Zero-Knowledge sues IBM

Montreal's Zero-Knowledge Systems Inc. is suing International Business Machines Inc. for $7-million, alleging copyright violation and violation of Quebec's civil code.
I have a brief write-up on this in today's Globe.
Zero-Knowledge, through its new wholly-owned subsidary Synomos, has put up the Statement of Claim and other documents filed with the Quebec Superior Court to support its claim.

Break up Hewlett-Packard, says Merrill

[From today's Globe and Mail] Merrill Lynch's top analyst Steve Milunovich says HP would be worth more to shareholders if it was in two parts – a topic that likely won't come up at today's analyst meeting.

The HP name should stick with a company that sells printers and consumer technology products, and the other should find a new name and sell just computers and high-end services for business customers, he said.

“Experience teaches that focus wins,” Mr. Milunovich said in a research note published today. “Resource allocation and mindshare are likely to be enhanced. HP can differentiate with investors by aggressively returning excess cash to shareholders through a higher dividend or greater share repurchase.”

[Read the full story]

Pacific Crest rates Apple a buy

The day after Apple Computer's CEO Steve Jobs used a lunchtime interview spot on CBNC to announce a cool new wireless gadget, brokerage Pacific Crest Securities is picking up coverage of the company. Analyst Steve Lidberg is starting Apple out with an Outperform rating and has a 12-month price target of $34.
Lidberg writes:

We are initiating coverage of Apple Computer with an Outperform rating. We believe Apple is becoming a leading provider of digital entertainment and media solutions. Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store should develop into a multibillion-dollar category over the next two to three years, and its R&D initiatives should allow the company to replicate its iPod success in other product categories. These initiatives should accelerate Apple's revenue growth and profitability, as well as change the basis of competition with Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. Our price target is $34, or 40x our calendar 2005 EPS estimate of $0.85. Market and macroeconomic conditions could interfere with the realization of this price target, as could risks such as channel disruption, supply constraints and a volatile pricing environment.

Meanwhile, Apple says its new cool gadget,  Airport Express (pictured left) will be available in Canada in July for $179. It's a Wi-Fi plug that, among other things, lets you take a wireless stream from your Mac and play it through your stereo.

I'm a musician, thanks to GarageBand

Several weeks ago, Apple Canada treated us to hands-on demo and briefing of Apple Computer's latest, coolest application called GarageBand. GarageBand is a music composition application that (my musician friends tell me) puts $100,000 digital recording studio on to your Mac. (And it costs about $90).
For the non-musician, like me, GarageBand lets you take pre-recorded loops — a 16-beat piano riff, for example — and tie them all up together into real music. The program handles the syncing up, etc. I think this is a fabulous application and could do for music what Adobe's Photoshop did for photography, that is, it will let everybody jump in and explore some aspect of their creativity.
So, this afternoon, it took me about an hour of noodling away with just bass, drums and piano, to come up with this. Try it out. It's Noodle Piano, Op. 1, about a minute-and-a-half MP3.

Degunk your PC

I'm not even sure degunk is a word but if you've got a PC that's 'gunked', you know what this means. The good people over at tech publisher O'Reilly have a great little 12-step program set up to degunk your Windows-based PC.

Top 12 Ways to Degunk Your PC by Joli Ballew — Your PC, with its 80GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM, runs way too slow. Why? It's gunked up with pictures, movies, music, and attachments you've saved; you've saved stuff to the wrong places; and you have apps installed that you don't use. If you want to clean up your PC, and get it running as fast as it should, follow Joli Ballew and Jeff Duntemann's 12-step program for degunking your PC. Joli and Jeff are the authors of the bestselling Degunking Windows book, from Paraglyph Press.

From Zero to Synomos: The latest startup from the Hills

Montreal's Hammie Hill and his two sons Austin and Hamnett are heading off with another start-up.
The Hills first hit the spotlight during the dot-com boom in the late 1990s. After becoming millionaires when they sold off an Internet service provider business they started up while Austin and Hamnett were in high school, the Hills went on to found Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS) Inc. In its first incarnation, ZKS was going to build privacy software for consumers.
Because the Hills — and Austin, in particular — were media-savvy and media-friendly, ZKS got a lot of ink (including lots penned by yours truly). Austin even testified before the U.S. Congress on privacy issues. The mindshare they created from that press and political coverage, the line of business they were in, and the general market enthusiasm of the day helped ZKS win more than $50-million (U.S.) in venture capital financing — tops at the time for a Canadian software startup.
But consumers didn't seem to be much interested in buying privacy-protection software and, to the Hill's credit, they recognized that fact, and tried to re-tool the company into a business that would provide other businesses — banks, ISPs and the like — with privacy consulting and software tools. They hired an outsider – Tamas Hevizi — as CEO. This re-focusing helped ZKS weather the dot-com bust although not without scads of layoffs.
Now the Hills are doing something else.
What was the enterprise privacy unit of ZKS has been spun out into a new company called Synomos Inc. It will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of ZKS. Hammie is to be chairman; Austin is to be CEO and president. Hamnett, meanwhile, has replaced Hevizi as ZKS' president and CEO.

Making a buck at Wi-Fi

The New York Times' Matt Richtel takes a good luck at the really important issue of making money with high-speed wireless Internet access.

Where Entrepreneurs Go and the Internet Is Free:
…”It's going to be hard for commercial carriers to make a profit,” said Dewayne Hendricks, the chief executive of Dandin Group, a wireless Internet service provider based in Silicon Valley, who serves as technical adviser to the Federal Communications Commission on wireless Internet issues.”…

The situation Matt describes in the U.S. market is much the same in Canada. There are some small start-ups — Spotnik Mobile, for example, or BoldStreet — and some of the large telcos — Bell and Telus — are also trying out the whole Wi-Fi thing. I don't think anyone is getting rich just yet but all the entrepreneurs in the space that I've talked to are hopeful.

The bust killed IT job growth in Canada

Canadian information technology companies hired almost no new employees during the industry bust of 2001, according to the first-ever Survey of Information Technology Occupations done by Statistics Canada.

Four of five IT firms in Canada did not hire any new employees in the six months prior to the period the survey was done in late 2002. Just 16 per cent of Canadian companies involved in computer systems design hired a single employee and only 4 per cent hired four or more new employees.

At the peak of the high-tech boom in the first quarter of 2001, there were 650,000 employees in Canada's computer and telecommunications industry. A year later, employment in the same sector had dropped to 586,000 and the unemployment rate among IT workers had jumped from 3.9 per cent to 6.6 per cent.

 

Lilies and an Iris?

The first of the Hyperion daylilies out front started to open. Looks like a good crop this year. Lots of flower stalks are up each with multiple buds forming on them. Had to stake them, though. One already blew over.
And it looks like that giant plant is an iris. A yellow flower bloomed on it this morning. I'm still not sure I know how it got there but there you go.
Also: Received the dahlias and phlox in the mail yesterday from Veseys.
The rhododendrons in the front garden appear to have produced their last flowers. The Catawba still has three big pink blossoms on it but the Williams looks done. It produced three blooms at the bottom of the plant. Both plants seem to be producing lots of new foliage which, I assume, is a good thing.