Mark Fox's Weblog

Throughout the baseball season I noticed an advertisement for a company called SpongeTech on the left-field wall of the Roger Centre, home field of the Toronto Blue Jays leading me to eventually find out of what the company sold, soap filled sponges. A search of their site lists sponges such as those shaped as a bone for cleaning your dog and animal shaped ones for children’s baths, but does not list what a report in the financial news site, The Big Money suggests that the company’s main products is, a pump and dump scheme. The report claims the company is issuing massive amounts of stock and inflating revenue numbers without actually selling many sponges even after a buying ads in numerous sports stadiums. While this claim may not be true, it is likely best to stick by buying SpongeTech sponges and not its stock.

Now that Peter Foster in the the National Post's Financial Post opinion page have stated that oil prices and thus gas prices will never rise again and thus hybrid cars are a waste I hope he provides the people of Alberta with some ideas of what to do next.

TechReport has noted that well known computer hardware retailer Newegg has opened a Canadian web site newegg.ca. Checking against existing Canadian retailes NCIX Canada and DirectCanada they fould that with shipping Newegg had the cheapest price for two out of three selected items (Asus Radeon HD 4850, WD Caviar SE16 640GB) but was $15 more expensive on the third, a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400.

Newegg.ca prices are now starting to appear in Canadian price trackers such as pricegrabber.ca.

Rogers Wireless has announced that they are extending its “limited time” 6 GB of data for $30 a month plan until the end of September instead of the previously planned August 31st end date. The claimed reason is last week’s introduction of the BlackBerry Bold. Once this ends Rogers states there will be two replacement plans offered. Both offer less than the current plan. The CBC states that:

Rogers will introduce a $25-a-month data plan for the iPhone and other smartphones on Oct. 1 that will allow 500 megabytes of downloading per month, which will be bundled with a three-month promotion of unlimited usage. Another plan will allow one gigabyte of usage for $30. Customers must also take a voice plan, which start at $20, and pay a system access fee of $6.95.

Rogers claims that this drop in data limits from 6 GB to 1 GB a month for $30 will not affect many people as they have found that “just over one per cent of iPhone owners used more than one gigabyte of data in their first month, while about 95 per cent of owners used less than 500MB”. In fact Rogers claims that only one person has exceeded the 6 GB limit.

Hopefully as Telus introduces the BlackBerry Thunder touchscreen smartphone and provides more competition for the iPhone Rogers will reverse course. 1 GB may be greater than today’s usage but that can rapidly change in the near future as new applications are introduced. After-all people used dialup for years, imagine trying to use YouTube over a 14.4K modem.

In Canada the Microsoft-Yahoo merger would create a funny situation. As noted by The Canadian Press, Rogers Communications has a partnership with Yahoo for its Rogers Yahoo! Internet service , while competitor Bell Canada links with Microsoft's MSN for its MSN Sympatico service.

Can Microsoft-Yahoo have ties to both companies? Could one switch and link up with Google?

With Microsoft’s announcement of a $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo at $31 per share in stock and cash, tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people may be wondering what will happen if their web e-mail, on-line photos, portal home page and numerous other web sites and tools that the two companies offer.

Long Zheng has posted a table that summaries the huge overlap of competing Microsoft and Yahoo offering. Among the overlaps are:

Yahoo.com vs. Msn.com, Yahoo Mail vs. Live Hotmail, Yahoo Messenger vs. Live Messenger, Yahoo Search vs. Live Search, etc.

He notes:

Now imagine for each and every one of these you have to make a decision - to keep it as is, integrate Yahoo’s into Microsoft’s, integrate Microsoft’s into Yahoo’s or even come up with a new hybrid. Simple branding aside, I think the developers are going to have to work quite a few late nights to integrate what I believe are two monolithic systems together.

I agree with his final note: Whatever they do, they better not ruin Flickr.

The Canadian wireless industry got a shock Thursday when the federal government announced that in order to increase competition a portion of the wireless spectrum coming available for auction will be reserved for new entrants in the market. Of the 105 Megahertz being auctioned off, 40 MHz will be reserved for new entrants.

Globe and Mail columnist Derek DeCloet looks at how self-serving the wireless industry’s claims of adequate competition were. The market seems to agree – share of Rogers Communications Inc., BCE Inc. and Telus Corp all fell Thursday.
However entry into a market where the big three already have 19 million subscribers will not be easy or cheap, with one cost estimate being between $1.5-billion and $2-billion on spectrum, equipment and startup losses.

My view is thatthe quickest way for a new competitor to make a splash is to license the iPhone for Canada and provide a cheap data plan for it. Based on events in the US tens or hundreds of thousands of people will switch to the new company.

Following a mistaken early announcement last week Google has introduced for real its Google Finance Canada site. With the ability to easily integrate data from the site into Google’s other tools this could be a strong competitor to the Globe and Mail’s GlobeInvestor.com site and other Canadian investment sites.

Looks like Canadian drug store chain Jean Coutu Group Inc. 2004 purchase of portions of the American Eckerd and Brooks drugstores from JC Penny really didn’t work out.

Jean Coutu is selling the 1,858 primary East Coast drug stores to U.S. chain Rite Aid Corp. in a cash and stock deal worth $3.4 billion US. Jean Coutu purchased the chains from JC Penny in 2004 for $2.4 billion US and later spent a lot trying to turn them around.

As Jean Coutu struggled and lost 40% of its share price since the sell, JC Penny’s shares have risen 90% as it refocused on department store sales.

Computer book publisher O’Reilly has a series of postings on the US Computer Book Market in Q22006 compared to last year, using Nielsen BookScan data as a basis. Overall the market was a bit better than last year:

The second quarter of 2006 was about 1.5% above the same quarter in 2005, with 1,781,390 units reported sold versus 1,753,735 in the prior period. We didn't quite fall back to 2005 levels, but we didn't see a continuation of or even a hoped-for increase over Q1's 6% increase. Reported revenues for the quarter were up 3% over the same period in 2005, to $63,319,058, due to an increase in the average price of a computer book from $37.54 to $37.78

There has been movement in various topics, the author notes:

• C# book sales continues to gain on Java, with a 49% unit sales increase compared to Java's 10% decrease.
  
• Ruby continues its momentum, and is the fastest-growing programming language in terms of book sales.
  
• Microsoft's new release of SQL Server has continued to drive significant book sales, with that market up 86%. ASP.Net is also on a roll, with book sales up 61%.
  
• It's amazing how many books so simple a device as the iPod can manage to sell!
  

However they do note that some of these values are affected by the releases of new versions of software or the availability of books.

In looking at publishers, O'Reilly is the #1 imprint in terms of revenue followed by Microsoft and the For Dummies line.

Waiting for the Japanese car you ordered from the dealer? It may soon be at the bottom of the Pacific.

The Japanese car ship M.V. COUGAR ACE which is carrying nearly 5,000 cars from Japan to Canada is badly listing, nearly on its side in the north Pacific near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. U.S. Coast Guard officials have ordered the crew to abandon ship and are planning to send helicopters and other rescue craft to pick up the 22-crew members.

There has been previous sinkings of car carriers. In December 2002 the Norwegian cargo ship Tricolor carrying over specially ordered Volvos, BMWs and Saabs destined for Britain and the U.S, worth nearly $48 million US sank in the English Channel after colliding with a freighter. Located in shallow, heavily trafficked waters, the ship was salvaged the next year, but not before the wreck was hit by three other ships including an oil tanker. A giant underwater saw was used to cut the ship into nine pieces, which were than raised to the surface for recycling. The cars were also raised and scrapped.