Month: December 2004

Tim Horton's is in the midst of its second invasion of the U.S. market and, this time, experts say it's making real headway. It has 200 stores now and may have more than 500 stores open in the U.S. by the end of 2007. Meanwhile, U.S. giant Krispy Kreme's attempt to establish a foothold in Tim Horton's home market is proving to be a fiasco. In fact, Krispy Kreme is blaming problems figuring out the accounting for its Canadian operations as the reason behind a late stock market filing. Meanwhile, Krispy Kreme's rosy Canadian expansion plans of two years ago have turned into retrenchment plans as the company closes three Canadian stores.
The Canadian unit is reported to have lost $2-million (U.S.) in 2003 with less than a dozen stores. Meanwhile, Tim Horton's operating for profit just the three months ending Sept. 30, was just under $70-million (U.S.).
Tim's also says same store sales in the U.S. are growing at a rate of 10 per cent a year. Even in Canada, where there's a Tim's on every corner, same-store sales are growign at 7 per cent.
I had a piece on CTV's National News last night looking at Tim's vs Krispy Kreme. As always, the video link is on the right side of the page.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce CEO John Hunkin has updated his letter to customers, first posted in the wake of reports we had about the bank
inadvertently faxing confidential customer to individuals outside the bank,
first to a guy in West Virginia, and then to a guy in Montreal. We also reported that other banks have also had some fax missteps.
“As a result, the banks, through the Canadian Bankers Association, have recognized that we have a common interest in ensuring the confidentiality of client information and we are determined to work more closely together to address this matter,” Hunkin writes. “In the meantime, CIBC is continuing its work to ensure that customer information is protected across our entire
network. This activity has been assigned the highest priority within our organization and we will not rest until it is completed.”

Algorithmics has been in business in Toronto since 1989, founded by a
way-too-smart mathematician named Ron
Dembo. They make software that helps big companies like banks analyze
risk. Today, it announced that Fitch
Group, a Fimalac SA company, had purchased the company for $175-million
(presumably that's U.S. $).

Sabia says that more than 1 million Bell customers are now buying 3 or more products from Bell (Internet, mobile phone, phone or TV services).
Look for “smart automation” when you want it.
“Today Bell.ca doesn't work. Only 1 per cent of our sale pass through that very low-cost channel.” Sabia wants a Web-based tool that is simple and that works better. “We're going to re-build Bell.ca.”
Sabia says the company plans to provision ultra-broadband services to Canada's most populous region. He's talking about building out the network to be able to provide a 26 Mbps pipe to 85 % of households in Quebec City-Windsor corridor at a cost of about $1.2-billion. Right now, Bell's broadband connection is between 1 and 5 Mbps.
“One of the things you will come to see from us is a growing velocity, a growing value, a growing variety of these next-generation services,” Sabia says.
He is promising simpler product plans and simpler rate plans.
Part of the motivation for that is to improve service to customers but it will also make it cheaper for the company to provide those services — fewer calls to the call centre; increased ability for customers to set up their own services; and fewer technicians having to 'roll trucks' to attend to new service configurations.
What does he want to do in 2005?

• Sell 1 million bundles of telecom/TV services to consumers
• Achieve a build-out on that 26-Mbps network so that 1 million homes can access it.
• Double wireless data revenues
• On the large enterprise side, he wants to see the number of customer circuits migrated to an IP network increase by ten times.

I'm at the annual business review conference for Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE). BCE is Canada's largest telecommunications concern — owner of Bell Canada and Bell Mobility among others — and is also the company that controls Bell Globemedia, which is the company that owns the two organizations I work for, CTV News and The Globe and Mail.
BCE CEO Michael Sabia is speaking. The headline news so far is that BCE has raised the annual dividend it will pay, boosting it by 10 per cent to $1.32 (CDN) per share.
Sabia is going to focus his talk on the “core elements” of things that “are driving change within Bell.”
Internet protocol (IP) and broadband IP services are the big areas Bell is pushing in.
“On IP, this company simply will not be outflanked.”

My colleague Simon Avery reports in today's Globe and Mail that AOL Canada, the Canadian unit of Time Warner Inc., will be the first AOL unit in the world to provide a voice-over-IP service. AOL Canada will offer it first in the Toronto area for about $30 a month. Simon writes:

“That price will include unlimited local calling, 60 minutes a month of free calling anywhere in North America, and numerous features for which traditional carriers, such as BCE Inc.'s Bell Canada and Telus Corp., charge a premium. These include call display, call waiting, three-way calling and call forwarding . . . Additional standard features will include the ability to receive voice messages in an e-mail account as an audio file, the ability to have a single phone number to ring at up to three different locations simultaneously or in sequence, and the option to use the phone service from other computers that have a broadband connection . .

AOL's TotalTalk will be available to anyone with a broadband Internet connection, regardless of whether it's an AOL connection or not … [Read the full story in today's Globe and Mail]

The UK papers have some thoughts today about Mark Thompson, (seated, left) the director-general of the BBC, who made the news this week after announcing some big cuts at one of the world's most famous broadcasters. Among other things, he also promised to shift some jobs out of the capital of Britain's media and cultural life, London, and send them north to Manchester, whose most recent contribution to global culture must surely be Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and Inspiral Carpets.
Thompson, incidentally, was apparently reluctant to take the top job at the Beeb for, as he puts it one article, it's always the last job anyone ever has.
Here's the Guardian:

“The Quiet Revolutionary”
Now, less than a year into his time at the BBC, staff are getting a sense of what it means to have Thompson at the helm. For many of them, it is a confusing time. The mood in Manchester and the rest of the north, earmarked for expansion as the balance of power swings away from London, is understandably positive. But those in the suddenly unfashionable metropolitan south are contemplating either redundancy or relocation to a distant land of which they know little. As the boss himself admitted, there is a tough and unsettling period ahead …

and here's The Scotsman on Sunday:

“Thompson gets BBC out of its Jacuzzi culture”
MARK Thompson, director general of the BBC, must wish he had never remarked that the BBC was “basking in a Jacuzzi of spare public cash” during his tenure as chief executive of Channel 4.
From the day he left C4 and took over at the helm of the BBC in May, Thompson has been expected to follow his critical words with decisive action and pull the plug on the corporation’s luxurious bathing arrangements.

Even if you don't have much interest in U.S. politics, this looks interesting if only from the communications technology point-of-view. Clipped from Crooked Timber:

Voting error in the 2004 elections:

…Philip Howard, has [taken] a very innovative approach to teaching his class on Communication Technology and Politics at the University of Washington this Fall. He and his students have been collecting data about the use of communication technologies in the elections and writing reports about their findings.

The team has released reports on topics from the legalities of voteswapping to the political uses of podcasting. The latest article looks at voting error due to technological errors, residual votes and incident reports.

Dan Gillmor, (left) one of the technology industry's most influential columnists, is leaving his paper, the San Jose Mercury News.
“I hope to pull together something useful that helps enable — and demonstrates — the emerging grassroots journalism that I wrote about in my recent book,” Gillmor writes at his blog. “Something powerful is happening, it's in the early stages and I have a chance to help figure this out. I'm not ready to discuss the specifics yet, mainly because I have many more ideas than I could possibly try to put into practice at this point — and we're early in the process of working out the venture's actual form.
“I hate the idea of leaving. But I'd hate not trying this even more.”
Some reaction: “This is a big deal. Dan is one of the most respected journalists around, a man of perfect integrity and great vision. And guts. Something exciting is in the wind,” says David Weinberger.

The Montreal Gazette reported earlier this week that a businessman there, Stephen Oakes, has been receiving errant faxes from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce for more than three years, the most recent of which arrived in September. And, just like West Virginia's Wade Peer, the faxes contained confidential CIBC customer data. CIBC's CEO John Hunkin took the remarkable step of phoning Oakes to apologize. He's also issued an apology to all bank customers.
In the meantime, we reported this week on both CTV News [see the video links on the right for my report as well as items from my colleagues at CTV affiliates in Montreal and Vancouver] and in The Globe and Mail, that the CIBC is not the only bank with a fax problem. The Bank of Nova Scotia and the Toronto-Dominion Bank, Canada's 2nd and 4th largest banks by assets, also faxed confidential customer data to strangers.