Canada’s Scotiabank is using technology from Microsoft to introduce an internal Web 2.0 social networking platform aimed at encouraging information sharing and collaboration among its staff.
Based on Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007, the platform enables employees to share, store, organise, search and manage information using blogs and wikis. As part of the programme, the bank is creating online user profiles for staff members.

Scotiabank, which is currently piloting the system at its international division, says the technology will transform how staff share knowledge and best practices.

Commenting on the move, Robert Fournier, SVP, enterprise architecture and methodology, Scotiabank, says: “By leveraging the knowledge and experience of the Scotiabank team with a business focused social networking platform we are enabling staff to better serve customers by sharing best practices and identifying experts and skill sets regardless of geographic and organizational boundaries.”

Dan Bloch, director, financial services, Microsoft Canada, says the SharePoint system includes native support for wikis, blogs and RSS feeds as well as privacy and security mechanisms so that employees can connect and share knowledge via a customisable and security-enhanced interface.

Last month Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) launched a financial advice blog written by students that can be accessed via its fan page on social networking site Facebook.

RBC has selected six full time post-secondary students at Canadian universities to write daily blogs on money management, which along with videos, are available through the bank’s Web site as well as the “RBC Bankbook” page on Facebook.

Last year analyst house Javelin Strategy encouraged banks to open their own blog sites as a way of strengthening brand management and customer loyalty.

The US research firm surveyed over 3500 consumers and found that one-in-five read blogs, rising to 34% among the more affluent tech-wise surfers.

But the study found less than one per cent of financial institutions had opened blogs, and Javelin warned that banks are largely losing control of discussion about themselves in the ‘blogosphere’.

AT&T announced on Monday that starting with March it would raise the prices of its main broadband Internet services. This decision will affect all of the states where AT&T operates excepting the ones acquired by the company with the buyout of BellSouth. According to AT&T’s spokesman, Michael Coe, the affected customers will be the ones having the slowest broadband tiers, ranging from 768 Kbps to 3 Mbps. So, the 1.5 Mbps service, which is the most common service among the company’s almost 14.2 million broadband clients, will also be affected.

Still, according to Michael Coe, the $5-per-month price hike will not affect AT&T’s new clients who sign up for the slowest broadband Internet service, as well as the ones who signed up under special promotional deals.

AT&T has already started to announce its customers about the price hike via emails or notices coming with the bills. The company’s arguments for taking this decision was that thus, “the value of our broadband service” would be better reflected as demand continues to grow for high-speed Internet services.

On Monday AT&T’s shares ended down 12 cents.

Kiwee, the online social expressions outlet, announced extraordinary growth in its first six months out of beta, attracting one million members since July 2007. In December, Kiwee hit another milestone; delivering 500 million IM graphics downloads. This exceptional growth has been bolstered by the Kiwee IM Toolbar, recently out of beta, which provides thousands of unique 2D and 3D expressions for the AOL, MSN and Yahoo! instant messaging platforms.

Kiwee currently adds an estimated 14,000 new members every day, and has tripled its number of unique visitors and page views from December to January. Also, Kiwee features a vast amount of original content for social expressions on the web — more than 6,000 items, many of which can be completely customized by adding text, color and even photographs.

Kiwee’s social expression content is all free and includes postCards, graphics, emoticons, winks, display pictures, widgets and backgrounds for all major online communications platforms including Facebook, MySpace, Piczo, Multiply, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger.

“The teen and twenty-something demographic communicates with friends and family immediately on whatever platform reaches them fastest, and we provide expressive content that isn’t available anywhere else on the Internet today,” said Rajiv Jain, SVP and General Manager, Kiwee. “We know how people connect with one another based on our 101-year American Greetings heritage and our deep psychographic knowledge of this market, and these exciting growth numbers illustrate how our content resonates with young people all over the world.”

As an innovative leader in social expressions, Kiwee speaks to the MySpace generation by creating new content to match their changing moods, and developing new applications for all the major social networking platforms. In the past two months, Kiwee launched a Facebook application, added postCards, and released a line of customizable widgets.

In addition to the social expressions at Kiwee.com and on the IM toolbar, Kiwee manages a relationship with Microsoft for delivery of content to their Windows Live Messenger product in 15 countries and 11 languages.

For more information on Kiwee, Kiwee branded content or the growth of the service (including graphs of recent growth) please visit http://www.kiwee.com/press.

About Kiwee

Kiwee, the youth-focused online social expressions division of AG Interactive — a subsidiary of American Greetings Corp — is one of the fastest growing social expressions companies on the web today. It is committed to providing an easy, fun, and personal way for teens and twenty- somethings to express themselves on today’s most popular online communications platforms. Kiwee closely monitors Generation Y to constantly deliver content that is relevant to their moods, lifestyles, current interests, and online personalities.

Kiwee works across all major social networking and instant messaging services including Facebook, MySpace, Piczo, Multiply, Yahoo! 360, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. Headquartered in Cleveland, Kiwee has a dedicated creative studio in Los Angeles, and operates in 15 countries around the world. For more information please visit: www.kiwee.com.

About American Greetings Corporation

American Greetings Corporation is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of social expression products. Along with greeting cards, its product lines include gift wrap, party goods, stationery, calendars, ornaments and electronic greetings. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings generates annual revenue of approximately $1.7 billion. For more information on the Company, visit http://corporate.americangreetings.com.

Nintendo continues to have a hit with the Wii gaming console.

Consumers bought 519,000 Wii systems in October, according to monthly figures released by The NPD Group, helping Nintendo to regain the top-selling spot among next generation consoles. That brings total U.S. sales of the Wii to 5 million.

“Demand actually continues to increase,” says Nintendo’s Perrin Kaplan. “People just can’t seem to get enough of it.”

Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which usurped the top sales spot in September fueled by the release of Halo 3, sold 366,000 — a drop from the previous month’s tally of 527,800, but still higher than the spring and summer months.

In mid-October, Microsoft released an Xbox 360 Arcade model ($280) aimed at casual gamers and families which helped buoy sales, says Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg.

Halo 3 remained the top-selling video game in October with 433,800 copies sold, bringing the total to 3.7

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (with enclosed guitar, $90-$100) took the next three spots, with the Xbox 360 version selling the most (383,200), followed by the Wii version (286,300) and Sony PlayStation 2 version (271,100). “For us to see that title selling the best on our platform speaks to the fact that we are really broadening our market to that mainstream consumer,” Greenberg says.

A game-only PS2 version of GH III ($50) finished at No. 8, selling 231,700. In total, GH III sold 1.4 million copies (including a version for the PS3, as well as other versions that come with soundtrack CDs).

“Guitar Hero has certainly established itself among the elite video games properties,” said NPD’s Anita Frazier. “Very few games sell in excess of 1 million units in their first month in market, but Guitar Hero III did easily with combined sales of 1.4 million units in only six days. Since it has broad appeal, it’s also the type of game that should continue to do very well throughout the holidays.”

Sales of various guitar controllers also increased monthly accessory sales, she said.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 sales increased slightly in October to 121,000, increasing the system’s installed based to nearly 2 million. On Wednesday, Sony chairman and chief executive Howard Stringer said that an Oct. 29 price reduction of $100 of the 80 gigabyte PS3 (to $499) and a new $399 40GB model had boosted sales.

However, the PS3 price cut’s effect won’t be seen in the monthly sales figures until next month, Frazier says, “so we’ll have to wait until our data comes out next month to see the effect of that cut on retail sell-through of the hardware.”

By Jeremy van Loon

Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) — Porsche AG, the world’s most profitable carmaker, said North American sales rose 21 percent in October, helped by new models of the Cayenne sport-utility vehicle and 911 sports car.

Deliveries in the U.S. and Canada increased to 3,018 cars and SUVs from 2,487 a year earlier, Stuttgart, Germany-based Porsche said in an e-mailed statement. Sales of the Cayenne surged 45 percent to 1,263 SUVs. The carmaker sold 1,017 of the 911, a gain of 38 percent. Demand for the Boxster and Cayman sports cars fell 16 percent to 738 vehicles.

Porsche, with the highest earnings as a proportion of sales in the car industry, gets more than a third of sales from the U.S. The company introduced the new version of the Cayenne in earlier this year in the U.S. and rolled out the Cayman, based on the Boxster, in 2005.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy van Loon in Berlin at jvanloon@bloomberg.net .