Three Commodore directors quit
updated 12:15 pm EDT, Tue August 2, 2011
Commodore board replaces three directors with one
Asiarim, the company that holds the rights to the Commodore name, has announced that three of its directors, who are also officers of the company, have resigned. In their place, Dr. J.C.M. Hovers has become the sole director as well as Chairman, President and CEO. Eugène van Os, managing director the company's Commodore Licensing subsidiary, will become Treasurer, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary.
Asiarim mainly conducts business under the Commodore name. The resignations came as a pre-condition to Asiarim signing a term sheet in July with Euro American SA. This gave the company exclusive worldwide rights to patented video compression technology. Asiarim did not explain the rationale between the resignations and the deal.
Commodore's current primary business is licensing its name to products and services. It also has adapted several of the old C64 games to run on iPhones using an emulator. In January, the company announced at CES that it would be developing a line of Windows-based notebooks, all-in one desktop PCs, tablets, and a series of smart phones running Android. It planned to begin shipping them by the end of March. It also indicated that it would be releasing a C64 emulator to run its games on Android OS devices, also by the end of March. Neither has occurred, and the company's product website is still under construction.
In August 2010, the company's Commodore Licensing subsidiary granted Commodore USA the worldwide rights to brand a PC, which replicates the old Commodore C64 form factor, with the Commodore label. That product, which runs Linux and sports an Intel Atom with NVIDIA Ion 2 graphics, a 1TB hard drive, and HDMI inside, began shipping this past June.
