Well not really an update, but more of a collection of links. Incase you don’t know about what went on, Michael Richards (aka Kramer from Seinfeld), was at a comedy club and he was heckled by a couple people. These people were black and Michael Richards responded to their heckling with some very harsh racist comments. This was all captured on video and his career was pretty much finished. He then goes on the Late Show with David Letterman for a chance to apologize. This could be seen as successful or unsuccessful depending on your opinion.
Tonight, I found a funny video that mashes up Seinfeld, and the above clips into a very entertaining piece. The editing and the clips work very well and the entire thing kept me entertained. Check it out.
The football player in question is named Lucious Pussy. What were his parents thinking? It must be so distracting for the coaches and his team-mates. I can just imagine the players talking, well he got Lucious Pussy on our team.. Then there is always the question people ask in sports, “how much action does he get in a game.” Well, I’m just thankful my parents didn’t give me a name like a porn star!
The largest bank in Canada, announced their largest year-end profit ever today. The Royal Bank of Canada (TSE: RY, NYSE: RY) reported a net income of $4.7 billion or $3.59 per share which is an increase of 40% over a year ago. So far the only other major Canadian bank to release its financial statement is BMO, which posted a profit of $2.7 billion which is a large ways away from RBC. The profits are likely to continue as they are expecting a “robust Canadian economy, with strong consumer spending and solid business investment. The strong earnings were attributed to the wealth management and banking divisions. With such strong earnings, I wish they would lower there fees that way I might consider doing more banking with them.
There has been a lot of buzz lately in regards to the possibilty of SIRIUS Satellite Radio (Nasdaq : SIRI) merging or buying out XM Satellite Radio (Nasdaq : XMSR). Most of the talk is due to lower than expected subscribers for both companies, and XM growth slowing down. Sirius CEO Karmazin has even been quoted as saying that “mergers often lead to creating shareholder value.” I am sure that he is under a lot of pressure from shareholders to turn the company out of its losses and finally turn a profit. He has also stated in the past that he would want to merge with XM, but it would be a regulatory problem. However, more recently, he has stated that the regulatory should not be a problem anymore. By the sounds of things, he seems as though a merger could happen. Whatever happens though, it should make for an exciting story.
I’m just not sure I see the benefits of decreased competition. On the one hand, with a combined company they would have all the sports leagues all on one platform, as well as all the bigger named talent like Howard Stern and Oprah. I think that the merger would have a negative impact on the assets that are already up in the sky. Since with one network they wouldn’t need to have that many satellite up in there. Also, I’m not sure how the satellites will interact with each other, since XM’s satellites are currently in geostationary orbit while Sirius are elliptical geosynchronous orbits. I have a feeling that if the merger did happen, we could see the possibility of moving a couple of those satellites over another market, such as Europe, to increase their business. Also with the increased bandwidth available, it will be interesting to see if they increase the quality on individual channels or if they just increase the total number of channels. I know that Sirius had been talking about adding cartoons to their service in the future, with the increased bandwidth they could probably be able to do that. As of right now, all this talk is just rumours and nothing substantial has come into play. Be on the lookout since a merger would happen quickly.
Wang Yue Si, a Chinese citizen studying in Japan, started selling items such as weapons and currency for online games through an Internet auction site in April this year, without obtaining the appropriate residency status. Wang, living in Kumamoto, Japan, has admitted that he sold the virtual goods for about 150 million yen ($US 1.3 Million). Hearing a story like this makes me interested. I really want to make a lot of money too. I have a feeling that he didn’t farm the games by himself though. He probably has an army of farmers in these games back in China. I wonder what will happen now that he has been charged. Will he just be taxed or will they take all the money away from him?
Quite possibly one of the most amazing pieces of art made with MS Paint…. apparently it took him 500 hours! While I agree it looks amazing especially for MS Paint, I am wondering if after 500 hours you could create anything if you made a picture pixel by pixel. I remember back in high school, we used to make pictures in MS Paint. They were normally very poorly made and were just jokes. We didn’t spend nearly that amount of time to create a picture. You have to wonder, what does that value an hour of his work at? Since 500 hours is a lot of time to be spending on a single picture in MS Paint. Although, just the fact it was made in paint will increase the publicity of the picture.
Both SIRIUS Satellite Radio (NASDAQ : SIRI) and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ : XMSR) have released some subscriber information in regards to Canada. Sirius has announced they have surpassed 200,000 subscribers in Canada, while XM Radio Canada has passed 90,000 subscribers. By comparing these two tidbits of information you can begin to see that Sirius is poised to take complete control of the Canadian marketplace. By converting these figures into percentages, Sirius controls approx 70% of the market. Meanwhile in the United States, XM continues to hold on to the market share lead but Sirius has been experiencing larger growth as of late. Sirius is slowly but steadily catching up to XM, and this will continue to happen since Sirius has been putting a lot of effort into increasing the quality of their programming.
I have a feeling that the upcoming NASCAR deal will help to increase the number of American Sirius subscribers but it won’t have much effect on the Canadian numbers. NASCAR just isn’t going to be a major selling point in the Canadian market. For Sirius to continue to keep up their lead, they need to promote the fact that their service has more variety, and higher quality programming. Sirius also needs to keep up their visibility in Canada; their advertising at CFL games was a very good idea! All I want now from Sirius, is a 24 hour-a-day NHL channel to get my hockey news without having to listen to other sports news.
As the market for acquiring fledgling Internet companies heats up, it’s worth taking a look at all those acquisitions that didn’t quite work out. For every Internet acquisition that’s successful there seems to be dozens that die on the vine.
One big one that I don’t see on the list is Mirabilis (ICQ) being bought by AOL. I also have to disagree with the Hotmail being bought by Microsoft one. I think that almost everyone at some point in their life has/had a hotmail account. I would have put this on a list of good acquisitions.
Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), announced that they will be giving $250 million to Cray Inc. (NASDAQ : CRAY) and $244 to IBM (NYSE : IBM) for the development of very large supercomputers. They have been selected to develop DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. The amount of money that the government spends on pure computing power is enormous, and it will bring results quickly. Investors also feel that this is good news for the companies involved, as both IBM and Cray stock have gone up today. IBM closed up 44 cents and CRAY closed up $1.70 on the day. CRAY stock had a huge volume of shares traded today. They ended the day at 4.80M, way above their average of 240 thousand. When I think of government supercomputers, I immediately picture the movie “Wargames”. These computers are built completely to compute complex formulas and advanced function but I could picture them saying, “Would you like to play a game?”
Gears of War just released less than a couple weeks ago has already sold over a million copies. This makes it the fastest selling Xbox 360 game on the market so far. There have even been claims that it is the fastest selling title of 2006. When you break the record for games sold, you also normally break the record associated with Xbox Live as well. Gamerscore Blog says that 850,000 unique gamers have played a match online so far, and have cumulatively unlocked 7 million achievements. Now thats a major accomplishment. Hopefully Gears of War is just the start of the train of A+ games that sell millions of copies.