Corporate Canada will likely deliver a wave of dismal earnings reports in coming weeks, but market pros say that could open the door to a stock rally as investors have grown numb to bad news and are ready to pounce on any morsel of optimism. According to the Bank of Canada, the domestic economy will emerge from its recession later this year, and on a stronger footing than most other major economies.
· TSX -67.86 largely influenced by commodity prices,
· DOW-148.15
· Dollar -.22c to 81.53USD
· Oil +$.24 to $41.68USper barrel.
· Gold +22.20 to927.30 USD per ounce
· www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/bond-look.html Canadian bond prices
Happy Anniversary to the Blackberry! Is it really only 10 years? Like it or not, it has changed our world.
Memories of BlackBerry still vivid 10 years later
Peter Lee, Record staff
Email the author
Software VP was shocked device named after a fruit
January 31, 2009
Matt Walcoff RECORD STAFF -KITCHENER
Ten years ago, developers at Research In Motion were working on an exciting project called PocketLink when they got the word from the marketing department that from then on, they were to refer to their creation by the name of a fruit.
"I can remember clearly at the end of '98 being shocked when they picked the name out," says Gary Mousseau, the Waterloo company's acting vice-president of software at the time.
"I was just floored. We didn't have the branding, marketing and sales experience of these guys.
We weren't appreciating their skill set."
Fortunately, the name BlackBerry stuck despite the techies' objections.
Ten years later, the Waterloo Region Record brought together some of the people involved in the creation of the BlackBerry to swap stories and talk about the genesis of the device that would change the world.
They certainly didn't feel like they were changing the world at first, says Mousseau, who was hired as RIM's 11th employee in 1991 and is now an intellectual property consultant. RIM, founded in 1984, had created an innovative device simply dubbed the 950.
It looked like a pager, but with a full keyboard, expanded monochrome screen and Intel 386 processor inside.
To the frustration of RIM's employees, the company's customers were not taking full advantage of the device's capabilities. They were using it with old servers and weak networks, mostly limiting its use to paging.
RIM was largely focused on paging in the late 90s, with email as an afterthought, says Dave Castell, who was on the marketing team for the original BlackBerry and is now retired.
"The BlackBerry project actually was more like hedging our bets or the contingency plan in case the first plan didn't work out," he said.
RIM, however, was an early adopter of email in the workplace, says Dale Brubacher-Cressman, one of RIM's first employees and program manager for handheld development in the late '90s.
So RIM had an inkling just how much of an advantage ready access to email might be.
"I think there was a realization that this could be a game-changing solution," says Brubacher-Cressman, now president of Vigor Clean Tech, an alternative-energy company in Kitchener.
"I don't think we ever imagined it would be anywhere near as popular as it became."
Mike Lazaridis, the company's founder and current co-chief executive officer, Mousseau and a few others had jury-rigged an email solution on their 950s by forwarding their work email inboxes to their mobile devices. It worked only one way; they couldn't reply to the messages.
But "it was exciting enough that one day Mike just called me into his office and said, 'Gary, we're going to solve this two-mailbox problem once and for all,' and we just started hashing it out," Mousseau says.
The two-mailbox problem meant that existing mobile devices could not work with users' work email, requiring a separate mailbox for mobile use. RIM's achievement was a solution that integrated the mobile device with the same mailbox used at the office.
RIM's employees were the test subjects for the BlackBerry email technology as the company worked on it in 1998.
They also became the first CrackBerry addicts.
"How we just did business just accelerated for me, at least in software," Mousseau says. "I got my answers so much faster; the roadblocks were just cleared quicker; I could just make decisions faster in '98."
The first devices -- machines that got BlackBerry email quickly became known as BlackBerrys -- were intended for text alone.
Conventional wisdom at RIM in the late '90s was that multi-use smartphones would never work, and the company was reluctant even to put a phone in the devices.
At the time, Jim Balsillie, RIM's other co-CEO, would compare what he called "everything devices" to the Chevrolet El Camino, the half-car, half-pickup truck that wasn't particularly good at being either, says Steve Carkner, former director of product development at the company.
Carkner now is chief executive officer of Panacis Medical in Ottawa.
Lazaridis is often called the creator of the BlackBerry. In fact, many people had a hand in the device's creation, from executives to overworked co-op students who developed software on RIM's then-modest budget.
But none of the RIM old-timers begrudged Lazaridis any of the credit.
"I'm not sure you could have replaced him with anyone else and still had BlackBerry," Brubacher-Cressman says.
"He obviously had a lot of really smart and really talented people working for him, but it was his job of pulling all that together."
mwalcoff@therecord.com
Monday, February 2, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Financial Update for Jan. 30, 2009
· TSX -143.47 profit taking after 4 days of gains lowered the tsx amid further signs of a worsening global economy
· DOW -226.40 fresh wave of dismal U.S. data, including labor market and housing figures, added to the economic gloom and rattled investor confidence, sending N.American equity markets lower
· Dollar -.54c to 81.75USD Canada's dollar weakened against the greenback as the price of oil dropped and a batch of bleak U.S. economic data kept investors away from riskier assets.
· Oil -$.72 to $41.44USper barrel.
· Gold +16.90 to905.10 USD per ounce
· www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/bond-look.html Canadian bond prices
Retailers are becoming creative to try and help stimulate the US economy.
Lose your job, Hyundai will take your car back Nicolas Van Praet, Financial Post
Buy or lease a new car and if you lose your job over the next 12 months, we'll take it back.
The offer is from Hyundai Motor Co. to Americans. The program's name: "Hyundai Assurance," whose TV ads state, perhaps in a cheeky stab at Detroit's big three automakers asking for billions in taxpayer-funded emergency aid: "An automaker that's got your back. Isn't that a nice change?"
It is a sign of the times, an automaker tapping into the national gloom with an offer of solace. It's also a reworking of the relationship between a car company and its customers, shifting responsibility for unpredictable events over to the seller from the buyer. And it just happens to be the brainchild of a Canadian entrepreneur named Vince Beretta.
Mr. Beretta is the founder and chief executive of Walkaway Canada Inc., a Toronto-based developer of credit products for the auto and recreational vehicle market. For the past eight years, he has been chipping away making small gains selling his protection plan, underwritten by ING Novex Insurance, to individual retailers. Just over 208 dealers now offer it to their clients wanting a bit more piece of mind.
In October of last year, Mr. Beretta hit real paydirt.
As he tells it, Hyundai Motor America executives were talking in a meeting late last year about the lack of consumer confidence, lamenting how vehicle incentives just weren't driving consumers to dealership doors any more. They were trying to figure out if there was some way to give Americans the reassurance to buy their cars. Someone in the room mentioned Walkaway and suggested Hyundai look at it.
A deal was quickly struck that saw Hyundai offer Walkaway's product, under the "Assurance" banner, across its entire U.S. lineup of vehicles starting Jan.2. Walkaway Canada will earn royalties, Mr. Beretta says, allowing it to double its current $14-million annual revenue.
Hyundai believes the program is striking such a chord that the automaker is replacing one of its two Superbowl ads featuring its Genesis car with a commercial centered on Assurance.
"This product helps sells cars. We've known that for years," Mr. Beretta says. "Why hasn't it landed with an [auto manufacturer before this]? Quite frankly because they haven't needed it. They've been selling record amounts of vehicles."
Until last year that is. U.S. auto sales were sliding for 11 straight months through September. But in October, they collapsed.
As the financial crisis ripped through stock markets, U.S consumers completely lost their appetite for buying big-ticket items, pinning most automakers to the ropes in what General Motors Corp. called the worst sales month since the end of the Second World War. Hyundai's U.S. sales fell 31% that month, mirroring double-digit increases at other companies.
People hesitate to buy a new car for one of three reasons, Mr. Beretta says: The unwillingness to take on more debt, job security, and health. "We answer all three of those," he says. "We're selling security in an insecure time."
In all, Walkaway has allowed Canadians to break more than $32-million in total vehicle loan and lease obligations since 2000. That may be nothing compared to the value of credit Americans may abandon with the Assurance program.
The ranks of America's jobless is growing as major employers announce layoffs to cut costs. The U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday that the number of U.S. workers drawing on unemployment benefits was 4.78 million in the week ended Jan.17, the highest since record-keeping started in 1967.
"It doesn't matter whether you can get a $199 a month lease or a $239 a month finance payment," says Richard Cooper, vice-president in Canada for market research firm J.D. Power & Associates. "That's not going to matter if what you're concerned about is whether you're going to have a job in three or four months."
Through Assurance, Hyundai pledges to offset up to $7,500 of negative equity in the vehicle returned, meaning it will pay up to that amount to make up the difference between what you still own on your vehicle loan and what the now-used vehicle is worth. Responsibility for the returned vehicle falls to the dealer. Buyers can return their vehicle if they lose their job, become disabled, or go bankrupt, among other conditions.
Hyundai has no plans at the moment to offer the Assurance program in Canada, saying newly-introduced pricing offers and low financing are resonating well with buyers here.
· DOW -226.40 fresh wave of dismal U.S. data, including labor market and housing figures, added to the economic gloom and rattled investor confidence, sending N.American equity markets lower
· Dollar -.54c to 81.75USD Canada's dollar weakened against the greenback as the price of oil dropped and a batch of bleak U.S. economic data kept investors away from riskier assets.
· Oil -$.72 to $41.44USper barrel.
· Gold +16.90 to905.10 USD per ounce
· www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/bond-look.html Canadian bond prices
Retailers are becoming creative to try and help stimulate the US economy.
Lose your job, Hyundai will take your car back Nicolas Van Praet, Financial Post
Buy or lease a new car and if you lose your job over the next 12 months, we'll take it back.
The offer is from Hyundai Motor Co. to Americans. The program's name: "Hyundai Assurance," whose TV ads state, perhaps in a cheeky stab at Detroit's big three automakers asking for billions in taxpayer-funded emergency aid: "An automaker that's got your back. Isn't that a nice change?"
It is a sign of the times, an automaker tapping into the national gloom with an offer of solace. It's also a reworking of the relationship between a car company and its customers, shifting responsibility for unpredictable events over to the seller from the buyer. And it just happens to be the brainchild of a Canadian entrepreneur named Vince Beretta.
Mr. Beretta is the founder and chief executive of Walkaway Canada Inc., a Toronto-based developer of credit products for the auto and recreational vehicle market. For the past eight years, he has been chipping away making small gains selling his protection plan, underwritten by ING Novex Insurance, to individual retailers. Just over 208 dealers now offer it to their clients wanting a bit more piece of mind.
In October of last year, Mr. Beretta hit real paydirt.
As he tells it, Hyundai Motor America executives were talking in a meeting late last year about the lack of consumer confidence, lamenting how vehicle incentives just weren't driving consumers to dealership doors any more. They were trying to figure out if there was some way to give Americans the reassurance to buy their cars. Someone in the room mentioned Walkaway and suggested Hyundai look at it.
A deal was quickly struck that saw Hyundai offer Walkaway's product, under the "Assurance" banner, across its entire U.S. lineup of vehicles starting Jan.2. Walkaway Canada will earn royalties, Mr. Beretta says, allowing it to double its current $14-million annual revenue.
Hyundai believes the program is striking such a chord that the automaker is replacing one of its two Superbowl ads featuring its Genesis car with a commercial centered on Assurance.
"This product helps sells cars. We've known that for years," Mr. Beretta says. "Why hasn't it landed with an [auto manufacturer before this]? Quite frankly because they haven't needed it. They've been selling record amounts of vehicles."
Until last year that is. U.S. auto sales were sliding for 11 straight months through September. But in October, they collapsed.
As the financial crisis ripped through stock markets, U.S consumers completely lost their appetite for buying big-ticket items, pinning most automakers to the ropes in what General Motors Corp. called the worst sales month since the end of the Second World War. Hyundai's U.S. sales fell 31% that month, mirroring double-digit increases at other companies.
People hesitate to buy a new car for one of three reasons, Mr. Beretta says: The unwillingness to take on more debt, job security, and health. "We answer all three of those," he says. "We're selling security in an insecure time."
In all, Walkaway has allowed Canadians to break more than $32-million in total vehicle loan and lease obligations since 2000. That may be nothing compared to the value of credit Americans may abandon with the Assurance program.
The ranks of America's jobless is growing as major employers announce layoffs to cut costs. The U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday that the number of U.S. workers drawing on unemployment benefits was 4.78 million in the week ended Jan.17, the highest since record-keeping started in 1967.
"It doesn't matter whether you can get a $199 a month lease or a $239 a month finance payment," says Richard Cooper, vice-president in Canada for market research firm J.D. Power & Associates. "That's not going to matter if what you're concerned about is whether you're going to have a job in three or four months."
Through Assurance, Hyundai pledges to offset up to $7,500 of negative equity in the vehicle returned, meaning it will pay up to that amount to make up the difference between what you still own on your vehicle loan and what the now-used vehicle is worth. Responsibility for the returned vehicle falls to the dealer. Buyers can return their vehicle if they lose their job, become disabled, or go bankrupt, among other conditions.
Hyundai has no plans at the moment to offer the Assurance program in Canada, saying newly-introduced pricing offers and low financing are resonating well with buyers here.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Financial Update for Jan. 29, 2009
· TSX +146.60-up for a 4th straight session, led by the heavily weighted financial sector, on hopes that the multibillion-dollar stimulus package unveiled in Tuesday's Canadian budget and further U.S. government action will promote economic stability.
· DOW +200.72
· Dollar +.74c to 82.90 USD
· Oil +$.58to $42.16 per barrel.
· Gold -$11.30 to888.200 USD per ounce
· www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/bond-look.html Canadian bond prices
· DOW +200.72
· Dollar +.74c to 82.90 USD
· Oil +$.58to $42.16 per barrel.
· Gold -$11.30 to888.200 USD per ounce
· www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/bond-look.html Canadian bond prices
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