Strictly Business

ROHNERT PARK Red Condor secures $2 million loan

Red Condor, a Rohnert Park company that fights spam, announced Tuesday it received a $2 million loan from Square 1 Bank.

The loan will augment $5.7 million in venture capital that Red Condor finalized in July. That round of funding included $1.2 million from local investors such as Don Green. The other $4.5 million came from ATA Ventures, based in Redwood City, and RWI Ventures, based in Menlo Park.

The anti-spam company will use the funding to further develop technology that blocks spam and other malicious e-mail for its clients, which include the cities of Santa Rosa and Petaluma.

Last year, Red Condor raised $2.8 million in its first phase of venture funding.

Founded in 2003, Red Condor competes in the fast-growing $2.5 billion market for anti-spam solutions. It has grown from 100 clients in 2005 to about 2,000 clients today.

-- Nathan Halverson

Server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to cut an unspecified number of jobs as part of a new restructuring plan, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sun said it expects to incur total charges of about $100 million to $150 million over the next several quarters, primarily related to cash severance costs. The company expects to book most of the charges in the first half of the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008.

The Santa Clara-based company did not disclose how many jobs would be cut.

-- Associated Press

USA Technologies Inc. and MasterCard Inc. on Tuesday said they will install 7,500 cashless payment terminals in Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. vending machines.

The terminals allow vending machine customers to use magnetic-stripe credit cards or MasterCard's PayPass contactless payment technology.

The new terminals will be installed in the Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Seattle markets.

-- Associated Press

McDonald's is boosting pay to most of its 50,000 staff in China by an average of 30 percent, the company confirmed Tuesday.

About 95 percent of the company's employees in China will receive raises of between 12 percent and 56 percent, the official China Daily said, citing McDonald's China chief executive Jeffrey Schwartz.

Though pay varies in different parts of the country, McDonald's employees are paid a minimum hourly wage of 73 cents in China's business center of Shanghai, according to Chinese media.

-- Associated Press