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> GENERAL INTEREST

Canada added 17,900 jobs in March bringing total employment to 16.96 million, according to seasonally adjusted numbers from Statistics Canada. The unemployment rate in March was unchanged from February at 8.2%.

Statistics Canada also reported that real gross domestic product in Canada increased 0.3% in February with much of the strength coming from manufacturing. Canadian real GDP had grown 0.6% in January.

The Canadian Staffing Index rose 15.5% in March from February, the Association of Canadian Search, Employment and Staffing Services reported. The index indicates that the Canadian staffing industry is about half way back to its pre recession numbers. The association indicated they expect the momentum to continue into April.

Human resources managers are more optimistic about hiring in the second quarter than they were a year ago, according to a survey of 400 human resources professionals by the Society for Human Resource Management. The study found 24% (18% a year ago) expect their companies to hire and 59% will maintain staffing levels.

The latest Swiss Job Market Index compiled by Zurich University on behalf of Adecco reveals that the number of jobs on offer in the first quarter of 2010 was up by +15% compared to the previous quarter.

U.S. workers are beginning to think about changing jobs; particularly Generation Y workers, according to a survey released by Adecco. The survey found that 30% of Gen-Y workers plan to seek a new job in 2010 compared to 14% at the end of 2008. 30% of Generation X workers, 29% of baby boomers and 22% of workers aged 61 and older are also headed for job interviews!

U.S. real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 3.2% in the first quarter of 2010, down from growth of 5.6% in the fourth quarter, according to an advance estimate released today by the U.S. Department of Commerce. First-quarter growth slowed from the fourth, but remained much improved compared to the decline of 6.4% in the first quarter of 2009.

Separately, the Economic Cycle Research Institute reported its weekly leading index of the U.S. economy is also pointing to slower economic growth. In the weekly period ending April 23, ECRI’s weekly leading index level rose to 133.7 from 133.0 in the prior period. However, the index’s growth rate slipped to 12.4% from 12.5% in the prior period. The growth rate and level can move in opposite directions because the growth rate is derived from a four-week average of the level that is compared against the previous year’s average.

The latest statistics published by the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat), reveal that the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate in the Euro area (EA16) was 10.0% in March 2010, the same as in February. It was 9.1% in March 2009. As a comparison, the unemployment rate in the USA was 9.7% in March 2010. In Canada it was 8.2%, and Japan’s February rate was 4.8%. The latest data published by the Association of Large Temporary Employment Agencies (agett), reported Spain now for the first time in its history has more than 1 million unemployed who are over the age of 45. This rate has more than doubled since 2007 to reach 13.4% or 1,038, 500 individuals. The Association says in a statement, “The age group in question has employability problems which range from a lack of professional skills to inflated income expectations.” According to Agett, overall unemployment reached an estimated 19.9% in the first quarter of 2010. It was 18.83% in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Canadian IT spending is still in its recovery stage, according to IDC Canada Ltd. The research firm predicted a 4% compound annual growth rate over the next five years, driven by strong growth in the software and cloud computing industries and weak gains in the struggling hardware market.

The recession continued to take its toll among high-tech workers in 2009, according to a report from the TechAmerica Foundation. A total of 245,000 high-tech jobs were lost last year, the organization said in its 13th annual Cyberstates report.

The world is now a much poorer place without the wisdom, graciousness, vision, and inspiration of CK Prahalad, regarded by some as the world’s top thinker on management and business strategy, and a celebrated and dearly loved distinguished professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. CK passed away over the weekend at his home in San Diego after a brief illness.

Another “big name” in the computer world also passed away this month. Ed Roberts, the maker of the world’s first personal computer, died at the age of 68. Roberts created the Altair 8800, the first computer normal people could a) afford and b) use in their homes, without it taking up an entire room. Altair 8800 was also the platform Paul Allen and Bill Gates used to make their first programs and launch Microsoft.

> COMPANY NEWS

Toronto’s Q9 Networks Inc., a provider of outsourced data centre infrastructure and hosting services secured a new $210 million senior secured credit facility which substantially increases the company’s borrowing capacity and its ability to accelerate expansion plans.

CA is planning to cut about 1,000 jobs, or roughly 7.7% of its workforce. The plan will also involve the consolidation of facilities. CA will incur a pre-tax restructuring charge of about US$50 million in severance and other expenses.

> MERGER & ACQUISITION ACTIVITY

Twitter has acquired Cloudhopper, a provider of mobile phone text messaging infrastructure. Twitter hopes to use the company’s expertise to improve the scalability and reach of its SMS (Short Message Service) service, according to a Twitter blog post. Twitter handles close to a billion SMS messages per month and that number is growing. Cloudhopper’s infrastructure lets Twitter connect directly to mobile carrier networks in countries all over the world. The company has been working with Cloudhopper for the last eight months. The 140-character length of Twitter messages was inspired by the length of SMS messages. Twitter didn’t provide financial details of the deal. This is the second time in two weeks that Twitter has acquired a company with a product for mobile phones. Earlier Twitter acquired Atebits, which has developed iPhone Twitter client Tweetie.

Symantec will acquire encryption specialist PGP and endpoint security vendor GuardianEdge Technologies for US$300 million and $70 million, respectively. Both are privately held companies. The companies’ combined specialties in standards-based encryption for e-mail, file systems, removable media and smartphones will complement its security offerings, such as its gateway, endpoint security and data-loss prevention software. PGP was founded by Phil Zimmermann who developed e-mail encryption software called “Pretty Good Privacy,” which is still widely used today. After the software was published for free in 1991, Zimmermann was the target of a criminal investigation due to U.S. restrictions on the export of encryption technology. But under U.S. law, Zimmermann could publish PGP’s cryptographic source code in a book, as restricting it would violate free speech rights. The source code was published, then the books were scanned using optical character recognition, according to Zimmermann’s Web site. He founded PGP in 1996 after the government eventually dropped the case. Symantec said it will standardize its products on PGP’s key management platform, which allows administrators to centrally manage encryption tasks. That platform will be integrated into the Symantec Protection Center, a management console for its products.GuardianEdge, which specializes in security for laptops, portable storage devices and smartphones, is already a partner of Symantec for its Endpoint Encryption product.

After struggling in recent years to reclaim the success it once had in pioneering the personal digital assistant market, smart phone vendor Palm has agreed to be acquired by Hewlett Packard in a deal worth US$1.2 billion. The acquisition, which is still pending shareholder approval and is expected to close in HP’s fiscal third quarter, gives HP popular Palm products such as the Pre and Pixi, as well as Palm’s critically acclaimed new mobile operating system, webOS. HP sees the acquisition giving it an immediate foothold in the emerging smart phone market, and sees webOS as the foundation that will allow it to build a common connected mobile experience across devices, from smart phones to netbooks and even its upcoming slate offering.

Apple has bought the firm widely believed to be responsible for the design of the engine behind the A4 CPU that powers the iPad. Austin, Texas-based Intrinsity does not directly make microprocessors; instead, it specializes in designing and licensing high-performance chips for mobile applications. In fact, its primary product is a set of design tools, called Fast14, which implement a number of sophisticated algorithms and techniques to improve the efficiency of CPUs based on a number of different architectures, including the ARM family that at the core of many of Apple’s mobile devices. In characteristic Apple fashion, the company has only now confirmed the purchase, although many of Intrinsity’s employees had changed their online profiles on the business-oriented social network LinkedIn to reflect their new positions with the Cupertino giant earlier this month. Apple hasn’t detailed what it paid for Intrinsity or how it plans to use the chip designer’s technologies. This isn’t the first time Apple has snapped up a chip specialist. In 2008, the company bought chip designer PA Semi for a reported $278 million.

Oracle is buying Phase Forward, which develops software for drug manufacturers, for about US $685 million. The deal is expected to close mid-year. Phase Forward’s SaaS (software as a service) products guide the entire drug-development process, from clinical trials to monitoring after they receive regulatory approval, according to a statement. Its employees will be folded into Oracle’s Health Sciences global business unit. The acquisition is just the latest in a long string by Oracle in recent years, but also one of the larger ones in recent history. It ties into the vendor’s desire to mine new business from vertical markets like health care.

Juniper is acquiring partner Ankeena Networks, a privately held maker of software for optimizing media content delivery, for no more than $100 million. Ankeena’s software is designed to deliver online media content at scale and provide television-like viewing quality. Juniper will integrate Ankeena into its Junos Ready Software business group and offer the technology to service providers looking to address demand for video and rich media content on fixed and mobile networks. Ankeena’s Media Flow Director product was used by Juniper to optimize mobile and fixed networks for efficient video and media delivery to smartphones and other mobile devices. Media Flow Director is intended to ensure that users receive an undisrupted viewing experience regardless of the viewing device and network conditions. The product supports different adaptive streaming technologies that dynamically detect the available bandwidth and varying the delivery bit-rate. This allows viewers to watch videos without any buffering or “stuttering”. Ankeena’s products also feature a caching technology designed to reduce the number of servers needed to deliver media, resulting in reduced transit network and media delivery costs, the company says. Ankeena was founded in 2008 as Nokeena Networks and is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. The company was funded by Clearstone Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Mayfield Fund.

NetApp is planning to acquire Bycast, a storage virtualization vendor, in an attempt to improve its object-based storage capabilities. “Object-based storage is a new and emerging approach to storing and accessing data based on object names and rich metadata that describes the content in greater detail, which simplifies the task of large-scale object storage while improving the ability to quickly search and locate data objects,” NetApp said in an announcement of the acquisition. NetApp has a definitive agreement to acquire the company in an all-cash deal expected to be completed next month. The amount of the acquisition was not disclosed. Bycast is a 10-year-old private company which is based in Vancouver and has more than 250 customers. Bycast’s software is “designed to manage petabyte-scale, globally distributed repositories of images, video, and records for enterprises and service providers”. Bycast describes its StorageGRID software as a storage virtualization product that turns multiple storage devices across geographically dispersed locations into a single pool of storage. The product is capable of automated disaster recovery, migration of data from one generation of hardware to another, support of multi-vendor storage environments, and integration with enterprise applications with industry-standard interfaces like CIFS, NFS and HTTP.

Salesforce.com is buying Jigsaw, a partner that has already integrated its business-contact-data service with the cloud application provider’s CRM system. The $142 million cash purchase, which is expected to close by the end of this quarter, will bring Salesforce into the $3 billion online data services market. Jigsaw relies on Wikipedia-style crowd sourcing to compile, correct and update business-card-level contact information. The company’s database has 21 million contacts. Individuals can use the service for free by contributing information. Jigsaw says public users are adding 36,000 records and augmenting or updating 12,000 records per day.

Google has acquired Agnilux, a stealth startup of former Apple employees involved in making the application processor used to power the iPad. Agnilux was founded by people who worked for PA Semi, a chipmaker Apple acquired in 2008 for $278 million. PA Semi’s technology is behind the Apple-designed application processor in the iPad. Very little is known about the secretive Agnilux. According to a New York Times article, the company included a several people who worked for PA Semi and then for Apple before leaving to form Agnilux. How big a role the Agnilux people had in architecting the iPad’s application processor is not known. The chip is also believed to be in the next-generation iPhone Apple is expected to release this year. A prototype of the device was left at a Silicon Valley bar and sold to tech blog Gizmodo for $5,000. After dissecting the iPhone, Gizmodo agreed to return it to Apple.

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