Videotron Ltee signed up its 75Kth cable telephony subscriber on Aug. 30, compared with 62.5K on Aug. 12. Concius Capital analyst Kona Shio estimates Videotron will have 139K customers by the end of the year and 349K by the end of 2006. Wonder what Bell Canada is thinking? By the way; anyone have insight into Bell's VOIP plans?

The Pulver 100 has been unveiled - I discovered this fact after a flurry of e-mail from companies that made it started to hit my in-box. Anyway, it features a healthy dose of Canadian content. This includes TalkSwitch, SIPQuest, Eyeball Networks (which has to be one of the most creative names in the telecom space), Natural Convergence, Convedia, Blueslice Networks and NewHeights Software. It's encouraging to see Canada is riding on the VOIP bandwagon given its long telecom history. Apologies to anyone I failed to mention. Drop me a comment and I'll update the post.
For some insight into how the list was compiled and who's on it, check out Jon Arnold's post.
Update: Another Canadian company on the Pulver 100 is Nimcat Networks, which was acquired in Sept. 2005 by Avaya for C$46 million. Nimcat is based in Ottawa.

Looks like Google executives are as smart about their stock holdings as they are about launching new products such as Google Talk. According to Thestreet.com, insiders have sold more than $3 billion of stock since last year's IPO. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have cashed in for $858 million and $855 million respectively - enough for them to buy search engine "rival" Looksmart Ltd., and still have $1.6 billion left over to do other things. Perhaps the luckiest person around is Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who won the lottery when he was hired to become the company's "grey hair" as Google prepared for its IPO. We should all be so lucky!

A few weeks ago, the New York Times had a story about the battle between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the music industry. Apparently, the music industry wants to hike the price of a downloaded song by 50% to $1.49 while Jobs wants to hold the line at 99 cents to keep demand strong for iTunes. Given this fight, how does $1.99 to apparently download a song to the new iTunes wireless phone fit into the strategic scheme of things. Have the wireless and music industries over-estimated the buying power of teenagers, or are they way too anxious to find a new way to boost revenue? While I think a standard fee of 99 cents for an online music download is too high - particularly for most older material - $1.99 for a wireless iTunes download seems downright greedy. Then again, it's been a long time since I was a free-spending teenager so perhaps there's more money among the younger demographic than I realize. At the same time, never under-estimate the music industry's ability to read the market wrong.
Update: For Canadians anxious get hold of the iTunes phone (otherwise known as the Motorola ROKR, which is apparently pronounced as "Rocker"), it will be available through Rogers by mid-September. The ROKR can hold up to 100 songs. According to Solutions Research Group, 50% of MP3 players hold less than 100 songs. As a result, SRG suggests there is a fertile market for a "limited capacity" mobile phone/digital music player. Yannick Laclau thinks the additional iPod mobile fee is not outrageous because it is "the value a consumer will be willing to pay to get the song they want NOW, at a bus station, nightclub, beach, or wherever." I guess it's like paying a premium for a milk at a convenience store that stays open late.
Apple also announced a new iPod called Nano, which is 80% smaller than the original iPod. Nano comes in two flavours - a 4GB model that holds 1,000 songs for $249 and a 2GB model with a 500-song capacity for $199.