So far, Rogers' cable telephony efforts have been best-described as conservative in that it's marketing and pricing has been far from aggressive. This approach seems to be changing as CEO Ted Rogers told a UBS conference yesterday that Rogers intends to be more aggressive next year. UBS expects Rogers will add 236K digital telephone customers next year, while reducing its capex to $80-million from $110-million. This is only bad news for Bell, which is struggling to deal with Videotron in Quebec.

Manitoba Telecom Services has hired Bell Canada veteran Pierre Blouin to replace Bill Fraser as CEO. If you're looking for a big challenge, MTS is a good candidate given its Allstream division, which sells telecom services to corporate customers, is struggling, while MTS' home market - Manitoba - is starting to see stiff competition from rivals such as Shaw Communications Inc. in the high-margin local phone business. Good luck, Pierre.

Canadian Business magazine has published its list of the 100 richest Canadians (no Warren Buffet-like trillionaires, mind you) and Jeff Skoll ranks #3 with C$6.66-billion. The Montreal-born Skoll was one of the eBay's first employees and hit the Internet jackpot thanks to a lot of really cheap stock options. These days, Skoll is actively involved in philanthropy, as well as film production through Los Angeles-based Participant Productions, which aims to make "socially relevant, commercially viable" feature films (whatever that means). Truth be told, Skoll is one of the most decent people you'll meet. For more on Participant Productions' success, check out this ABC News story.

Is Research in Motion backed into a deep legal corner after Gartner Group advised its customers "stop or delay" Blackberry purchases until RIM's patent dispute with NTP is resolved? (Note: If a judge imposes an injuction on RIM next month, Blackberry sales and its mobile e-mail service in the U.S. would have to  be stopped.) Like the NHL lock-out where a settlement made sense for everyone, RIM and NTP need to get this lawsuit resolved. Both sides need to realize the Blackberry franchise could start to be damaged. If I'm RIM's battalion of lawyers, I'm asking NTP "So, what's it going to take to make this go away? $500 million? $750 million? $1 billion" At some point, NTP should take the money and run....and then use the victory over RIM as a starting point to squeeze multi-million dollar licenses out of other wireless companies. The big wildcard in the RIM-NTP catfight is the software "work-around" that RIM has developed. Apparently, this work-around will let RIM provide Blackberry service without infringin NTP's patents. It makes you wonder why RIM hasn't implemented this work-around already. If it really works - and just isn't a negotiating tool for a settlement - then RIM would be able to easily resolve its patent problems without, in theory, having to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to NTP. It's a mystery, I tell you! For more details on Gartner's recommendation, check out today's National Post story.

Update: The U.S. government has deemed the Blackberry to be an essential service so the court injuction - if it's imposed - would not affect politicians, bureaucrats, etc. That said, I wonder how RIM and/or its U.S. carriers can determine who works for the U.S. government so Blackberry service can be kept on. Perhaps it has to do with U.S. government e-mail domains?