Talking Tech, Tuesday, May 25th

0.32 – Mark et al are back with apologies for their absence last week and news that Jim Balsillie has taken another run at buying an NHL team.

1.45 – Duncan reminds us of the legion of tech entrepreneurs who used their success to buy professional sports teams only to see their stock price tank. Duncan’s interested in seeing the market’s reaction to this news.

2.44 – Mark goes back to the theory that Balsillie will move the Preds up to Waterloo. He’s also interested in the different paths Balsillie and Lazaridis are taking now RIM has been such a huge success.

4.10 – Balsillie is the business guy while Lazaridis is more focused on the engineering. Kevin questions Balsillie’s choice to take the eye off the ball when so many competitors are catching up to the Blackberry.

4.53 – Mark brings up Google’s $3.9m investment into biotech start up 23andMe, which was founded by Sergey Brin’s wife. Duncan points out the amount is less than a rounding error on Google’s market cap and that the new company is not a biotech company, but a bioinformatics company and sees some synergies between the two companies.

6.59 – The guys move onto Google’s $100m acquisition of FeedBurner, the RSS distribution and advertising company. The buy comes in the wake of other online advertising acquisitions including Microsoft’s $6bn purchase of aQuantive.

8.02 – Kevin thinks this shows the explosion of online advertising and Duncan compares the size of these acquisitions with the global advertising companies. He also thinks that this points to a huge feeding frenzy in the online advertising market.

9.07 – Mark finds it interesting that Google can walk in and buy Feedburner and DoubleClick, two prime targets in the advertising market. Duncan thinks it talks to the currency Google has and the multiple that its stock trades at.

10.13 – Kevin asks who’d you rather work for – Google or Microsoft. He makes a good comparison that Google is the new Microsoft; Microsoft is the old IBM. Duncan points out that it’s been uncool to work at Microsoft for more than a decade now but it’s still cool to work at Google.

11.26 – Duncan brings up Zarlink, the former MyTel semiconductor vendor that sells to the telecom space, who reported a very poor quarter despite cost cutting and asset selling to get back in the black. He can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel for the telco industry.

12.35 – Duncan reflects on the telecom industry’s growth which some data suggests will either be at zero per cent or, in fact, be negative.

12.55 – Mark heralds Toronto Tech Week including mesh (now sold out) and the Canadian New Media Awards. He hopes the sell out nature of mesh reflects the enthusiasm that is surrounding the Internet right now.

14.30 – Duncan plugs a conference around municipal use of WiFi happening early next week and Mark takes the opportunity to slam Toronto Hydro’s WiFi network in downtown Toronto.

Audio or text comments for Mark, Kevin and Duncan can be emailed to [e-mail].

Our announcer is the lovely Amber Mac and the music is No Mojo by Anthony Stauffer and Holy Smoke which is available on the pod safe music network.