RIM was at that point at the zenith of its power. Its share price earlier that summer had hit a historic peak of $144.56 — or about 19 times the price it was trading at today — that it would never see again. Apple’s iPhone had been on the market for a little more than a year, and Google’s Android was barely on the scene. RIM’s co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, both of whom I interviewed, seemed in utter denial to the threat the iPhone and Android so clearly represented, even then.

With the shares trading at $7.39 as of the close of market today, the devastating slide in RIM’s share price has done incredible damage to the personal fortunes of the two founders: As of April, Lazaridis and Balsillie together still owned nearly 11 percent of the outstanding shares of RIM. As of today’s closing share price, the paper fortunes of RIM’s two founders, once about $4 billion each, has declined to $219.2 million for Lazaridis and $198.8 million for Balsillie, according to Canadian regulatory filings.

So it goes. RIM’s survival as a going concern is now officially in doubt. Investors now value the company as being worth less than $4 billion, and of that more than half is its $2.2 billion in cash. With operating expenses at their current level running at about $307 million per month, RIM has enough cash on hand to fund operations for another seven months or so.

The company will be firing people and restructuring its operations to lower those costs and buy time. But time is not on its side. Its options are dwindling, and it will either end up in the hands of another company, be chopped up into pieces in a bankruptcy proceeding, or cease to exist.

But time is on the side of the two nonprofit foundations that the two RIM co-founders started when they were at the height of their wealth. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that they will outlive the company that generated the wealth that funded their creation.

By far the most well-known nonprofit linked to RIM is the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an institution founded in 1999 primarily with $170 million in donations from Lazaridis’s personal fortune. Its mission is to provide a place where some of the world’s smartest people come together to try to unlock the secrets of the nature of the universe.

I toured its impressive facility (pictured) in 2008, and while I was in Waterloo, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Brian Greene, a professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia University. He’s the author of “The Elegant Universe,” which was adapted into a PBS TV series of the same name. What surprised me most was that on a hot August evening, there wasn’t a single open seat at the local high school’s stuffy auditorium. (I wrote about the lecture, and published an audio recording of it on my rarely-updated personal blog.)

Greene is not the only superstar lecturer who has given talks in Waterloo under the auspices of the Perimeter Institute. In 2008, Stephen Hawking was named the institute’s distinguished research chair, and has regularly visited to give lectures like this one in 2010.

In short, the Perimeter Institute has, in its brief life, become a heavy hitter in the field of theoretical physics. It’s also living well within its means. According to its annual report for the 2011 fiscal year, the institute exited the year with nearly $272 million on its books, and reported $18.6 million in operating expenses, more than half of which was spent on research.

Aside from the gift from Lazaridis, the institute has secured $50 million in grants from the federal government of Canada through 2017, and another $50 million from the provincial government of Ontario through 2021. It raised an additional $5 million in private donations. Its spokesman, John Matlock, told me that its fortunes aren’t directly linked with those of its founding benefactor: “Perimeter was founded through the vision and personal philanthropy of Mike Lazaridis, and the institute continues to grow its research, training and outreach activities via a successful public-private partnership involving a wide variety of members who equally value the importance of theoretical physics,” he told me via email.

It’s a similar situation at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a global policy think tank founded by Balsillie in 2001. Its mission is to suss out through research the complicated questions about how world governments can do their jobs better, and it aims to have some influence over actual policies that get enacted. One bit of credit it claims is the research that led to the creation of the G20 group of major economies.

It appears to be similarly well-funded; it exited the year with about $203 million in its endowment, according its 2011 annual report, and reported operating expenses of $38.4 million. CIGI began with a combined $30 million gift from Balsillie, who gave $20 million; and Lazaridis, who gave $10 million. Another $30 million in matching funds came from Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Its $69 million campus was built with $50 million in federal and provincial aid, and sits on land leased for 99 years rent-free from the City of Waterloo.

Regardless of how they’re funded, these institutions will, by all appearances, live on long after RIM as we know it today becomes a memory.

Of course, because Americans now have a wide range of tools to express themselves online, the historic and surprising Supreme Court decision that has upheld the Obama administration’s controversial health care overhaul has been a perfect medium for the escalating debate.

There is already a Tumblr created today, with all kinds of funny captions and graphics about the Affordable Care Act — which includes the requirement that most Americans have health insurance — called, “When SCOTUS Upheld Obamacare.”

It entails a lot of interactive dancing and snapping of fingers, including by President Obama.

Meanwhile, culling the reaction on Twitter, BuzzFeed assembled a compilation of tweets called: “People Who Say They’re Moving To Canada Because Of ObamaCare.”

Like so:

Thats it! I’m moving to Canada! #Obamacare

— Amber Rose (@EmberrRose) June 28, 2012

While some who posted seemed to be kidding, most who tweeted were soon inundated by responses that, um, pointed out that Canada funds a public health care system for all its citizens.

Instant education in political science and a good roiling Web goat rodeo is #ExactlyWhyILovetheInternet.

More, of course, to come.

Six years ago this month, I revealed in Businessweek that Apple had incorporated in Nevada where the corporate tax rate is zero. So I found the Times’ account — written by Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski, about the many financial tricks that Apple employs to minimize its tax exposure — to contain a lot of old news, but also some new, fascinating details. Who couldn’t love a phrase like “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich” to describe arcane accounting and legal tricks?

But the implication the story leaves a reader with — that Apple is somehow doing society a disservice by not paying its fair share of corporate taxes — is simply wrong on many levels. The most dubious of the lines that the Times attempts to draw is between Apple and the budget crisis at De Anza College, a Cupertino community college where Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was once a student. The college is facing a “death spiral” because of a decline in funding from the state. This funding, the reader is led to conclude, would be more plentiful if corporations like Apple were to step up and pay, and not escape the tax bill by setting up an office in neighboring Nevada.

What the Times fails to make clear is how community colleges are funded in California. The picture is much more complicated. California community colleges draw the majority of their funding from the state’s general fund — which is drawn directly from the state’s personal and corporate income taxes — and from local property taxes collected by counties. As of the 2009-2010 budget cycle, these two buckets made up about 88 percent of the system’s funding. State lottery funds, federal funds and student fees made up the remainder.

Tax policy wonks — which I’m not — will remember that California was the birthplace of the property tax revolt movement in the 1970s. In 1978, California voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that limits the amount by which property taxes can increase each year. Since then, at least one estimate pegs the amount that the state’s taxpayers have avoided paying at north of half a trillion dollars as of 2009. In February, the property tax shortfall facing the state community-college system was $41 million. Conclusion: If there is to be blame for the shortage of taxpayer funding at De Anza College, a healthy portion of it should be laid at the door of California’s own voters and taxpayers, who in 1978 thought that property-tax limitations were a good idea.

I had a few other problems with the story. Take sales taxes. When you buy a Mac in New York, you pay a sales tax of 8.875 percent. For a base-level iMac, priced at $1,199, that works out to more than $106 in taxes. While some states charge no sales tax — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon — the average sales tax in the U.S. works out to 9.6 percent.

Putting aside the fact that the average sales tax in Canada is higher, let’s assume that Apple’s North American sales of $38.3 billion in its fiscal 2011 were taxed at that rate, and do the math: We get $3.7 billion in sales taxes paid into the coffers of states and municipalities, except in those five states that have no such tax. That amounts to more than 1.5 times the $2.4 billion the Times says Apple would have owed the federal government. Factor in VAT and other similar taxes in the U.K. and throughout Europe, and you get the idea that Apple is generating tax revenue aplenty on the sale of its goods. Yes, those taxes are passed on to customers. But isn’t that the case with every tax a corporation making consumer products pays?

Finally, you may remember that earlier this year Apple released an extensive report on the number of jobs it had created and supported both through direct employment and in the orbit of the products it creates. It seemed an odd thing for Apple to release at the time, and now we know why: It reads almost like it was prepared by Apple in advance, knowing this story was in the pipeline at the Times. The final number, by its reckoning: 514,000 U.S. jobs are created by the Apple universe, including 47,000 employees; 210,000 jobs were created as part of the app economy, which didn’t even exist until 2008.

Assuming that each of those jobs pays a salary north of $35,350 a year, taxes collected on that income could range anywhere from 25 percent to 35 percent, depending on the income bracket. And that’s before accounting for any stock-based compensation.

At this point, the discussion turns to a deeper question: Is it better for society to have a company pay more in taxes, or to create more jobs? You can argue that had Apple not taken advantage of the various strategies it employed to pay less taxes, it might not have flourished as well as it has, and thus created fewer jobs. But people smarter than I will likely hash out the finer points of this argument in the coming days.

(Image is a screen grab from this silly Beatles cartoon built around the group’s song “Taxman.”)

Facebook filed an updated version of its S-1 public offering document today, which included somewhat disappointing first-quarter financials.

In the new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, its fourth update for its upcoming public offering, the social networking giant’s revenue was $1.058 billion, up 46 percent for the year, but down six percent from the previous quarter.

In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook’s net income was $205 million, which was down from $233 million a year ago. The company attributed the decline to rising costs, including in marketing and in research.

Facebook also said its current share price was $30.89 each, which values the entire company at about $77 billion.

Some investors might worry about the latest results, which show a slowing in Facebook’s torrid growth. But Facebook said the quarterly decline was due to seasonality — it was flat in the same period a year ago.

As it noted in the document:

“We believe that our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time. For example, our revenue grew 154% from 2009 to 2010, 88% from 2010 to 2011, and 45% from the first quarter of 2011 to the same period in 2012. Historically, our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue. We expect that our user growth and revenue growth rates will decline as the size of our active user base increases and as we achieve higher market penetration rates.”

Its audience, though, was still growing strongly: Facebook also said it had 532 million daily active users, up from 372 million a year ago and 483 million in December. Its monthly active users were up from 680 million last year to just over 900 million and up from 845 million from December.

Facebook also added an explicit figure for average revenue per user, which was $1.21, up six percent year over year. It also said the number of full-time employees grew 46 percent from last year to 3,539 at the end of March.

The last update to Facebook’s regulatory filing for its mid-May IPO was in late March. That one gave investors more information about a patent infringement lawsuit waged by Yahoo — Facebook noted its counter claim in the newest filing — and also its motion to dismiss Paul Ceglia’s legal attempt to garner half of the company. It then included more information about growing engagement by users of the social networking site.

Along with some other minor changes in the new document, Facebook noted, in news that was already known, that it would trade its stock on the Nasdaq market under the ticker symbol “FB.” It also said it had bought photo-sharing start-up Instagram, another piece of old news, and noted its just-struck patent deal with Microsoft.

One new detail about Instagram: Facebook forked over “approximately 23 million shares of our common stock and $300 million in cash” to buy it.

Also, said Facebook, in an interesting new section on its global business:

“In the first quarter of 2012, 50% of our revenue was generated by users in the United States and Canada, a decrease from 54% of our revenue for the first quarter of 2011, and in 2011, 52% of our revenue was generated by users in the United States and Canada, as compared to 58% in 2010, as we experienced more rapid revenue growth in markets such as Germany, Brazil, Australia, and India.”

Here is the whole updated file, if you want to peruse yourself:

4thfbs1update

Varicent makes software that’s intended to automatically collect and analyze sales data not only from a company’s finance and sales operations, but also from its human resources and IT departments. The point — and if this doesn’t describe an IBM-like view of the world I don’t know what does — is to gain efficiencies, discover unknown trends and, as always, boost sales.

In more practical terms, it means, according to a note from Brian Marshall at ISI out this morning, that Varicent’s software makes it easier for companies to “optimize compensation, streamline territory assignments, manage quotas, analyze sales activities and prepare for audits.”

Founded in 2003, it had raised $35 million in venture capital from FTV Capital, RBC Venture Partners and Edgestone Capital. It has 180 customers including Hertz, Manpower, Office Depot and Starwood.

Marshall goes on to argue that IBM is the company best positioned to capitalize on the expected $10 billion business in analytics. Varicent would be its sixth recent deal in the space: Others include Algorithmics, Clarity Systems, OpenPages, Cognos and SPSS.

And while terms haven’t been disclosed, IBM, Marshall says, has indicated that the return on its software acquisitions has been better than it has been in several years. It also looks like Big Blue’s dealmaking it on a serious upswing: After spending about $6 billion on acquisitions in 2010 it cut back to only $2 billion in 2011. Marshall argues that IBM is going to be busy buying companies: “We expect continued activity this year and see IBM as among the best in large-cap technology at building high-value capabilities through acquisition.”

IBM shares fell by $1.09, or about a half percentage point, to $204.23 by 10 am ET. The shares are up almost 12 percent this year, and earlier this month hit a lifetime high of $210.69.

The company’s BlackBerry, long a favorite among Canadians, was outsold by Apple’s iPhone last year, for the first time. According to new data from IDC, RIM shipped 2.08 million BlackBerrys in Canada in 2011. Meanwhile, Apple shipped 2.85 million iPhones, easily besting it.

And Canadian sales of the BlackBerry, which account for 7 percent of total shipments of the handset, fell 23 percent in the latest quarter.

A humiliating reversal for RIM’s BlackBerry, which just four years ago was outselling the iPhone in Canada by a nearly five-to-one margin. While losing traction like this among the hometown crowd isn’t a massive strategic defeat, it’s surely a devastating psychological one for RIM, a Canadian success story.

Still, it’s important to note that the BlackBerry remains the dominant smartphone in some emerging markets, like the Middle East and Africa, where 2011 BlackBerry shipments were more than triple those of the iPhone.

RIM reports earnings next week.

“There’s an excellent growth opportunity for U.S. retailers outside the U.S.,” said Michael DeSimone, CEO of FiftyOne, a logistics company. “E-commerce is much more nascent [outside the U.S.], but our merchants are seeing extraordinary growth by building their brand with a new customer base.”

As it turns out, however, shipping and selling goods internationally is extremely complex.

First, there’s currency translation, then there’s the complexity of dealing with customs. And there are other considerations: For instance, a down pillow or a snakeskin purse may have to be cleared by the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife or require a permit if the animal is on an endangered list.

“The opportunity for a bad customer experience is very high, unless you have a repeatable process in place,” DeSimone said.

In other words, done well and executed efficiently, it can be a moneymaker, but if done poorly, you can hurt the brand.

FiftyOne helps U.S. retailers ship products to 106 countries worldwide, by assisting retailers with currency conversion and global shipping logistics, including customs and returns. It manages a central distribution in Columbus, Ohio, where all the packages exit and enter the U.S.

The New York company works with dozens of online retailers, including Macy’s, J.Crew, Overstock.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Gilt Groupe and Wet Seal. Since FiftyOne started focusing on international logistics, back in 2008, it has seen e-commerce start to take off internationally, DeSimone said.

Last year, the company’s gross merchandise volume, accounting for the total amount of all international purchases made, was $136 million, almost up twice from the year before, when it recorded $78 million. In 2009, its business totaled $26 million.

The biggest international markets for U.S. retailers today, FiftyOne said, are English-speaking countries such as Canada, Australia and the U.K. But South Korea, Brazil and Mexico are also all growing close to 50 percent year over year.

In addition, DeSimone said, the average order size increased to $265 in 2011, up from $237 the year earlier.

Here’s a graphic detailing some of the challenges in shipping internationally:

Oh, just look here, via this cool infographic from MBAOnline: