Business briefs

expected on inventory charge

SAN JOSE — Hurt by an inventory writedown, digital video recorder provider TiVo Inc. posted Wednesday a wider-than-expected loss for its fiscal second quarter.

In the three months ended July 31, the Alviso-based company said it recorded a net loss of $17.7 million, or 18 cents per share, which included a $11.2 million inventory purchase charge it had not accounted for when it earlier predicted a $5 million to $8 million loss for the quarter. In the year-ago period, the company lost $6.4 million, or 7 cents per share.

Revenue rose 6 percent to $62.7 million.

Wall Street was expecting a loss of 5 cents per share, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Shares of TiVo closed at $6.20, up 18 cents, but fell 35 cents, nearly 6 percent, after posting its results.

Startup targets music fans

SAN JOSE — Being a groupie can be as easy as picking up the phone.

"I love you, Tyrese!” a female caller shouts in a message to the R&B singer.

"Yo, Rihanna, I just wanted to say thank you for the good work. I love ya,” a male caller from Conyers, Ga., tells the pop star.

With Web sites, blogs, social networks and text-messaging services, musicians have plenty of ways to connect with fans. SayNow is adding to the mix an older form of communication — voice messages.

SayNow’s service, slated to formally launch next month, lets celebrities receive voice messages and send ones en masse to those who have subscribed to be a part of their fan community. Each celebrity gets a phone number that fans can call to either record a message or listen to one left by the artist.

The service is free; SayNow is relying on advertising for revenue.

The Jonas Brothers, a young rock band among more than 250 musicians testing the service, records several messages a day for fans.

Last month, while en route to New Jersey for a concert, they called in a message to tell fans they were looking forward to picking up some bagels while in town. Girls toting hundreds of bagels showed up at the concert that night.

"It’s great that a single call could become a mass phone call,” said 19-year-old Kevin Jonas, the oldest of the three brothers. "We use MySpace and blogs to communicate, but that’s just text on screens. This is a way for us to speak right to them and for them to speak right back to us. There’s nothing like hearing someone screaming on the phone they like the songs or the video.”

SayNow, a startup based in Palo Alto, says it has signed more than 870,000 fans and secured $7.5 million in venture funding. The voice-messaging service is also available for use by other groups.

"It’s a very hot idea right now — social marketing using the cell phone,” said Jupiter Research analyst Julie Ask.

AFL-CIO sues government

over planned crackdown

on illegal workers

LOS ANGELES — The nation’s largest federation of labor unions sued the U.S. government Wednesday over a plan to crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, arguing increased scrutiny of Social Security numbers will result in errors and threaten the jobs of legal and American workers.

The new rules, set to take effect Sept. 14, will violate workers’ rights and impose burdensome obligations on employers who receive "no-match” letters from the Social Security Administration, according to the AFL-CIO suit filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

"We’ve seen employers use these no-match letters as a union busting tool,” said Ana Avendano, an AFL-CIO attorney and director of its immigrant worker program. "Employers will look at these letters, see all the new burdens, and just decide to fire people.”

Filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the suit seeks to force the Bush administration to halt the plan.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the lawsuit was "an obvious attempt to impede the department’s ability to enforce our immigration laws. It is completely without merit and we intend to fight it vigorously.”

Currently, the Social Security Administration sends "no match” letters to workers and their employers notifying them of information discrepancies. The letters are not shared with other government agencies because of privacy laws.

Although employers are prohibited from hiring illegal workers, their responsibilities with the letters have generally ended with notifying the workers of the discrepancies. Many employers have traditionally viewed the letters, and the small fines they sometimes incur, simply as a cost of doing business.

Under the new rules, employers who receive "no-match” letters will have 90 days to resolve the problem. Those who don’t comply could be deemed as knowingly hiring an illegal worker, which could result in fines and criminal prosecution.

The planned crackdown comes after immigration reform legislation in Congress fell apart this summer. Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the administrative sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants.

The plan has created deep concern in immigrant communities and among businesses and unions, as it’s an open secret that millions of illegal immigrants work "on the books” with fake names and Social Security numbers and other bogus documents.

Wednesday’s suit, which included a handful of other unions and trade councils, focuses on legal immigrants and American workers who could face job discrimination or hassles because of the new rules.

The plaintiffs argue the SSA’s national data base is riddled with errors, and that numbers can be incorrectly flagged due to typos, worker mistakes while filing out tax forms for job applications or a name change that wasn’t reported after marriage or other reasons.

An estimated 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies in SSA’s database, over 70 percent, involved native-born U.S. citizens, according to a December 2006 report from the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General.