Month: October 2011

The Occupy Wall Street protests have gone global, including our home Vancouver. Protestors can be found in their “tent city” blocking the Vancouver Art Gallery and or parading through the streets disrupting local businesses; most recently their run on the banks.

The protestors lack a clear unified goal but the overlying message many of the global protests seem to be that people are not happy with the income gap and want change. In Vancovuer, protestors recently placed the burden upon the banking industry and moved in to “occupy” several banking establishments throughtout Vancouver including RBC and TD; chanting slogans like “Shut down RBC” or “hey hey ho ho big banks have gotta go”. The crowd ended at the TD bank next to the art gallery where miscreants played a loud stero while others danced on tellers tables.
Actions like these show that many of the people at the protest arent there to better the world, they’re jumping on the bandwagon and looking for a little fun, which masks many people who do have something important to say, and genuinely care about fixing the income gap.  One thing that I couldn’t stop thinking about while watching the video was, “Do these people realize the country wouldn’t be able to run without a banking system?”

Check out the source video pulled from youtube below.

     Technology blog Engadget has been following the recent blackberry outage for the past few days now and have now confirmed what Blackberry users around the globe have feared; Blackberry services worldwide including email and BBM have crashed.

Frustrated may be an understatement to the millions worldwide who have been affected by the Blackberry outage.  Many endured days without access to email, web browsing, and Blackberry’s popular BBM service.  The outage is a major blow to the company as it tries to play catch up to market leaders such as Apple and Android.  The brands perception secure reliable perception may also be under fire.  RIM executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have come out in acknowledging the failure and apologizing to their customer base for the inconvenience.

RIM’s response to the situation has seemed rather delayed and took a full four days for the Executives to address the public.  This doesn’t help the company in its struggles to regain market share; the stock has fallen from near 70 to 23 dollars this year and the company has been losing market share to competitors like Apple and Android.  Its going to be interesting to see if the company will be able to recover from the ordeal but social media is a-buzz with dissatisfaction.  Some angry users even asking for friends to vote, if they should switch to Android of Apple.

Source:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/12/rim-clarifies-global-service-outage-doesnt-provide-eta-for-res/

     Apples latest addition to the iPhone family may have left people “underwhelmed” after 15 months of hype led expectations of a “revolutionary [new] design”, but that has by no means lessened demand for the phone.  At&t recently came out with sales figures, announcing that within 12 hours of taking pre-orders they had sold 200,000 iPhone 4s units.

      With the latest rendition of iPhone, Apple is relying on internal hardware upgrades like an 8MP camera and the new A5 dual-core processor.  The phone will launch with Apples iOS 5 bringing a slew of new features, most prominently a sophisticated voice recognition software called Siri.

     Apple has never had so much competition in the mobile phone market.  Other mobile operation systems like Android or Windows Phone have been taking sizeable chunks of the mobile market; Google’s Android actually accounts for a larger market share then Apple.

     These sales numbers are quite impressive considering that At&t is no longer the sole carrier for the iPhone.  During the launch of the iPhone 4 is was the single place Americans could go to get the much loved phone but later in the year a Verizon variant came out.  With the launch of the iphone 4s Sprint has been added to those three, adding a large number of consumers who had been previously unable to purchase the iPhone.

     Despite a lacklustre unveiling, the iPhone 4s seems positioned to continuing the success of previous iPhones with some analysts even predicting that 28 million will be sold by December.  Only time will tell if Apple’s loyal fan base is willing to put up with the rather uninspired new phone and if the new phone can hold off competition from Android.

Sources

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/08/us-att-idUSTRE7966NL20111008

http://www.apple.com/iphone/ios/

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html

 

 

Adelle Tepper came upon a very interesting article, one I believe involves an industry many post secondary students have tried at some point throughout their academic career.  It’s an article about energy drinks, yes from Redbull the drink that “gives you wings” to 5 hour energy shot.

Recently though the Canadian government has put forward a plan to limit the amount of caffine that these drinks are allowed to have awhile not going as far as calling them stimulant drugs only to be sold in pharmacies.

While a consumer of energy drinks the first thought that came to mind was, the government shouldn’t be allowed to do that.  Not wanting the drinks I had come to enjoy to be lessened in their value, it sounded like the government had overstepped its bounds; that is till I read on and found out the average energy drink has 80mg of caffeine, 100mg less then the imposed limit.  It is the health departments role to protect the Canadian consumer from harms unknown to us but with the levels of caffine in a cup of coffee being higher I think they may have overreacted to the acceptence of energy drinks among youth.

Reffering to the chart on the right, you can see that a grande Starbucks coffee has over double the amount of caffeine as a Red Bull.  It seems only fair that if the government is going to be placing caffeine restrictions on energy drinks they should look into implementing the same system to the coffee industry as well.

 

 

 

 

You can find Adelle’s original blog post here, or for the original article please check the link below.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/06/canada-energydrinks-idUSN1E79514D20111006

 

      When Spyker, a maker of luxury sports cars, bought Saab last year, there were doubts whether the small sports car company would be able to bail Saab out of its financial woes.  After joining to form Swedish Automobile, the luxury car company is being jettisoned in hopes that the cash from the sale will keep Saab afloat until a potential deal with Chinese auto companies,  goes through.

Like previous dealings between Swedish Automobile and Vladmir Antonov, a deal to sell Spyker fell through earlier this year.  Mr Mascioli, Managing Director for North Street Capital, has announced he would be purchasing the company stating “he has owned a few racing cars, he has never owned a Spyker or an entire car company”

If the proposed deal goes through it would give Saab $32 million Euros and Mr. Muller, CEO for Swedish Automobile, believes that the deal could be closed within a month.  Muller would stay on as CEO for Spyker as appointed by Mascioli, but is currently looking for a new CEO for Saab.

Muller had been very optimistic about Saabs future and had made many broad claims about the company rebounding to its former glory.  His departure from the company seems to undermine that optimism and point to a not so bright future for Saab which might is only being held at bay by a potential deal from Chinese investors

Sources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/29/us-swedishautomobile-idUSTRE78S3MS20110929

http://gallery.carphotos.org/data/938/thumbs/spyker_logo.gif

http://cdn-www.rsportscars.com/images/spyker/2009-spyker-c8-aileron/spyker-c8-aileron-2009-front-quarter-panel-studio.jpg