Standard Life said that most of the packs went out to the 2.3 million policyholders last week.One policyholder, who asked to remain anonymous, said that she had contacted Standard Life to inform them, only to be told that this was because her endowment policy was assigned to her mortgage lender. She said she was keen to vote in favour of demutualisation.Standard Life said yesterday: “We have teams and teams of people dealing with the mailing. But we can’t say some will not have fallen through the cracks. With this many packs going out it has to be spaced over time. All we can say is if anyone has not received a pack by next Wednesday they should phone our helpline.”The number is 0845 6060022..

Graham Wallace, the chief executive of Cable & Wireless, bagged a near-£500,000 short-term performance bonus during his first year in charge of the telecoms company for beating financial and customer service targets. Graham Wallace, the chief executive of Cable & Wireless, bagged a near-£500,000 short-term performance bonus during his first year in charge of the telecoms company for beating financial and customer service targets.
The bonus, along with a salary of £700,100 and other benefits of £46,999, raised Mr Wallace’s total package for the year to March to £1.24m. Appointed in February 1999 after the departure of Richard Brown to EDS, Mr Wallace instigated a broad restructuring of C&W.He also received new options on 143,000 shares, bringing his total stake in C&W to 647,189 shares. The options may be exercised over the next six years.Oddly, however, two other C&W executives did even better than Mr Wallace, underlining the rewards that can be unleashed with share options. Robert Lerwill, finance director, collected £1.7m in total with £1.16m being gained from cashing in share options.

Stephen Pettit, director of corporate development received £1.65m, including £1.08m realised from share options.C&W staff will also get a modest share of the bonanza with around 14,000 employees not covered by any scheme due to receive stock worth one-third of their salary The options will vest for three years.. At 9.30am last Monday, APBnews was a thriving internet content provider, putting out a well-organised, useful news site on crime in America with 140 journalists. At 9.30am last Monday, APBnews was a thriving internet content provider, putting out a well-organised, useful news site on crime in America with 140 journalists.
Minutes later, the number of employees had come down a little – to zero. The company had, like many other dot s, hit a funding wall after it failed to find a third round of financing.It is an all too familiar feeling in the dot world, which has prompted widespread calls of “I told you so” from those who always thought the New Economy too good to be true. But reports of the sector’s death are vastly exaggerated; in fact, the prospects for those who get their business model right are still exceptionally bright.That does not lessen the pain for those that fail.

“We’re all shocked,” one employee told Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews site. The company “had a new alliance with AOL, they had some alliance with a criminal textbook company, they just started their radio news service (and equipped reporters/freelancers with expensive mini-disc recorders),” wrote the APB staffer – all the things that a content provider ought to be doing.Yet such failures co-exist with the fact that the internet economy is maturing, and fast. “2000 will be remembered as the year that important psychological thresholds were crossed and technologies once considered cutting-edge entered the mainstream – making the PC as common as the stereo system,” said Patrick Callinan, an analyst at Forrester Research.A study by the US Commerce Department found that between 1994 and 1998, IT-related employment expanded by 30 per cent to 5.2 million jobs. “The first two reports were called the ‘The Emerging Digital Economy’,” said William M Daley, the Secretary of Commerce of his Department’s study. “Today, after just 26 months, we dropped the ‘emerging’, because it’s here.”Another from the University of Texas shows 36 per cent job growth in purely internet-related jobs from 1998 to 1999, to nearly 2.5 million jobs. “To put that in perspective,” says the survey, “there are more workers in internet-related jobs than employees for the Federal Government, excluding postal workers (1.827 million), communications and public utilities (2.390 million) and insurance (2.405 million) industries.”There is, of course, a common acceptance that the investment expectations which have gone into the sector have both exceeded the realities, and encouraged some losers on the way.