Canada Latest Economic Updates GDP – Q2 growth reported at 1.8%, unchanged from Q1 Unemployment – 7.3% in August, no change from July Inflation – 1.3% in July, down from 1.5% in June Retail – June: -0.4%, compared to +0.2% previous month Housing Starts – YTD (Jan-Aug) monthly average 218,000, an increase of 15% from the same period in 2011 Canadian Auto Sales Overall automotive sales this August 2012 were 6.4% ahead of August 2011 sales.

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Week of September 10, 2012

B2B Dick Clark Productions Guggenheim Partners, Mandalay Entertainment and Mosaic Media Investment Partners have acquired Dick Capital Productions from RedZone Capital Management for upwards of $400 million. American/US Airways Rumors are circulating that American Airlines and US Airways are holding confidential merger talks.

Year North American Nameplates Import Nameplates Total

Aug ’11 69,702 70,659 140,361

Aug ’12 66,974 82,327 149,301

Change -3.9% +16.5% +6.4%

Global Apple/Samsung/Japan A Japanese court rejected patent claims made by Apple against Samsung, a victory for the South Korean company after its defeat in the United States that cost it $1 billion in damages.

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Kim Kardashian/Old Navy USA Today reported that Kim Kardashian has settled a lawsuit against Old Navy alleging that the clothing retailer violated her publicity rights by using a lookalike in an ad called Super C-U-T-E that ran in February 2011.

Apple Samsung After winning a jury verdict in the U.S. for patent infringement against Samsung in late August, Apple has petitioned the presiding judge for a permanent injunction against eight Samsung mobile phones, as reported by The Wall Street Journal: The 5 largest jury verdicts since 1995, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, as reported by The Wall Street Journal:

Litigation

Product Revenue (mm) Units

Galaxy S Showcase $148 417,000

Galaxy S 4G $473 1,447,000

Droid Charge $395 806,000

Galaxy Prevail $378 2,255,000

Galaxy S II AT&T $240 574,000

Galaxy S II Epic 4G $764 1,675,000

Galaxy S II Skyrocket $289 636,000

Galaxy S II T-Mobile $561 1,252,000

Year Case Award (billions)

2009 Centocor Ortho vs. Abbott $1.8

2007 Lucent vs. Microsoft $1.5

2012 Apple vs. Samsung $1.0

2010 Mirror World vs. Apple $0.626

2011 Saffran vs. J&J $0.593

Image source: eonline.com

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Retail Disney/Disney Baby Disney has opened its first Disney Baby retail store at a mall in Glendale, California. Sales of infant and children’s clothing is a $10 billion market in the U.S., according to IBIS-World. Concurrently, Disney plans to build out Disney Baby sections in its 200+ Disney stores across the U.S. Walmart/Mobile Checkout In the U.S., Walmart has begun testing a new checkout system, Scan and Go, that allows shoppers to scan items as they walk through stores and pay at self- service kiosks, skipping the cashiers’ lines. The company claims that it spends $12 million per second on cashiers’ wages in the U.S. Hermes/New Online Store With four retail stores in Canada, located in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal, the high-end fashion retailer Hermes is opening an online boutique in Canada on September 25th.

Top 10 Brands The following chart delineates the top most followed brands in social media as compiled by Track Social based upon the number of fans each has on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn:

Social

Rank Brand Followers

1 YouTube 76,000,000

2 Facebook 69,000,000

3 Zynga Poker 64,000,000

4 Disney 54,000,000

5 Coca-Cola 47,000,000

6 MTV 41,000,000

7 Farmville 39,000,000

8 Twitter 36,000,000

9 Starbucks 34,000,000

10 Converse 32,000,000

Image source: dailyfinance.com

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ComScore’s Top 25 Canadian Online Properties (August 2010) Rank Property Total Unique Visitors (000)

1 Google Sites 26,180

2 Microsoft Sites 23,914

3 Facebook.com 22,838

4 eBay 14,998

5 Wikimedia Foundation Sites 14,823

6 Bell Media 14,094

7 Apple Inc. 13,214

8 Yahoo! Sites 13,087

9 Canoe Network 10,449

10 Vevo 10,177

11 Amazon Sites 9,837

12 Ask Network 9,176

13 AOL, Inc. 9,120

14 Yellow Pages Group 9,030

15 Glam Media 8,982

16 The Weather Network Meteomedia 8,907

17 BitTorrent Network 8,065

18 Viacom Digital 7,906

19 Federated Media Publishing 7,682

20 ROGERS 7,210

21 New York Times Digital 6,627

22 CBC-Radio Canada Sites 6,615

23 CBS Interactive 6,440

24 Twitter.com 6,361

25 Postmedia Network 6,312

Online

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Technology Ultrabooks: A Sampling (Bloomberg Businessweek)

Brand Cost Screen Size Weight Battery Life Storage Processor

Apple iPad $499 9.7 inches 1.46 lbs 10 hours 16GB SSD Apple A5X

Apple MacBook Air $1,199 13.3 inches 2.96 lbs 7 hours 128GB SSD Intel Core i5 1.8 GHz

Asus Zenbook $1,085 13.3 inches 2.87 lbs 7+ hours 128 GB SSD Intel Core i5 1.7 GHz

HP Pavilion g6 $529 15.6 inches 5.46 lbs 5.75 hours 500GB 5400RPM HD

Intel Core i5 2.5 GHz

Samsung Chromebook Series 550

$449 12.1 inches 3.10 lbs 6 hours 16GB SSD Intel Celeron 1.3 GHz

About.com/IAC Online information service About.com has been acquired by IAC/Interactive, which owns dating sites like Match.com, local listings sites like Citysearch and media sites like College Humor, for approximately $300 million. Making Measurement Make Sense The online industry’s Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative calls for a new viewability metric that would only measure when 50% of an ad is in view for at least one second. A study by AdSafe Media reported that 49.9% of ads sold directly hit this proposed requirement whereas the number shrinks to 41.2% in the case of ads sold through ad networks and 40.3% of ads sold through ad exchanges. When extending the in view window to 15 seconds, the stats dwindle to 21.1% for ads bought directly through the publisher., 16.4% for exchange buys and 16.3% for network buys.

Online

Zynga/Farmville 2 Online/mobile gamer Zynga has launched Farmville 2, the next generation of the company’s popular Facebook farming game. It is the company’s first game to be built entirely in 3D and allows players to grow and harvest crops as well as utilize the harvest for commerce and culinary experiences.

Gaming

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Finance Citigroup Citigroup has agreed to pay $590 million to settle legal claims by shareholders that its executives lied about the bank’s growing problems before the financial crisis. As part of the settlement, Citigroup was able to deny the allegation.

Pharma HIV Pill/Quad/Stribild The Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. has approved a new Gilead Sciences HIV medicine, Quad, which will be sold under the brand name Stribild, and combines four ingredients into one pill. It combines Gilead’ existing HIV drug Truvada, which contains the ingredients emtricitabine and tenofovir and two new ingredients, elvitegravir and cobicistat. It is meant to treat people with human immunodeficiency virus who haven’t been previously treated with other HIV medicines.

Science Arctic/Ice Scientists have reported that ice in the Arctic has shrunk to its lowest level on record. The scientists reported that the extent of Arctic sea ice shrank to 1.58 million square miles breaking the old record of 1.61 million square miles from 2007.

Comics Green Lantern

Warner Bros. owned DC Comics announced last June that its long running character The Green Lantern has come out as gay. Last week, the publisher revealed that one of the principal characters of its soon to be relaunched Green Lantern series will be Arab-America. His name is Simon Baz and his story begins on September 11, 2001, when he was 10 years old, and watches the attack on the World Trade Center on TV.

Image source: nypost.com

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Sports Forbes Top 10 Earning Tennis Players

All Time Biggest Moneymakers Disney/Marvel’s theatrical The Avengers has become the third highest box office generator in film history crossing the $1.5 billion mark at worldwide receipts. Box office leaders Avatar and Titanic both grossed over $2 billion worldwide. Box Office Hollywood.com has reported that ticket sales at North American cinemas declined 3%, to $4.28 billion, for the period from the first full weekend in May to Labor Day, compared with the period a year earlier. Studios generally record about 40% of their annual ticket revenue during this period. In terms of attendance, there were 533 million heading to the movies in North America, a decline of nearly 4% and the lowest since at least 1993. The Hobbit(s) The long awaited feature The Hobbit is now going to be divided into a trilogy: An Unexpected Journey (release date December 14, 2012), The Desolation of Smaug (December 13, 2012) and the final film, There and Back Again (July 18, 2014)

Movies

Rank Player On Court Off Court Total

1 Roger Federer $9.3 million $45 million $54.3 million

2 Rafael Nadal $7.4 million $25 million $32.4 million

3 Maria Sharapova $5.1 million $22 million $27.1 million

4 Novac Djokovic $10.3 million $9.3 million $19.8 million

5 Li Na $1.4 million $17 million $18.4 million

6 Serena Williams $5.3 million $11 million $16.3 million

7 Caroline Wozniacki $2.7 milion $11 million $13.7 million

8 Andy Murray $5 million $7 million $12 million

9 Victoria Azarenka $6.7 million $3 million $9.7 million

10 Andy Roddick $0.8 million $8 million $8.8 million

Image source: teaser-trailer.com

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Broadcast Apple/Virtual Radio Stations Rumors are circulating that in the future Apple iTunes users will be able to create their own virtual radio stations that rival services like Pandora, Spotify, Sony Music Unlimited and iHeartRadio.

Personalities Avis After nearly five decades rental car service Avis is scrapping “We Try Harder” for the new tagline “It’s Your Space.” Michael Clarke Duncan 6 foot 5, African American actor Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile, Armageddon, Sin City) has passed away. He was 54 years old. The Millers Basketball’s Reggie Miller and his sister Cheryl Miller have become the only siblings to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Rev. Sun Myung Moon Korean evangelist and founder of the Unification Church, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose cult followers were described as Moonies, has passed away. He was 92 years old.

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Image source: usatoday.com

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