it sought to overturn the lower court ruling.

Vonage has been embroiled in a patent dispute for many years with Verizon Communications, which accused it of violating three patents covering technology that allows low-cost voice calls to be made over the Internet.

The court stay came a month after a jury in the Eastern District of Virginia held that Vonage was guilty of patent infringement and ordered it to pay Verizon $58 million and royalties on future sales.

Vonage was among the first few companies in the world to come out with the technology that transmits voice calls over the Internet, known as VoIP. It currently has 2.2 million customers.

During the last year Vonage has been hit by competition from traditional phone companies as well as the cable industry that have moved into the VOIP turf, offering low-cost bundles of services, including phone, cable and Internet access.

Last year May, Vonage went public offering shares priced at $17. It sold 31.3 million shares and raised $531.3 million. The shares fell nearly 13 percent on the first day of listing, closing at $14.85 and closed at $3.37 Thursday.

Vonage shares have dropped more than 25 percent since listing to reach a record low of $3 a share after Judge Hilton ordered the company on March 23 to stop using technologies patented by Verizon.
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Contaminated pet food brands to be recalled
The US Food and Drug Administration has widened its recall of pet food found contaminated with melamine, (chemical used to make plastic products) to include 22 types of dog biscuits. The biscuits, made by Sunshine Mills Inc., contain wheat gluten imported from China that contained melamine.

The counsel for Sunshine Mills said 80 percent of the tainted biscuits were sold by Wal-Mart, under the Ol' Roy brand. The company had produced about 24 truckloads of biscuits with the contaminated gluten, and that the majority of the product was large biscuits. He said wheat gluten accounted for less than 1 percent of the total weight of the biscuits.

Another pet food maker Menu Foods last month recalled more than 90 brands of its "cuts and gravy" pet food. The company, based in Ontario, initially recalled only food made from Dec. 3, 2006, to March 6, 2007.

Menu Foods said it initiated action after a supplier, ChemNutra of Las Vegas, recalled all wheat gluten it had imported from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company of Wangdien, China.

The FDA had found melamine in the gluten. The FDA is now testing all wheat gluten imported from China. The Chinese government said yesterday that no wheat gluten had been exported to the United States or Canada. Xuzhou Anying has also denied shipping wheat gluten to either country.

Though melamine has been found in the food and in the urine and kidneys of pets that have eaten the food, officials and scientists are not sure whether the chemical actually caused pets to get sick.
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