Japanese carrier NTT Docomo today announced one more acquisition in Europe both to continue building out its operations in the region and beyond vanilla offerings like voice and mobile data: it is acquiring fine trade, an e-commerce and payment solution provider based out of Austria.
This prompts musings from seven women, several of whom claim it's a function of bad luck so far in finding a guy. .
Some of the same unbuttoned enthusiasm has spilled over into domestic equity funds, where even a plain-vanilla offering like the Gabelli Equity Trust overseen by celebrity money manager Mario Gabelli has been pumped up to as high as a 20% premium.
Google has adopted the opposite approach with its online Spreadsheets product, taking a vanilla software offering and making it increasingly more sophisticated.
But in a chapter from its twice-yearly Global Financial Stability Review (GFSR), released on Wednesday in advance of its spring meetings next week, the IMF identifies fund managers as a key risk – even those offering "plain vanilla" products rather than exotic investments such as hedge funds.
From August 17 until August 31, Burger King is offering its vanilla soft serve for only 50 cents.
The coffee chain is encouraging customers to taste its Blonde Roast coffee, which debuted in autumn 2011, and its even newer Vanilla Blonde coffee by offering free samples in several different venues for a limited time starting Tuesday.
Fewer are offering "plain-vanilla" options, and more are demanding hurdles that link them to the firm's performance.The real crunch will come, though, when share prices turn down.
It is too soon to tell whether the long-term cost of the deal and the swaps contracts, which carry more risk than a plain-vanilla bond offering, will be even higher.
Tucci has kept EMC competitive by snapping up software companies that add value to its plain vanilla storage offerings.
