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In an exciting bit of news for early adopters north of the border, the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone from Research In Motion Limited (NASDAQ: RIMM) is slated to hit Canadian shelves this Thursday, August 21. Because RIMM has signed service pacts with various wireless carriers in different regions, the Bold is being rolled out gradually around the globe. The snappy new device has already launched in Germany, but U.S. carrier AT&T (NYSE: T) is so far keeping mum about its plans for the Bold's Stateside debut.

The latest addition to the CrackBerry family is aimed toward business users; as proof, even Rupert Murdoch is getting in on the act. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network announced today that it's launched a new mobile application to provide immediate access to headlines in the WSJ family of financial publications (including Barron's, MarketWatch, and All Things Digital). The application is available for free on most BlackBerry smartphones.

Naturally, the Bold has already garnered comparisons to Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone -- but there are a few notable differences. While Jobs & Co. are slowly trying to make headway into the corporate world, their core audience is still top-heavy with tech-gadget completists and trust-fund hipsters. Meanwhile, BlackBerry's already in business with business, and the new WSJ app is just an extra boost of its Street cred.

During my various commutes over the past week I have been hearing a new radio commercial about Intuitive Surgical Inc. (NASDAQ: ISRG). The City of Hope Hospital in Los Angeles is advertising their Di Vinci robotic surgical procedures to attract patients.

They use the catch phrase "The science of saving lives" while promoting less invasive surgical procedures, shorter hospital stays, and faster recovery. These are well-known themes among the medical profession and investors but it is the first time I have heard the story promoted for a competitive advantage among hospitals. I am sure it won't be the last.

Certainly this will raise the bar among other hospitals competing for similar business and simply to keep their Di Vinci operating rooms productive, cost effective, and profitable. It also means that any hospital without the equipment will soon be deemed second rate, if they are not already.

Perhaps we will soon be hearing competing hospitals bragging about having multiple Di Vinci's or more trained doctors or the highest number of procedures or new procedures. Where will it end? When it is common place and every hospital is using the system.

Have you heard any radio advertising from hospitals in your city? Fans of Elvis Costello can check out Radio, Radio" at Last fm. here.

ISRG closed last Friday at $299.17 and is trading down slightly this morning. It has been hovering around $300 for the past two weeks.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. DISCLOSURE: I currently own shares of ISRG and have no relationship whatsoever with "Last fm" ,but I was reminded of the song and it is way cool.

Best Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY), after announcing it was going to come on strong in the United Kingdom, is now setting its sights on Russia to further its international expansion plans. This according to scattered media reports about the largest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S.

Proof comes in the form of Best Buy's registration of the Future Shop trademark in Russia. The Future Shop trademark is the name for Best Buy's Canadian subsidiary. It filed the license for trademark a few years ago and has been granted the trademark recently. Would Best Buy really try to enter a country where recent political strife has caused growing international concern? Sure -- if profits are to be made.

With Best Buy on record saying that it wants to achieve $80 billion in annual sales within five years, much of that growth won't be sitting inside its U.S. stores, but from international sales. Of course, the retailer continues to open stores inside the U.S. and won't stop that type of expansion as long as it makes business sense. For the last 18 months, Best Buy has ramped up its dominance in retail electronics and has crushed former rival Circuit City stores, Inc. (NYSE: CC). It's showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

It has been almost two weeks since a Nomura analyst reported the dropped phone calls due to faulty chips were a significant problem for Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) 3G iPhone customers.

The mainstream press has been slow in reporting the trouble, but the FT made it a major story today. According to the paper, "Over the past few weeks, customers have flocked to Apple's online support forums to complain about weak or fluctuating signals leading to dropped calls and long download times."

Since the FT prides itself on being early to market with important news, what happened?

The media, in general, seems reluctant to take on Apple's image as an almost flawless designer, manufacturer, and marketer of PCs and consumer electronics devices. The company's customers are vocal defenders of the Apple's blue chip reputation and are rabid about attacking media that try to undermine that.

Apple's obsessive need to present itself as "perfect" is beginning to backfire because of problems with its newest product, the 3G iPhone. It would be better to come clean about the troubles and offer a way to fix them

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Since returning in January 2007 to the company he founded in 1984, Michael Dell has set many things straight with Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL). It's widely known that some of the best stewards of public companies are the founders, and this is certainly the case with Dell himself. Entering retail in a large way, busting out plenty of new designs, and concentrating on laptop sales have given Dell an edge to use against PC market leader Hewlett-Packard Corporation (NYSE: HPQ), which wrestled the world's largest PC maker crown from Dell in 2006.

Dell is now saying that his company will see more sales growth in 2008 than the overall PC market as a whole. No, this isn't just due to being more in retail with colorful laptops in the U.S. market. Most of the demand that will allow Dell to outpace the industry growth rate will come from strong demand in emerging markets like India and China.

Dell recently said ''The emerging markets are a big part of our growth ... 'Dell will continue to grow faster than the rest of the industry, certainly for the remainder of this year.'' Those are pretty strong words, but it's not surprising. In many instances, companies are pinning their hopes on international sales growth to balance out tepid waters in the U.S. market. Even up until recent times, the red-hot U.S. market was comfortable.

But that's not so much now as gas prices and a bombing mortgage market has turned off the consumer flame. The auto industry is the most lucidly aware of having a balanced product mix globally, and PC makers are there as well. Dell beat HP's shipment growth 21% to 17% in the quarter ended in June, so it's hitting on more cylinders every quarter.

Back in the good 'ol days of say 2004, Gannett Co. (NYSE: GCI) was one of the few newspaper publishers Wall Street liked. Part of the reason was that many of the papers were in smaller cities such as Wilmington, Delaware, and Poughkeepsie, NY, where competition was not as great for advertisers. These days the publisher of USA Today is up the creek with the rest of the industry.

With its shares down more than 50% this year, it should come as no surprise that Gannett is joining the ranks of publishers that are laying off staff. According to a memo leaked to the unofficial Gannett blog, about 1,000 positions will be eliminated across Gannett's Community Publishing Division. Six hundred of those employees will lose their jobs, the memo says.

"Several GCI papers have already made recent job cuts, but at a higher rate: 5%," the blog says. "The division's dailies do not include USA Today, suggesting that any further reductions at Gannett's flagship could be on top of the 1,000 jobs eliminated."

Gannett investors -- who must be the few, the proud like The Marines -- must have been expecting the move. Shares of the publisher have soared 10% in the past month. About the only relief they are going to get is through a takeover by private equity companies. The publicly traded media companies have no interest in buying into an industry whose best days are behind it.

According to a Reuter's report, General Motors (NYSE: GM) is finding "significant interest" in the assets it is trying to sell to raise capital. The biggest asset on the trading block so far is Hummer, the militaristic luxury SUV line that is variously loved and loathed in different corners of the country.

Whatever your feelings toward Hummer, $4 a gallon gas has made it far less attractive to American consumers. And having lost over $50 billion in the last three years -- that's right, $50 BILLION -- GM sure could use the cash it would get from its sale.

At a plant opening in Thailand, GM confirmed that it has been in negotiations with India's Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. to sell the Hummer division. Automakers in China and Russia are also reportedly interested.

Mahindra is a large and growing company, one that you'll hear lot about in the near future. It's a $150 billion conglomerate that already sells tractors in the U.S., and starting next year it plans to sell a diesel pickup truck here as well. Mahindra got its start making Willys Jeeps in India after World War Two, and now controls most of the utility vehicle market there. Hummer could make sense as a luxury badge for the company, one that it could sell to oligarchs and new capitalist kings throughout Russia, China and the Middle East. The Hummer's days in the U.S. may be limited, but it may have a future in the more turbulent emerging markets where military looks make more sense and where poor gas mileage is less of a problem.

General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM), which is closing plants as it suffers some of the largest quarterly losses in the history of the company, is going to pour nearly half a billion into a new diesel plant in Thailand.

The Detroit automaker said it will invest $445 million into the Thai plant to ensure it can meet growing demand in the Asian market at the same time the U.S. market is tanking. Putting your eggs in more than one basket is always a good thing -- although GM should have done this years ago to help soften the blow from the currently anemic U.S. economy.

The new Thai plant is scheduled to open in 2010, with an engine building capacity of 100,000 engines per year. The engine types will be 2.5L and 2.8L diesel engines to serve the Southeast Asia market, little of which has a need for larger V6 or V8 engines like you'll currently find sitting abandoned in larger trucks and SUVs all over used car lots in the U.S.

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about Four Bucks below in the comments.

As big multinational corporations go, Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) had such possibility. Rooted in the heart of the Pacific Northwest, born of grunge rock and a commitment to really good coffee and a distinct sense of place, embracing the centuries-old European coffeehouse tradition with its literary name, Starbucks, Captain Ahab's first mate in Moby Dick. The company's founders were all about the beans, buying them directly from growers in Africa and Central America and roasting the beans themselves.

It was entrepreneurial upstart Howard Schultz who conceived of the strategy of making espressos, coffees, and lattes in the coffee shops and selling them for big profit margins. And in the 1980s, milk was cheap and coffee was cheaper. I like to imagine that, as the company's founders sat around a cafe table in Seattle's Pike Place Market, drinking their mellow brew and listening to Schultz's wild ideas, the others scoffed at the concept of someone paying upwards of three dollars for a latte.

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about Fiat below in the comments.

Sometime in the 1970s, some wag dubbed the Fiat Fix It Again Tony, because at the time the Italian cars were awful -- they were built with cheap Russian steel that rusted easily. Their reputation among American consumers has never recovered.

"Modern Fiats are actually pretty respectable thanks to modernization of materials and manufacturing processes, unfortunately most Americans still think of the old phrase 'Fix It Again Tony' because Fiat has not sold cars in North America since 1982, and therefore that is the last Fiat anyone there has usually seen," according to the Urban Dictionary.

Maybe Fiat's absence from the U.S. market is not a bad thing. Writing in BusinessWeek, Helen Walters described the Fiat Punto as being riddled with design flaws, including one that is a safety hazard. "As it happens, I'm not in the market to buy a car," she writes. "But if I was then the Punto wouldn't make it anywhere on the list."

Looks like the old Fiat joke is not going away anytime soon.

Waste Management Inc. (NYSE: WMI) raised its hostile bid for smaller rival Republic Services Inc. (NYSE: RSG) by more than 8% to $6.73 billion, a premium that should be enough to scuttle Republic's $6.24 billion purchase of Allied Waste Industries Inc. (NYSE: AW).

Under the terms of the deal, Waste Management would buy Republic for $37 per share, a premium of almost 33% to Republic's closing price on July 11, the last trading day before the company's buyout proposal was disclosed. The proposal is above Republic's all-time high stock price. Moreover, Waste Management will pay Republic, which rejected Waste Management's earlier offer as inadequate, a fee of $250 million if the merger does not close because of opposition from the U.S. Department of Justice.

"Our $37.00 all-cash proposal clearly offers Republic stockholders a better and more certain value
alternative than is contemplated in the Republic-Allied transaction," said David P. Steiner, Waste
Management's CEO, in a press release. "We believe our proposal is clearly superior for Republic's stockholders and is designed so we can work cooperatively with Republic to structure a transaction that would benefit both
Republic and Waste Management stockholders."

A combined Waste and Republic would create annual synergies of $200 million, $50 million more than the savings created by the Republic-Allied deal, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reason for Waste Management's interest in Republic is simple according to the paper: "Though smaller than Waste or Allied, Republic is generally regarded as the best-run trash hauler in the country, and its stock has outperformed its rivals."

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about Whole Paycheck below in the comments.

Having long shopped at overpriced gourmet foods markets, I'll admit to having rolled my eyes a bit -- maybe even scoffed -- when I first heard the beloved nickname for Whole Foods (NASDAQ: WFMI), "Whole Paycheck." Of course, this was also when I was single and living on a dot-com boom-style income.

Today, I rarely shop at Whole Foods; there isn't one in my neighborhood, and it's true: it's not difficult to spend upwards of $100 on ingredients for one meal. While there are choices on the lower end of the price spectrum, especially in the company's 365 house brand line and seasonal produce, the grocery chain has long prided itself on providing a wide range of organic and gourmet ingredients; and if its customers demand star fruit from Brazil, stinky cheeses from around the globe, and sushi-quality tuna, by all means, Whole Foods will provide it, and won't bat an eye about charging for its hard work.

This post is one in a series on prominent company nicknames. See all 25, and share your thoughts and memories about BK below in the comments.

Is there any advertising icon more creepy than the Burger King (NYSE: BKC) King? I get nightmares myself every time the mascot appears on the small screen. My opinion, though, may be in a minority since the character seems to be wildly popular.

Unlike McDonald's (NYSE: MCD), Burger King isn't afraid to be edgy and even annoying. I always have to turn the volume down on my TV whenever a BK spot is on the air or my ears will start to bleed otherwise. Burger King tried being like McDonald's and got its butt kicked. I am old enough to remember when the king was a cuddly cartoon. That strategy has now shifted and all of the in-your-face marketing appears to be paying off.

Shares of the number two burger chain are up 17% over the past year as cash-strapped consumers forgo casual dining chains for fast food. Wall Street analysts consider the stock a buy. The company is expected to post earnings of 34 cents per share on revenue of $633.26 million when it reports results Aug. 21, according to Thomson Reuters. Those are respectable numbers especially given the current economic environment.

All is not completely calm in Whopper land. Franchisees are balking at new late-night hours, and the Miami company, like every food business, is being slammed by high commodities prices. But at the end of the day, Mel Brooks had it right in History of the World Part I: "It's good to be the king."

When you sell something as a "limited edition," you better mean it. But it turns out that a recent limited edition of the Ford (NYSE: F) Mustang was not that limited after all. And now a group of angry Mustang buyers are taking legal action against the troubled automaker.

Ford claimed that only 100 of the 2007 Roush Stage 3 BlackJack Mustangs would be made in 2007, and fans snatched them up as they went on sale. The car, which cost $59,000, was continued in 2008 and another 100 were made by Ford and Roush Performance Products. That fact didn't sit well with those who had purchased the 2007 model. (I remember the Chevy Camaro and Ford Mustang fanatics of the 70s and 80s -- and fans of both can be quite intense and still dote on their treasured vehicles to this day.)

in the end, though, "limited" doesn't really mean anything -- the number can refer to 10 or 1,000. The lawsuit states that the value of each of the 2007 Mustangs was harmed by the additional 100 cars made in 2008. But is this what true fans are really worried about? I doubt it -- it's hard to think of these vehicles as long-term investments. Their attraction comes more from being something unique. Perhaps it's a bit of both. The lawsuit, though, is claiming more than $12 million in damages. Doing the math, 100 vehicles times $59,000 equals just over $5.9 million. Multiply that by two and you get something close to $12 million. Apparently, the entire value of all 200 Mustangs from 2007 and 2008 are at issue here.

Could it really be just about money? Or is it more a matter of bruised egos? Either way, it could be expensive for Ford, which can't afford to lose another penny.

Over the past year, automakers have struggled to deal with the tough economic conditions in North America, especially the United States. One of the companies that has been able to handle the slowdown better than its peers has been Toyota (NYSE: TM). But the effects are being felt even by the Japanese automaker, as made clear today in the news that the company is laying off 800 workers in one of its Japanese plants.

The 800 workers that are being laid off represent about 10% of the workforce at the company's plant in southwestern Japan. So far, the company has been able to sidestep the steep losses that its American rivals have been forced to deal with, but this year is proving to be a bit tougher, as the company is now predicting a first annual drop in profit, which would be the first time in the past seven years that the company has seen profit fall.

Toyota has been more fortunate than many automakers, mostly due the fact that the company has a long history of building smaller, more fuel efficient cars. This fact alone has helped it weather the slowdown that record high gasoline prices in the U.S. have helped create. Last Friday, however, the company stated that sales dropped 18.7% in July from the same period last year.