As usual, outside the ‘Waterloo bubble’, the world has been steamin’ on and producing quite the array of events. Try as I might to keep up, I do a poor job in comparison to work terms.
But, that is the nature of the beast.
I saw this yesterday on CityPulse24 but couldn’t confirm it. It’s official now[G&M] however – Blockbuster’s about to drop its late fees for items on Jan 1. 2005 in the US and early next year for us Canadians. Apparently stiff competition from Netflix, Wal-Mart (why am I unsurprised) and more started cutting into the bottom line. In answer to Paul’s question, trial runs indicated that the increased transactions/sales following fee elimination more than offset fee revenue.
In the tech news, certain journalists have taken to calling RIM “Lawsuits in Motion” for its propensity in suing competitors. For the past year however, that moniker’s been turned on its head as RIM has been sued for IP infringement by NTP Inc. Today’s latest[G&M] indicates that RIM lost its last round of appeals but the case gets sent back to lower court due to problems in how the technology was defined. At any rate, looks like RIM’s going to be paying out a bundle.
Exporters can start getting a little relief as the loonie’s started to make it’s way down from the lofty highs it found itself at. 80.95 US cents as of yesterday. There’s just got to be a happy middle ground…