We are all analysts. We have all the information at our disposal and we will marry that to our experiences and opinions. We don’t have faith in the established financial, political, consumer and even sporting analys systems because they’ve proven fallible. Which is ok, but not when you&#...

In the Internet-fueled echo chamber, a crisis within your industry can easily become a PR problem for your company too. This is particularly true in food-borne illness situations. Extensive media coverage of precautionary government warnings and companies pulling products from menus or shelves all a...

Today is January 15, 2009, the rumored date for Microsoft to announce huge layoffs, but that just has not happened. What we do have is a story from the Wall Street Journal that suggests that Microsoft layoffs might be coming next week, albeit not necessarily on the scale previously rumored: Microsof...

The New Year’s Day Microsoft buzz is a rumor of a huge 17% layoff at Microsoft on January 15: The rumor that Microsoft was set to lay off people on January 15th, 2009 is no longer a rumor but a fact. Staff at Microsoft have been informed that the company is readying major layoffs to its worldw...

Rick Aristotle Munarriz on The Motley Fool says Netflix is the Best Stock for 2009. The cost for the service is certainly reasonable, with the average customer paying just $13.60 a month. It may not be the cheapest entertainment subscription service out there -- Sirius XM Radio is slightly cheaper -...

This first appeared in Techleader, June 2008 I’m grateful for search engines, but I still find it hard to accept living with Dead Text. Letters and figures on a screen. Not able to be mined, found, unlocked, extrapolated into meaning. What irks me in particular is tables of figures, especially...

I’ve just put down a fascinating article in an old issue of IR Magazine, about the differences in IR language between the US and UK. The premise is that while language and verbage are 99% the same, meaning and emphasis is totally different. For example, “challenging” in plc terms m...

This week Intel, Google, IBM, and Caterpillar all announced impressive financial results.  Meanwhile GE and Wachovia came up short. Google stock is up 20% today.GE was down 13% last Friday. Some bellwether stocks are disappointing while others are hitting it out of the park. So is the economy i...

Saw this announcement the other day: Warren Buffett to speak at Business Wire Canada's Opening, and I have to admit I wondered what was more interesting: that Warren Buffett was speaking in Canada, that he would invest in Business Wire (how does this business line stay relevant in a social media wor...

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, more and more North American companies are choosing to go abroad to raise capital via an IPO (initial public offering). Why? It’s clearly due to the burden of the strict regulatory environment in North America.Put simply, Sarbanes Oxley is driving companies abroad ...