I heard a rumor today that Rio is going to discontinue the Empeg because its not making any money on them. Not enough sales or something like that. Any truth to any of this?

I certainly hope not, but this looks like a typical reaction of a panicked company made up by aquisitions of everybody and his brother and incapable of integrating its aquisitions and making them make money in reasonable time ('redundancies', as Rob put it, are another typical reaction [1].)

If they do decide to discontinue it, perhaps they could sell it for a song (perhaps a few shares of their not so valuable stock) to a certain group of people across the pond . Now, if those people succeed in raising a pound or two of venture capital [2], we could almost be in old good days again [3].

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

[1] It's funny how companies decide to save by laying people off. Take Boeing in the aftermath of WTC tragedy: they decided to lay off 30000 people, but don't know yet from which units. That means that the thing does not begin with "Let's see whom we can do without, and who is going to have nothing to do due to such-and-such changes in the market", but simply "Let's cut payroll expenses by $75zillion".

[2] I was investigating venture capital market recently, and it is hillarious. A British company, for example, recently rose quite an amount for launching a ground-breaking service: each subscriber to Cosmopolitan is going to get a daily advice on achieving better orgasm over SMS (advice, not orgasm). (OK, so it was just one of services; the idea is that sponsors would pay them to pester sponsor's clients with just a little more that thinly disguised SMS spam.)

[3] What worries me is that empeg is not Hugo's first project. What if he decides to switch to gardening, hot air balooning, running a retaurant or rock band...