business NewsOK.com Blogging Community

Fair warning. Tomorrow is April Fools Day. Slate offers a defense kit to protect even the most gullible among us.

PC Magazine compiled this list of top 10 April Fools’ online pranks.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary issues its annual April Fools’ Day rant on the worst in current English.

Most irksome euphemish: “Issue. We used to have problems; now we have issues (or concerns)”

Google has established an April Fools’ Day tradition of launching inventive hoaxes, but also has introduced some legitimate products, such as Gmail, which was incorrectly labeled a joke.

Wired magazine issued its 10 best April Fools’ pranks for nerds (and these are geeky).

If you’re tempted to pull a prank in the office, you should read this story from our own Paula Burkes about inappropriate places and times for such shenaningans.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

Sometimes in this business you just have to put on the hardhat to get the story.

So, Friday I donned this stylish Flintco hardhat and took a construction elevator 14 stories up to the top floor of the new OU Children’s Physicians Building on the Oklahoma Health Center campus.  I was there for the “topping off” ceremony where a Christmas tree was hoisted to the roof to signify the building had reached its full height.

 The building is part of a $113 million project that also includes a parking garage, a six-story glass atrium and an education center.   Flintco’s project manager told me that the building should be finished in about  a year.

Before we took the elevator back down, I posed for a snapshot with the Oklahoma City skyline behind me.

Jim Stafford

Business News Reporter

A federal court has ruled that Charles Smith, who runs two Web sites that criticize Wal-Mart, is within his First Amendment rights to compare the company to the Holocaust and Al-Qaeda. The court also ruled that Wal-Mart does not own exclusive rights to the smiley face.

From Law.com:

In a meticulously crafted, 87-page order that eviscerated conclusions by Wal-Mart’s expert witness, the judge explained that Smith’s products qualified as protected noncommercial speech because his goal was to criticize Wal-Mart, not to make a profit from his products. The judge noted that Smith had sold only 62 T-shirts, including 15 to one of Wal-Mart’s outside law firms.

Ironically, Wal-Mart’s inhouse blog about products includes a favorable review  of a violent video game that features a smiley face. The blogger, Sam’s Club video game buyer Joe Muha, writes “How can you not love a game that features a smiley face pin on a grenade?”

Writers of cheesy e-mails everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief about their ability to continue include smiley-face emoticons with annoying frequency.

Have a nice day!:)

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

We’ve all noticed rising prices in the grocery store. But imagine the headache such price hikes cause someone who buys such commodities by the ton.

Here’s Sonic Corp. President Scott McClain responding recently to a question from JPMorgan analyst Steven Rees about the company’s contracts to purchase the basic ingredients of the drive-in restaurant’s burgers, shakes, and drinks. And keep in mind that Oklahoma City-based Sonic operates nearly 3,400 stores across the country.

As you know, our largest single item is our syrups that go into our fountain drinks. That’s on a long-term contract. So those continue to be locked in with kind of inflation level increases. Our next largest item is beef which we’re on a month-to-month contract there. That makes up about 12 percent of our food and packaging costs. Dairy costs, which really have two components, cheese and ice cream mix. We have locked in a portion of our cheese through, I think it’s through the month of June. It is up pretty significantly year-over-year. However, there has been some recent movement in the cheese market. We do anticipate it will continue to be up yearover-year until July and then once we lap over the large increase we took last July, we actually should be slightly favorable in cheese. Ice cream mix has actually moved and is now favorable year-over-year. So that’s been somewhat more favorable. As you drop down to chicken, I think it’s about 10 percent and it’s locked in through 2009, flat year-over-year. There are a couple of smaller items that actually are having a bigger impact on us right now. Soybean oil, and then our bread costs are going up. So we still continue to face some pretty significant commodity cost pressures. But I think as you look towards the fourth quarter, we’ll be lapping over where some of those pressures started kicking in next year. But really it will be next year before we probably see some pretty significant relief.

Meanwhile, the company got some good press from a former analyst writing at Investopedia.com, one of the Web’s best business glossary sites. Glenn Curtis, a former securities analyst and financial writer, was wild about Sonic’s same-store sales.

The same store sales increase is all the more impressive because the company reported a 2% increase in the second quarter last year. This wasn’t growth from an artificially low base. Finally, Sonic’s operating margins came in at about 15.3%, which is a roughly 50-basis point increase over the 14.8% it posted last year. This indicates that the improved sales weren’t just the result of Sonic cutting prices on its burgers and slushes.

Curtis offered a target price of $30 for Sonic shares, which closed Thursday at $22.37.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

Be sure to click in and watch an interview that I conducted with Sheri Stickley, executive liaison for the new Oklahoma BioScience Association.  Sheri is a veteran of technology-related economic development in Oklahoma and talks about the ways this new organization will advance bioscience commercial development in the state.

Jim Stafford
Business News Reporter

My co-worker Don Mecoy and I had a lot of fun buying the domain name okc-sonics.com and holding it for the past couple of years just in case the NBA franchise with the name “Sonics” comes to town.

It was fodder for a couple of columns and a lot of laughs around the office about just what rewards we might get from the Sonics ownership in exchange for relinquishing that name if they came to town.

The gag finally ended this week when the NBA team’s ownership told the city of Seattle it can keep the name when the team moves to Oklahoma City.  It might end up as the Oklahoma City Thunder or Lightning  —  anything but Sonics.

Anyway, a spoil-sport e-mailed a response this morning to our ploy to buy and hold the okc-sonics.com domain name. He suggested that the tactic could actually land us in court.

Money quote:

I am wondering if you going on public record might lead someone to get themselves in trouble. The intent to gain is one of the criteria that would used against you. Anytime a person or business creates value in a word or term they have the right to that domain name. Coke, Holiday Inn, Microsoft etc. belonged to those companies whether they were the first to buy the name or not. The courts always took the names away from the squatters and often the squatter paid the legal costs. However, generic words in the public domain, e.g., auto, computer, tennis, were a first-come, first-serve entitlement.

The e-mailer said he wasn’t an attorney but had some experience in the area of cyber squatting.

And I thought the Internet was like the Oklahoma Land Run where as long as you were the first to arrive you could stake your claim to the name.  Guess not.

Jim Stafford
Business News Reporter

Here’s a product to fix a problem I didn’t know anyone had. A company called Thriving Office offers a compact disc or mp3 file that provides authentic office background sounds to disguise the environment of home office workers during telephone calls.

There are two tracks on the CD: ‘busy’ and ‘very busy.’ The Web site claims that the noise “builds credibility, boosts confidence, fosters concentration, and increases productivity.”

In this day of spotty cell phone coverage, conference calls and labyrinthian voice mail menus, I’m just happy when I can hear the person on the other end of the phone.

As long as your outfitting your home office, you might want to respond to this online survey to get a free Swingline stapler. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to come in red.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

After years of sorting through regulatory filings on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission site, I’ve stumbled across a couple of my own stories.

For wonks of a certain slant — like me — this is a momentous occasion. I wrote a story last month about a local security firm’s plan to launch an exchange traded fund focusing exclusively on Oklahoma-based stocks.

The firm, Capital West Securities, filed my story and the list that accompanied it with the SEC. The document was referred to as a From 497 — Definitive materials.

Earlier this year, another local company, LSB Industries, filed a story I wrote in which the CEO made some comments about his expectations for the coming year.

I can only assume it was an abundance of caution on the part of the firms to consider the stories reportable events that contained information that needed to be widely distributed. I’m not complaining; I’ll take readers wherever I can.

Don Mecoy
Business Writer

It was quite apparent this morning when I visited the Oklahoma Christian University campus that it has become an “Apple university.” 

As I approached the administration building I was greeted with four large Apple logos on the doors.

 OC recently announced that it was switching to Apple as part of its mobile computing initiative.  The switch from Dell products won’t begin until this summer, but OC already is  flying the logo on campus.

When the switch is complete, each faculty member and fulltime student will receive a Macbook laptop and an iPhone or iPod touch.

OC hailed it as a “Mac to the Future” campaign when it announced the switch earlier this year.   It is the second area university to switch to Apple computers in recent years.  Oklahoma City University became an ”Apple digital campus” in 2005.

Click here to see OC’’s formal announcement of its switch to Apple products.

Jim Stafford

Business News Reporter

I mentioned recently that the Wall Street Journal had opened its fee-based Web site for a day to all comers. Now a blogger points out a couple of ways to access the some or all of the newspaper’s online stories. Such unfettered access costs $79 a year.

In Salon.com’s “Machinist” blog, technology writer Farhad Manjoo points out that the Journal allows links to its Web site from sites like Google News and Digg, which means you can search those sites for links to the Journal and follow them to access the content for free.

For those comfortable with manipulating their browser, Manjoo points out a way to “spoof” the Web site to make it appear as if you are visiting from one of those free-access links. He also offers an argument that users should harbor no ethical qualms about this method:

I’ll grant you that setting your browser to spoof Digg is slightly deceptive. But it’s a minor fib, on the order of, say, handing a cashier an expired coupon. The Journal adds Digg buttons to all of its stories, encouraging you to open its articles to everyone (including you) for free; by pretending that you’re coming from Digg, you’re simply taking advantage of that implicit offer.

Another publishing behemoth, Sports Illustrated, has unlocked its extensive vault of contentstretching back for decades. And this free content is readily accessible and searchable. Here, for instance, is Dan Jenkins first paragraph from his game story of the 1971 OU/Nebraska game:

In the land of the pickup truck and cream gravy for breakfast, down where the wind can blow through the walls of a diner and into the grieving lyrics of a country song on a jukebox—down there in dirt-kicking Big Eight territory—they played a football game on Thanksgiving Day that was mainly for the quarterbacks on the field and for self-styled gridiron intellectuals everywhere. The spectacle itself was for everybody, of course, for all of those who had been waiting weeks for Nebraska to meet Oklahoma, or for all the guys with their big stomachs and bigger Stetsons, and for all the luscious coeds who danced through the afternoons drinking daiquiris out of paper cups. But the game of chess that was played with bodies, that was strictly for the cerebral types who will keep playing it into the ages and wondering whether it was the greatest collegiate football battle ever. Under the agonizing conditions that existed, it well may have been.

Be careful. You can get lost in there, looking up stuff like this:

Don Mecoy
Business Writer