Stupidity is contagious. It gets us all from time to time. Even respectable companies can catch it. As I do every week, let's take a look at five dumb financial events from this week that may make your head spin.
1. Tracking the tracker
It's been rough to be comScore (Nasdaq: SCOR ) these days. The Internet traffic watcher is taking body blows to its integrity after publicly admitting that it underreported Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO ) web traffic for the month of June.
It wasn't by a small amount either, as Yahoo!'s page views were off by more than a billion. The portal's stickiness was also underrepresented by a whopping 850 million minutes.
The irony here is that the validity of comScore's monthly search engine reports has been knocked around in recent months, with the web tracker accused of overestimating traffic at Yahoo! and Bing by counting contextual links and slideshow views as individual search queries.
2. K.O. in Tokyo
If Yahoo! finds its traffic undercounted in Japan, it may be its own doing. Yahoo! Japan has agreed to outsource its search to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) , in a deal that seems eerily similar to Yahoo!'s pact of letting Bing fulfill its stateside queries.
The catch here is that Yahoo! Japan is actually that country's top engine. Didn't Yahoo! learn anything from its stateside history? It was the top dog here, too, until it leaned on Google for its searches. Outsourcing queries validates the provider at the expense of the originator's reputation.
If Google is publicly fulfilling Yahoo! Japan's requests, it won't be long before many of those users cut out the middleman, switching directly to Big G. Isn't that exactly what happened here several years ago?
3. Lighting the Kindle at both ends
Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN ) announced the third generation of its Kindle e-reader on Wednesday, helping explain why the second generation of its fast-selling gadget was mysteriously out of stock since Tuesday.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the new Kindle. It sticks with the recently reduced $189 price point, but adds greater storage capacity, a longer battery life, a superior screen, and a lighter, compact form factor. Amazon is also introducing a $139 Wi-Fi model without the more portable 3G digital delivery flexibility.
The rub is that Amazon won't be shipping these out for another month, so it's going to be out of the market on the hardware side through most of August.
The month-long delay also perfectly coincides with its 30-day return policy. Did Amazon fear that those who snapped up a Kindle earlier this month would be upset at being sold an obsolete and inferior Kindle and return them in droves?
Even if this is not the case -- and Amazon simply ran out of the second-generation gadgetry -- it certainly seems as if it was tricking consumers last week when it was rattling off a laundry list of metrics validating the Kindle in an attempt to clear out its now-dated inventory.
4. Identity theft? There's an app for that!
You can apparently be "too big to fail" in the banking sector, but still call up the fail whale in Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL ) App Store.
Citigroup (NYSE: C ) revealed that its mobile banking application for Apple devices is saving personal account information in a hidden file on the phone, potentially compromising account numbers, access codes, and bill payments.
Citi fixed the bug in a recent update, but those who downloaded the original program aren't automatically required to upgrade. The inadvertent breach makes Citi look stupid, but what about Apple? Shouldn't the notoriously lengthy process to get some apps approved check for oversights like this?
5. Black and blue berry
Research in Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM ) announced a long overdue update to its BlackBerry App World marketplace, and shares spiked on "iPhone killer" speculation after the smartphone pioneer scheduled a media event for next week.
Let's set aside the ludicrous notion that RIM could seriously catch up to Apple or even Google's Android in the app space now. Let's also dismiss the inanity of a BlackBerry handset -- as great as it may be for its corporate email and texting -- to be the mother of all consumer smartphones.
RIM makes the cut this week because tech blog MobileCrunch is reporting that the company acquired the BlackPad.com domain, presumably as the name of its upcoming tablet.
Worst. Name. Ever.
I know that the iPad seemed like a laughably ridiculous name at first, but Apple's ability to ooze style and illicit swoon like a Twilight heartthrob made it work. RIM, on the other hand, puts the pan and ache in panache. I'm hoping that RIM simply gobbled up the domain to avoid any confusion with the real name. PadBerry, TabBerry, and even BB Pad make far more dollars and sense.
Which of these five moves do you think is the dumbest? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
Google is a Motley Fool Rule Breakers selection. Apple and Amazon.com are Motley Fool Stock Advisor picks. The Fool owns shares of Google. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services, free for 30 days. That certainly wouldn't be a dumb move.
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