Word: lucent
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jose Aguayo, a New Jersey-based energy analyst, was one of those believers. He lost thousands in Lucent and WorldCom shares. "I felt very silly," he says. And chastened. Now the splurge money is gone, and Aguayo says he won't be going back into stocks anytime soon. His experience is common. Vaporized stock-market wealth is at $4 trillion and counting. The losses have engendered one of the fastest economic decelerations ever--from an annual growth rate last spring of 6% to near zero today. In a $10 trillion economy, that's a difference of $600 billion...
Tucked into a corner of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., stands a small box that houses what could be the future of the telecommunications industry. Called a LambdaRouter, the device contains 512 microscopic mirrors, each of which can switch light waves packed with more than 10 billion bits of information--roughly the contents of 10,000 novels--from one hair-thin strand of optical fiber to another...
Nobody knows the vicissitudes of technology better than Lucent, which had to negotiate a $6.5 billion loan package last month to avoid a cash crunch. Lucent was first a beneficiary and then a victim of the race to wire the U.S. with the speed-of-light data pipes known as broadband. And now it has company in its misery, as broadband carnage has spread from phone companies like AT&T and WorldCom to fiber makers like Corning to optical-systems builders like Nortel Networks to components makers like JDS Uniphase and networking companies like Cisco Systems...
...voice-portal specialists don't have the lucrative receiver to themselves. A host of techies, from wireless software players like Openwave and Infospace to voice infrastructure start-ups like Telera, TalkTwo, NetByTel and Voci, as well as equipment providers like Lucent and Nortel, are picking up the same lines. "Our 800 number is just a continuous, live beta test," says Amol Joshi, co-founder of BeVocal, a Silicon Valley start-up that partnered with Qwest Wireless to launch its own portal. "We want to be the 'Intel inside' for phone companies...
Consider John Ellis, 45, who worked at AT&T and then at its spin-off Lucent for a total of 24 years. He left Lucent before the telecom equipment maker's recent string of bad news. But his 401(k) was always fully invested in Lucent stock, and a year ago, it was worth $500,000. A brutal 75% slide in Lucent's price in the past 12 months chopped his balance to $130,000. Sadly, Ellis' plight isn't unusual, nor is this solely a tech experience...