America with no Apple?

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, July 11, 2011 - 0 Comments

Samsung and Apple are trying to get each others’ products banned from the U.S.

Ahn Young-joon/AP

Samsung upped the stakes in its patent dispute with Apple last week when it called on the U.S. International Trade Commission to ban imports of Apple’s iPhone and iPad from China, where they are made. Apple is expected to respond with a similar request, raising the possibility that the tech giants will be choked off from the American market. The two sides have traded accusations of copyright infringement since April, when Apple accused its South Korean rival of ripping off its smartphone and tablet designs. For its part, Samsung has filed similar lawsuits against Apple in Germany and Japan.

While Apple has dominated the tablet market, Samsung has emerged as a big player, too, and is expected to pass Nokia as the world’s top producer of smartphones this year. Ironically, the two companies have enjoyed a close business relationship. Apple is one of Samsung’s biggest buyers of computer chips and screens.

Do you take cellphone?

By Colin Campbell - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

PayPal, the online payment-processing system made popular by eBay, its corporate parent, is betting…

Noah Berger/The New York Times

PayPal, the online payment-processing system made popular by eBay, its corporate parent, is betting that its future may not be online, but in the real world. PayPal is planning a push into retail stores with a system that would involve swiping cellphones at registers to make payments, rather than using credit or debit cards. The company, which has 95 million users online, estimates expanding into physical stores could double its revenues to $7 billion within two years.

PayPal isn’t the only firm anxiously eyeing this market. Google and Apple are now reportedly working on cellphone payment systems—using a technology called near-field communications—as are cellphone makers like Research In Motion and Nokia. The systems could be useful for consumers who always have a smartphone in hand. But for cellphone companies looking to be the next Visa, it’s a market potentially worth tens of billions of dollars.
A cautionary tale

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:52 PM - 2 Comments

What RIM can learn from the ‘unbelievable’ fall of Nokia from the top of the smartphone market

Luke MacGregor/Reuters

For many in the industry, cellphone giant Nokia Oyj’s recent announcement that it will use Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system on its high-end devices was viewed as a sign of desperation. Despite being the world’s biggest cellphone maker, Nokia has been steadily losing ground in the smartphone wars to Apple’s iPhone and devices that run Google’s Android operating system, while Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker, has been unable to gain any real traction with its mobile OS. And it’s far from clear that combining forces will do much to staunch the bleeding. “Two turkeys don’t make an eagle,” tweeted Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra about the announcement.

It’s a stark reminder of how quickly fortunes can change in the tech business—and it should act as a cautionary tale for Canada’s Research In Motion Ltd., which makes the popular BlackBerry. RIM’s global market share has also been slipping (to 16 per cent from nearly 20 per cent last year) as consumers pass over the company’s clunky touchscreen efforts—Storm and Torch—for the latest iPhone or Android-powered device. Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Research, argues that both RIM and Nokia stumbled as they tried to adapt their existing keyboard-oriented operating systems to touchscreen hardware, instead of building new software from scratch.

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Good for businesss: Corporate Social Responsibility report 2010

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 14, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments

Our second annual survey of companies in Canada that prove it pays to have a conscience

For many successful companies, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is no longer just a boardroom buzzword, but a key to business. So, for the second year in a row, Maclean’s has partnered with Jantzi-Sustainalytics, a global leader in sustainability analysis, to present the country’s Top 50 Socially Responsible Corporations.

While the reasons each company was selected vary—from Gildan Activewear donating more than half a million dollars to Haitian relief efforts, to Loblaw’s commitment to acquiring all of its seafood from sustainable sources by 2013, to Nike making World Cup jerseys for nine national teams out of bottles found in landfills—the underlying goal is the same: make the world a better place. As well as the Top 50 list, which begins on page 42, we look into how CSR might help with major PR problems, like BP’s oil spill, and whether the recession made the business world any less socially responsible.

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Top 50 Socially Responsible Corporations

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 14, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 28 Comments

These companies have made doing good a big part of their business

Click on a company name for more details:

Adidas Group
Ballard Power Systems Inc.
BCE Inc.
BMO Bank of Montreal
BMW
Brookfield Properties Corp.
Cascades Inc.
Catalyst Paper
CIBC
Dell Inc.
Direct Energy
Enbridge Inc.
Gap Inc.
General Mills Inc.
Gildan Activewear Inc.
H.J. Heinz Company
Honda
Hewlett-Packard Company
HSBC
IBM Corp.
ING Group
Intel Corp.
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Kinross Gold Corp.
Loblaw Companies Ltd.
L’Oreal
Manulife Financial.
McDonald’s Corp.
Nexen Inc. .
Nike Inc.
Nokia
Oracle Corp.
Puma
RBC
Rio Tinto-Alcan
Scotiabank
Sony Corp.
Stantec Inc.
Starbucks Corp.
State Street Corp.
Sun Life Financial
Suncor Energy Inc.
Talisman Energy Inc.
TELUS Corp,
TD Bank Financial Group
TransAlta Corp.
Transcontinental Inc.
Volkswagen
Westport Innovations Inc.
Xerox Corp.

For the related article and methodology, The Jantzi-Maclean’s Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2010 click here.
Cindy Gomez’s Cinderella story

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 2 Comments

She used to sell office furniture in Toronto. Now she’s a Nokia-branded singing, dancing global superstar.

Cindy Gomez is in motion, cruising along Los Angeles’ chi-chi Melrose Avenue in late August in the back of a big black chauffeured SUV. The Canadian singer is travelling with Dave Stewart, who came to fame as the bespectacled guy next to Annie Lennox in the innovative ’80s band the Eurythmics. Today, the 57-year-old British rock legend is a big-picture entrepreneur—performer, songwriter, producer, photographer, activist, new media savant and general connector of cosmic dots.

All of these endeavours dovetail perfectly with his current quest: to turn the multilingual Gomez, with her United Colours of Benetton beauty, into a global, multi-platform superstar. That in itself isn’t the kind of visionary thinking for which Stewart, a Davos denizen, corporate consultant on “disruptive change,” and friend of Bono, is known. What makes it pioneering is that he’s doing it in tandem with US$70-billion Finnish cellphone colossus Nokia as part of that company’s quest to become the world’s biggest entertainment media network. The stakes are big, Stewart says in his soft-spoken, unassuming, sage-like way: “If the experiment works, it will change the way art is made.” Continue…
Protests and a Nokia boycott

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 1 Comment

Rafsanjani’s movement is targeting the cellphone maker

Thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets of Tehran last Friday after Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an influential cleric and former president, publicly called for the government to release those detained in protests following the controversial June presidential election. But even as those demonstrations were underway, a different kind of protest was unfolding as companies deemed complicit in the post-election crackdown were targeted with a boycott.

An opposition daily, Etemad Melli, reported that Nokia sales have been slashed in half because the Finnish ﬁrm provided Iran Telecom with the ability to monitor local communications from ﬁxed and mobile phones late last year. For members of the “Twitter Revolution” who used their phones to tell the outside world of the protests and government crackdowns, there is a very real worry that their texts and videos will get them thrown in jail. An online watch group, OpenNet Initiative, recently reported that arrested activists were shown transcripts of their texts. Continue…