US firm's website goes down the YouTube

Current Account: If you are intending to download one of your favourite video clips this weekend, make sure you do it at youtube.com and not utube.com.

The first is the free video sharing download site set up only last year and sold in recent weeks to Google for $1.6 billion (€1.25 billion). The other is the site owned by a company selling tube and pipe machinery called Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corporation.

It's somewhat smaller than YouTube, employing just 17 people from its humble offices in Perrysburg, Ohio.

Up until last year its site, www.utube.com, was not top of too many internet traffic charts, but since the explosive growth of youtube.com, this has changed and its site has now become one of most clicked manufacturing sites in the world, recording 68 million hits in August as computer users mistook it for the video sharing website.

The company claims to have lost business because genuine customers have had trouble accessing its site, and it has filed a lawsuit asking YouTube to change its web address or pay the cost of creating a new domain name. One suspects the first demand is unlikely to be met, whatever about the second.

The site was down yesterday when checked by The Irish Times.

But surely the Ohio-based company must admit it could never have dreamed of this level of publicity for itself in a million years. And what is the utube.com domain name now worth if 68 million hits are coming its way each month, even if bound for a different final destination?

Morrogh still beset by communications woes

It was perhaps the final irony of the collapse of Cork's blueblood stockbroker, W & R Morrogh.

Five and a half years after the last Cork-based broker was ordered to cease trading amid talk of shortfalls in client funds, the report of a review group established by Minister for Finance Brian Cowen to examine the collapse and subsequent receivership process was published this week.

In keeping with the unravelling of the Morrogh story, it took everyone by surprise. Communication, or the lack of it, has been a hallmark of the Morrogh fiasco from the outset.

Even before Stephen Pearson's antics in using client funds to trade on his own account - to calamitous effect - it emerged that senior partner Alec Morrogh had failed to tell regulators of similar previous irregularities at the firm by his junior partner.

Throughout his time as receiver, Tom Grace, who had to freeze assets held in nominee accounts at the firm, was accused by investors of keeping them in the dark as he navigated his way through a tortuous receivership process.

Those complaints, among others, led the Minister to establish in 2004 a working group to examine the Morrogh affair - run by his own department. This is the group that has now delivered its findings.

It proposes legislative changes that it hopes will expedite the waiting time for investors who are in similar situations accessing what is left of their funds as well as reducing the costs incurred in winding up businesses in similar circumstances.

Many will argue that it could have shown the way in another crucial area - communicating what it is doing, openly and transparently.

Cash burn returns

The concept of cash burn made a brief return this week. You'll remember cash burn of course - it was a fashionable phrase during the worst excesses of the technology boom.

It was the rate at which young gun technology companies spent cash while taking in nothing, because they were "in development stage".

It quickly fell out of fashion in early 2001, as people realised that investing in companies that had lots of outgoings and no income was a bad idea.

This week it popped up at the Smart extraordinary general meeting, where a number of directors and one or two shareholders made a reference to the company's burn rate, which was of the order of €3 million a month in September, but has since gone down to zero.

Funnily enough, we discovered once again that when investors back companies with "burn rates", it's they who are getting burned.