Month: April 2004

Earlier this week, Apple Computer Inc. released financial results for its fiscal second quarter and they were terrific, although there were some shadows in the details. Sales of Apple's iPod were through the roof but sales of the G5 desktop were disappointing.
Investors, though, took one look at the big picture — profit tripling, $4-billion plus cash in the bank, no debt, a white-hot product – and started buying shares. Apple's shares hit a new 52-week high yesterday of more than $29 (U.S.). I've got a write-up on the market reaction to Apple's numbers in today's Globe:

“Despite cautionary notes from several Wall Street analysts that shares of Apple Computer Inc. were fully valued, investors piled into the stock of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company, driving its shares up by more than 10 per cent at one point yesterday, to a new 52-week intraday high.
The day after reporting financial results for what one analyst called “a monster quarter,” Apple's shares finished at $29.30 (U.S.) on the Nasdaq Stock Market, up $2.66 or 10 per cent from the previous day's close. Apple touched its 52-week high of $29.58 early in the session.
“We think Apple's newfound momentum is likely to snowball and continue to surprise investors on the upside,” said Steven Milunovich, technology analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. of New York. Mr. Milunovich reiterated his “buy” rating yesterday. He has a 12-month price target of $32 . ..” [Read the full story]

I found some old Apple photos on my hard drive recently. They are pics of Apple's HQ in Cupertino taken during a 1998 trip to Macworld San Francisco. The pic here is the front door at that time to Apple's head office. A bigger version and another pic is in B-Roll.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association says it will appeal a controversial court ruling earlier this month that seemed to suggest that, in Canada anyhow, sharing music on the Internet is not illegal. The record industry will argue that Federal Court of Canada Judge Konrad von Finckenstein made several legal errors in his precedent-setting judgement. Canada's record industry is attempting to sue 29 Canadians for illegally uploading music files to the Internet.

“In our view, Canadian copyright law does not allow people to make copies of hundreds or thousands of musical recordings for global copying, transmission and distribution to millions of strangers on the Internet,” said CRIA's lawyer Richard Pfohl (pictured)

“This appeal is important for virtually all Canadian intellectual property owners,” said CRIA President, Brian Robertson. “Any owner of intellectual property that can be digitally transmitted has a stake in this appeal process.”

CRIA claims that retail sales of recorded music in Canada have decreased by $425-million since 1999 and that, in the last 12 months, record companies operating in Canada have laid off 20 per cent or more of their staff.

I was not filing on this story but my Globe colleague Jack Kapica has this report.

Washington-based research firm TeleGeography says that “while falling prices
and overcapacity continue to plague the industry … New demand growth has
begun to outpace price erosion on many city-to-city routes.”
That would be encouraging news to long-haul service providers like Bell,
Spring, and (back from the dead) 360Networks. It also points to a more
promising future for the equipment vendors, like Nortel Networks and Lucent
Technologies, that those providers buy their gear from.
In its study
of international bandwidth, TeleGeography says prices on most long-haul
routes in the U.S. and Europe fell by 10 percent to 30 percent in 2003 while
new deployments of Internet capacity–the key indicator of bandwidth
demand–increased almost 60 percent.
“Revenues aren't necessarily skyrocketing,” said TeleGeography analyst
Stephan Beckert. “However, these new data do suggest that bandwidth demand
is strong enough to offset recent price declines.”

In December, the International Telecommunications Union will host the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, Switzerland. In preparation for that summit, the ITU is asking anyone with any interest at all in this area, to fill out an online survey asking questions like:

• What are the most important goals to ensure an Information Society for all?
• Should cyberspace be declared a resource to be shared by all for the global public good?

On Tuesday morning, I will be giving a presenation to the Media Relations Summit in Toronto, Canada. Here's the conference blurb for my session:

““First it was the tech meltdown. Then, the war on terrorism grabbed the headlines. In a news environment dominated by an uncertain economy and global unrest, how can media relations professionals create stories that find their way “above the fold” and on the nightly news? Hear and learn directly from this panel of experienced journalists how your stories can be crafted to compete with the news that is dominating today's media.

 
You can get the gist of my presentation — it's mostly advice and observations of use largely to public relations and communications professionals – here. As much as I am able, I will have a go at blogging this event.

CHUM said this morning it will be buying all the assets of Craig Media, pending CRTC approval.  With this acquisition, Chum establishes itself in new markets, namely in Alberta and Manitoba and is on its way to becoming a national broadaster, a la CTV, CBC, and Canwest Global.
CHUM also said it would commit to selling Toronto1 because Chum already owns two TV stations — CITY-TV and CKVR — in the Toronto and southern Ontario market. Big news for Canada's broadcasting industry.

[Press release]

CHUM Limited signs agreement to purchase Craig Media Inc.

TORONTO, April 12 /CNW/ – CHUM Limited announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase all the shares of Craig Media Inc., which includes the three “A Channel” conventional television stations in Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg; CKX, a CBC-affiliate station in Brandon; the newly launched Toronto1 station in Toronto; and the MTV, MTV2 and TV Land digital specialty television channels . . .

A few weeks ago, AKMA asked if anyone wanted to record, post, and host a chapter of Lawrence Lessig's new book Free Culture. Lessig had released the book under a Creative Commons license and had not reserved the rights to non-commercial audio performances of the book. The speed and enthusiasm with which Lessig's fans recorded the book surprised both AKMA and Lessig himself. I talked to Lessig, AKMA, and others, about this phenomenon a couple of weeks ago and wrote a piece for The Globe and Mail about it. It's in today's paper, buried in the middle of the Review section. I will also try to put excerpts from those interviews online here shortly, as they all had tremendously interesting things to say and I simply ran out of room trying to say them all in the paper. My colleague Guy Dixon had earlier told Globe readers about the Creative Commons license.:

Righting copywrongs
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig has turned the intellectual ownership debate on its ear
While Canada's content creators pored over a controversial Federal Court of Canada ruling that seemed to set ideas about ownership of intellectual property on its head, Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor, author, and influential voice for copyright reform in the United States, was out proving that free downloads and fewer restrictions can be a creator's best friend.

On March 31, the Federal Court ruled that sharing digital music files over the Internet did not infringe on copyright rules. Some filmmakers, TV broadcasters, authors, software publishers and other content creators wondered if their work was still copyright-protected under Canadian law.

The ruling sparked a debate on Canada's editorial pages and Internet chat rooms about the rights of creators to control their work.

Lessig convinced his publisher, Penguin Books, to allow his new book, Free Culture, to come into the world this spring under a Creative Commons licence, a relatively new kind of copyright which, among other things, allows anyone to make and distribute a non-commercial audio performance of his book without even asking his permission.

And sure enough, days after the book's release, one of his fans put out the call: Are there any volunteers who would read and record a chapter of Free Culture and then post an MP3 copy of that recording on their website? … [Read the full story}

And here's a bit of news on this subject this morning. Boing Boing notes that:

“Some Chinese bloggers have recently launed a collabrative transaltion project to translate Lessig's Free Culture into Chinese, Create a Wiki page in SocialBrain. So far, 21 people have joined this collaborative project, memes appeared in lots of blogs. 12 chapters were assigned by contributors to translate.”
Link

[Lifted word for word from Boing Boing]

Jack Layton is the leader of the NDP, Canada's left-wing New Democratic Party, and is in the running for Prime Minister of Canada in the next election. On the heels of Canada's landmark court decision that essentially legalized file sharing, Layton has turned P2P into an election issue, endorsing file-sharing as a beneficial activity, a gutsy move, considering the Party's close ties with the arts (the NDP has traditionally endorsed strong arts-spending):

“I'm a holder of a copyright myself. But it's a book on homelessness and I don't mind if anyone wants to copy it,” he says with a grin. “I'm still not so sure how (file sharing) impacts sales — some studies even say it enhances them. I don't think the dust has settled on this yet. When I was at university there was a great fear that photocopying was going to destroy the publishing industry and that hasn't happened. It's sometimes best to muddle along, take things one step at a time and see what happens. Society can have a way of sorting things out.”

Link
(Thanks, Simon!) [Boing Boing]

I love RSS feeds. I love the idea of them. (I think I may have mentioned this before but I'm using the wonderful NetNewsWire on my Macs and the pretty darn good News Gator on my Windows 2000 box as my aggregator tools). I wish the folks who send me press releases would use RSS feeds. I wish more companies would publish their corporate stuff as an RSS feed.
Antone Roundy, thought, has a different view:

Are you sick and tired of people telling you to publish a newsfeed? I sure am. So today, I'm going to give you a break and discuss why you shouldn't publish a newsfeed. Feel free to use these arguments to tell people to shut up and mind their own business”

Antone makes some good points. Not good enough that you should be dissuaded from publishing an RSS feed but there are some things he talks about that prospective RSS feed publishers ought to consider.

I am not an America-hater. But surely the death penalty is not a cure for whatever ills U.S. citizens believes they're afflicted with. From the blog of San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor:

The world's top three executioners, according to Amnesty International, are (in order): China, Iran and the United States.
Aren't you proud to be in such company?

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]