Required reading: Five essential stories of the week

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Each week, Report on Business editors choose five stories that shouldn't be missed. Here are the 'must reads' for the week of Feb. 1, 2010.

In sports broadcasting, CTV and Rogers are fierce competitors, with competing sports cable channels: TSN and Rogers Sportsnet. In another arena, they have been the key combatants in a lengthy and occasionally bitter dispute over whether cable firms should be required to pay fees to conventional television stations. But rivalries were set aside in the pursuit of a goal - breaking the CBC's hammerlock on Olympic rights, and doing it for what is almost certain to be the most-watched Games ever in this country. And it all started seven years ago with a phone call to Ted Rogers, and a decision that took no more than five seconds.

They are called "machines" or "timepieces" or "kinetic sculptures," never what they really are - which is highly expensive watches. They are often imaginative and elegant, other times laughably unwearable and over-the-top garish. Most of all, they are not selling, at least not well. In the suburban Geneva workshop of de Grisogono timepieces, a lab technician unlocks a steel case and removes the Meccanico. It's a clunky-looking thing, equipped with a sporty rubber strap and a busy, complicated face. Eye-catching yes; handsome, not really. It must be expensive because it takes three weeks to make under a microscope. Maybe €20,000 (about $29,600)? Try €200,000 - the price of a new Ferrari. . . While other luxury watch makers say the worst is over, many industry executives, private entrepreneurs and analysts do not expect a quick return to the double-digit export growth rates of the last decade, when Swiss watch making more or less doubled in size on a happy combination of rising prices and export volumes.

It's the competitive advantage that happened almost by accident. When Research In Motion executives made the decision many years ago to route much of the e-mail traffic on BlackBerrys through RIM's own servers, they probably weren't thinking about a future in which everyone carries around a mobile, bandwidth-hogging computer. The company was focused on how to give business and government clients a fast and secure means of sending and receiving sensitive information. But as the smart-phone market - once populated almost entirely by RIM's business customers - shifts to a consumer focus, RIM's strategy is starting to look good again for an entirely different reason. At a time when wireless carriers are beginning to fret about all the bandwidth that devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPhones and the upcoming iPad will eat up, RIM's phones give them fewer headaches.

Canaccord Financial Inc. has entered talks with Genuity Capital Markets on a deal that would unite the country's largest independent brokerage with an upstart Bay Street firm that has made inroads in the lucrative field of providing merger advice. Publicly traded Canaccord recently made an offer to Genuity, according to sources close to both investment dealers. The bid values privately held Genuity at more than $100-million and would be paid mostly in Canaccord shares, sources said. If consummated, the deal would represent a marriage of west and east. Canaccord has its roots on Vancouver's Howe Street and has traditionally been a player in junior resource stocks, while Toronto-based Genuity was launched five years ago by a team of former senior deal makers at the investment banking arm of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

On a mid-July morning, Doug Landry pulled into the passing lane in his 2009 Toyota Avalon. He passed a car at 90 kilometres an hour, then took his foot off the gas when the speedometer hit 110. The car sped up, racing along Highway 11 north of Huntsville, Ont. When it hit 155 kilometres an hour, Mr. Landry said, he put both his feet on the brake pedal and all but stood on the brakes to try to slow down. "You've got two feet on the brake and the car's not screeching to a halt," he recalled. "It's going as if there's a ghost in the car. It was as if I had somebody with their foot on the gas." This is sudden, unintended acceleration and it lies at the heart of a serious and growing crisis for Toyota Motor Corp. in the face of two massive recalls of its best-selling North American vehicles.