Virgin Mobile must be serious about Canada. How else do you explain Richard Branson kitesurfing near Squamish, B.C. to unveil a one-year, $100K sponsorship for Virgin's first X-Treme Team. The team consists of four women who compete in sports such as wakeboarding, kiteboarding, BMX and motocross. For Branson watchers, six months ago he descended from a four-story building in Toronto to a bevy of scantily-clad "nurses", who certainly felt the exteme weather conditions. Speaking of exposure, it would be insightful if Virgin and Bell Canada, its joint venture partner in Canada, would provide some insight into how Virgin Canada is doing - particularly now that it's facing fierce competition from Bell.

According to Sandvine Inc., Skype accounts for 35.8% of all VoIP calls in the U.S. and 46.2% of total minutes - leaving rivals such as Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL chat far behind. Third-party VOIP players such as Vonage account for 35.7% of VoIP minutes. Looks like Waterloo, Ont.-based Sandvine, which develops intelligent bandwidth management technology, just provided Skype with more ammunition to court a better offer from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and/or fodder for an IPO.

Nortel's second-quarter results have finally been released and I guess the positive news is there are no major surprises. On the plus side of the ledger, revenue was up 10% from a year ago while sales in each of the four business units improved. That said, the wireless unit, which is supposed to be Nortel's growth engine, was up just $8-million, or 1%, due to Nortel missing out on the Cingular contract. Nortel's net income of $45-million was helped by a $58 million gain from "other income", which included $21 million from the sale of an investment and $17 million from a contract settlement. "The end markets look pretty healthy here,'' Gus Papageorgiou, an analyst at Scotia Capital Inc. in Toronto, told Bloomberg before the results came out this morning. "What I'm really concerned about is that their profitability, vis-a-vis their main competitors, is still pretty weak.'' Investors should get some more perspective on Nortel's results when Cisco posts its fiscal fourth-quarter results tomorrow. CIBC World Markets analyst Steve Kamman expects Cisco to benefit from strong U.S. government sales - an area Nortel CEO Bill Owens has heavily targeted with the US$448-million purchase of systems integrator PEC Solutions Inc. earlier this year.

After some prodding, Blogware has indeed fixed its "issue" with Technorati so my posts are now being properly spidered and appear in Technorati search results. It turns out I wasn't the only one stumped by this problem, although this post cited another issue. Now, I'm looking for some love from Blogware for coming to their Technorati rescue.

CNet has a story on the 10 biggest dot-com flops, which includes the regular suspects such as Webvan.com, Pets.com and Boo.com. My favorite is Govworks.com, which raised more than $60-million as it attempted to provide ways for municipal governments to offer online services such as the ability to pay parking tickets. It was a company ahead of its time with a management team in over its head. All this, of course, was documented in Startup.com, which I found fascinating because it mirrored many of the same things I experienced in my start-up, Blanketware.com. Govworks' co-founders, Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza, Tuzman are now partners in The Recognition Group, which provides consulting services to "distressed" companies. The Recognition Group's Canadian connection is an investment it has in Lemontonic Inc., which offers online dating services. Lemontonic is headed by Mark Pavan, who was the Mary Meeker of Canada before the dot-com scene crashed. Pavan is probably best known for receiving death threats after Bid.com stock went sour.