David Akin’s On The Hill

The New York Times reports today that, because of the CRTC's
insistence on licensing radio services that include significant doses of
Canadian content, proposed new satellite radio services may do
two things: “…[Canadian] artists may be getting more exposure if
satellite radio, with its hundreds of channels, is approved in Canada, as
many here expect it to be early next year.
And in the process, the more than three million subscribers to XM Satellite
Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio in the United States may find a slightly
more Canadian flavor on the radio: more Canadian music, more Canadian news
and more Canadian comedy . . .”

Last week, Heather Ross was in charge of IBM Canada Ltd.'s computer business.This week, she's still in charge of selling the same IBM-branded computers, but soon she'll be doing it for Lenovo Group Ltd., the Beijing company that is buying the personal computer business of International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., in a deal valued at $1.75-billion (U.S.).
The deal has been structured so that many IBM employees, like Ms. Ross, will join Lenovo and continue in roles similar to the ones they had with IBM. Ms. Ross will head a unit in Canada that employs about 400 people.
In addition to keeping IBM employees, Lenovo will keep the IBM brand on many of the products it sells, in the hopes of cashing in on Big Blue's cachet among corporate information technology buyers . . . [Read the full story in yesterday's Globe and Mail]

IBM and China's Lenovo Group confirmed what was the world's worst secret shortly before 9 pm EDT today. Lenovo Group Ltd. is buying IBM's personal computer business for $1.2-billion (U.S.) in cash. IBM will continue to hold a stake worth just under 20 per cent in the business. Just like that, though, Lenovo is now number three in the world when it comes to computer makers, behind Dell (1) and Hewlett-Packard (2).
The new company will have its headquarters in New York but have principal operations in Raleigh, N.C. and in Beijing.
A top IBM exec, Stephen Ward, will stay with this new venture as CEO.

In a blatant and shameless attempt to boost traffic here at the blog, I archived the Air Canada Celine Dion video after covering the airline's new Celine-centred marketing effort. If you've taken an Air Canada flight recently, you might have seen this video but that's the only place it's being shown, one reason why, in an effort to be a valuable information conduit, I made it available for download here. So, welcome to all you Celine Dion fans and thanks for helping to boost the number of unique visitors to this site to 30,141. The post with the Celine Dion video was accessed almost twice as much as the second most-popular article, the persistently and unexplainedly popular post on a problem with Apple's calculator.
In addition to visitors who actually came here, we served up more than 20,000 XML requests in November, to folks keeping tabs on this blog through an RSS aggregator.
Here, then, for your review, are the most popular articles at this blog for the month of November (the date the articles were originally posted follows):

1. Air Canada and a new Celine Dion video — right here! (11-1-2004)
2. [What they said] Apple calculator a bad joke (8-10-2004)
3. Why didn't I get a gmail invite? (11-13-2004)
4. New paint for Air Canada's planes (11-1-2004)
5. A place to sleep in the sky (11-1-2004)
6. The New Air Canada uniforms (11-1-2004)
7. National Post drops columnist on plagiarism allegations (11-6-2004)
8. The saddest day (11-14-2004)
9. Toronto — most expensive airport in North American to land your jet (11-21-2004)
10. Celine and the plane (11-1-2004)

The Ontario government appears to have made a major privacy gaffe, mailing out thousands of cheques this week that included wrong names and social insurance numbers.
Government officials said yesterday that as many as 27,000 cheques were sent out with incorrect confidential information.
Ontario Management Board chairman Gerry Phillips blames human error and a new computer system for the security laps.
The cheques were issued with the correct names of the recipients, but the cheque stub contained the name of someone else as well as a social insurance number and home address . . . [Read the full story in today's Globe and Mail]

It's hell, of course, when your meeting is running late and you know your time is running out on the parking meter and fines start at $20 or $30. Now, there's a solution. Use your cell phone to dial up the parking meter and have it charge your credit card an extra 50 cents or so in order to keep the meter maid happy. They're doing this now in Toronto, my friend Tyler Hamilton says. Terrific idea. Anyone else have this fabulous new functionality built in to their meters in other cities?

Apple Canada launched iTunes here today and the price is still 99 cents a tune. Mind you, that's 99 cents Canadian, which works out to 83 cents U.S. U.S. customers of iTunes, of course, are also paying 99 cents a tune but they're paying 99 cents U.S. or $1.17 Canadian per track. Any way you slice it, we'll be getting our tunes relatively cheaper than the U.S. music fans.
But while Apple U.S. was an early driver of the online music market, Apple in Canada is a late (albeit much anticipated) entrant to the market. PureTracks has been up and running and selling 99 cent songs for more than a year. Canadian consumers now have a choice but it's a choice more to do with technology. PureTracks is not built for Mac users; it's Windows-only and music comes with copyright protections built by Microsoft and that means PureTracks tunes can't be transferred to an iPod.
Apple locks its stuff down, too, in its own AAC format. And while Apple's iTunes and the iPod work for both Mac and Windows users, music purchased at the iTunes store can't be dumped onto your Rio or other non-iPod music player.

A couple of items on the continuing CIBC missing faxes story in today's Globe and Mail:
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce accuses scrapyard operator Wade Peer of deliberately leaking confidential CIBC customer data and of violating Canadian privacy laws.
The bank's allegations, made in court filings yesterday, come just one business day after the bank publicly praised him for the way he protected confidential customer data that the bank had mistakenly faxed to him for more than three years.
Mr. Peer is seeking $3-million (U.S.) in damages from the bank in a Maryland court, claiming that the volume of faxes sent to his business, AllStar Sportsline Properties, by CIBC branches prevented him from communicating with his customers. As a result, he claims in the suit, his business failed.
In their brief, CIBC lawyers said: “Mr. Peer provided The Globe and Mail (a mass publication Toronto newspaper) and the Canadian tele-
vision network CTV with confidential financial information about CIBC's customers — either from his own copies of the faxes or, as Peer now claims, from the materials his counsel had already placed on this Court's website.
“[Mr. Peer and AllStar] have already shown that they will misuse CIBC's confidential customer information. . . . None of this conduct can possibly be justified as a matter of fairness or common sense.” . . .[Read the full story in the Globe and Mail]
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My colleague Gord Pitts takes a look at the reputational risk issues for the bank:
It's a bank's worst public relations nightmare — a challenge to its image of trust and confidence. It gets even worse when the accuser is an ordinary Joe, a plain-spoken scrap yard operator from West Virginia.
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has responded by playing the heavy in its public relations standoff with Wade Peer, the scrap dealer who was mistakenly sent faxes of bank customer information.
Crisis management experts say this strategy contains risks in reassuring the public, which is more likely to sympathize with Mr. Peer than with a major Canadian bank already coping with challenges to its reputation … [Read the full story in today's Globe and Mail]
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And finally, the CIBC situation is fodder for the paper's editorial writers:
How does a bank know when its internal communications system is in awful shape? When its employees are faxing customers' confidential documents to scrapyards in Maryland and West Virginia. When they continue to fax those documents to the same 1-877 number for three years, despite the persistent pleas of the scrapyards' operator, Wade Peer, that they stop doing so. When, even after the story appears in The Globe and Mail and on CTV exposing this shocking breach of privacy on the part of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Mr. Peer receives two more such faxes, one from an Edmonton CIBC branch and one from an Ottawa branch.
And how does the bank respond? It orders all its branches not to transmit customers' personal information by fax machine, indicating that even now, three years later, it has no clue where the originating problem is and how to remove Mr. Peer's fax number from the bank's files. (The basic problem is simple enough to spot: If you hit a digit in the bank's 1-877 number twice by mistake, you get Mr. Peer's number.) CIBC says it will still send faxes to those customers who want to receive them. Brave customers.
The bank's chief privacy officer, Ron Lalonde, has posted a letter on CIBC's website that begins: “I want to personally apologize and share with you my deep concern regarding the breach of confidentiality of client information reported in the media.” He then spends the rest of the letter blaming Mr. Peer — a victim in this case, a man who was forced to launch a lawsuit against the bank last spring because the mail hadn't stopped — for not complaining often enough that he was being besieged. “We heard nothing further regarding this issue from the individual for more than two years,” Mr. Lalonde writes, “and thus believed that the company was no longer receiving CIBC faxes in error.” Did no one at the bank, particularly the chief of privacy, consider the matter worth a follow-up phone call or two? …[Read the full story in today's Globe and Mail – subscription required]

Another former National Post colleague of mine, Steve Maich, has a blog:

Money is what you’ll read about here, and in my column in Maclean’s magazine. This weblog and the column are both called “All Business”, but if you think of business stories as stultifying, dull grey lumps of prose laden with impenetrable numbers and white guys in suits, well I hope I can change your mind. There’s a reason why they call it the “Almighty dollar.” Hopefully, this corner of the web will provide a little colourful commentary and a little insight on where that power comes from, where it’s going, who’s wielding it, and why you ought to care