The Irish Independent reports that consumers who want to use the post office as a one-stop shop for banking will have to wait 12 months before Postbank will provide a full suite of services.

The Irish Independent also reports that Greencore is to go ahead tomorrow with a legal challenge to Agriculture Minister Mary Coughlan's share-out of compensation funds for the closure of the Irish sugar industry.

The Irish Times reports that An Post, the state postal service, will tomorrow launch a banking operation that over the next five years aims to take 5 per cent of the retail banking market.

Postbank, a joint venture with Belgian bank Fortis, will initially operate out of 250 post offices nationally, rising to 1,000 over the next 12 months.

The venture will employ 250 people at the outset, 100 of which are new jobs.

Speaking at the official launch of the €112 million venture yesterday, Minister for Communications, Noel Dempsey, said that while the financial services sector in Ireland was already highly populated, there was definitely room for a community-based offering from a group such as An Post.

He said that the service offered by many of Ireland's existing banks was far from customer friendly and that a new banking offering from An Post was very well-placed to benefit from the positive role post offices already play in many local communities.

"There is a strong financial services sector here in Ireland, but I believe very strongly that there is room for a bank offering that's doing something different, approaching things differently and that's why I think Postbank has a clear advantage," he told the group gathered at St Andrew's Street post office in Dublin for the launch.

According to An Post, 40 per cent of adults visit a post office once a week with more than three quarters visiting once a month and these are exactly the people Postbank is seeking to attract as its customers.

"That is who we want as our customers, the general public," said Margaret Sweeney, Postbank's chief executive - "anyone who wants simple, transparent, honest banking services."

From tomorrow consumers will be able to avail of what Ms Sweeney calls a "very favourable" interest rate on a "very simple" deposit account - exact details of which are to be released later today - and another separate investment product at 250 different post office outlets around the country.

Over the course of the year, and in response to customer demand, the range of products will be expanded to include current accounts, loans, credit cards, ATM services and web-based banking.

The aim is to have all of these in operation by the end of the year, according to Ms Sweeney.

The timing of the launch is also significant, given that the last-remaining special savings incentive accounts (SSIAs) mature this week, said Mr Dempsey.

This puts the bank in a good place to attract lump-sum deposits from those looking for a new home for their SSIA once it matures or for others who want to continue saving on a monthly basis but are looking for an alternative option to their existing bank.

Ms Sweeney said that, unlike many other savings accounts, Postbank wouldn't require customers to pay their salary into the account in order to earn interest and the small print relating to the terms of each Postbank product would be minimal.

Postbank is aiming to have a workforce of 500 within the next three years.

The Irish Times also reports that one of the State's largest independent fashion retailers and distributors, Barry & Sons, is being sued by Irish Life for more than €119,000 over outstanding rent and service charges it claims it is owed relating to a store in Dublin's St Stephen's Green shopping centre.

The disagreement is understood to have initially arisen in 2003, when Barry & Sons, which has 13 stores trading as Japan, sought to sell on a long lease at the mall, which is co-owned by Irish Life and Pierse Moloney.

It is believed that Barry & Sons, which is controlled by the Dublin-based Bari family, had arranged to sell the lease to a high-profile tenant, but that Irish Life's agent instead agreed to exercise pre-emption rights and take back the lease.

As Barry & Sons would therefore not have received key money for the lease, an agreement is alleged to have been struck whereby the agent would forgo outstanding rent and services charges.

However, Irish Life later pursued Barry & Sons for more than €119,000, alleging that it still owed the money for rent arrears and service charges. Latest accounts for Barry & Sons carry a contingent liability for the disputed sum, but stress that the company has "good grounds for defence".

It is understood that Barry & Sons has significant written evidence to counter Irish Life's claim. Soaring rents at the St Stephen's Green site are thought to have forced Barry & Sons to reconsider its future there. Escalating high street rents elsewhere have also recently affected other fashion chains such as Sasha and A-Wear.

Latest accounts for the Barry & Sons Japan outlets show that the chain made a loss of €446,000 in the year to the end of January 2006. It was an improvement on the previous year, when it posted a loss of €1.8m. However, its parent firm showed a slight profit for the latest period. The number of stores operated by Barry & Sons has fallen in the past few years due to increased competition and higher costs. At one stage it had 50 stores, more than double the current number.

Barry & Sons also owns the Häagen-Dazs café franchise in Ireland, which has three stores. However, the company is known to be seeking a buyer for the franchise and the outlets. Häagen-Dazs's UK arm could be a potential bidder. Barry & Sons also owns two stores trading under the Angel franchise in Ireland and a further four in the UK.

It has Angel concessions at three House of Fraser stores, two in London and one in Glasgow, while it also operates an Angel showroom in London. The company has three stores that trade under the Barry & Sons name, all of them in Dublin. It previously owned a French Connection franchise in Cork.

The Irish Examiner reports that the multi-industry Quinn Group is believed to be gearing up to make a renewed €1 billion-plus assault on the Irish energy market through the construction of two natural gas-fired power stations and two wind farms.

The power stations are believed to be planned for counties Louth and Galway, while the locations for the wind farms are not yet known.

The projects will take place over the next five years.

The Financial Times reports that more than 40 US companies embroiled in the options back-dating scandal, including software makers McAfee and Novell, could be vulnerable to takeover by activist investors because of a side-effect of long-standing laws.

The new threat to some of the 140-plus companies involved in the options controversy comes at a time when cash-rich hedge funds and private equity groups are scouring the market for takeover targets.

An analysis by the Financial Times has found that 42 of the companies involved in the options scandal are at risk of being targeted by activists who could seek to remove their boards and gain control without launching a takeover bid.

The threat stems from a complex combination of state laws and financial regulations. Under laws in Delaware, the state where most US companies are registered, if a company does not hold a shareholder meeting for 13 months, investors can ask a court to call one.

At such meetings, a company can be banned from communicating with shareholders because the US Securities and Exchange Commission prohibits a group from issuing proxy documents if it has not produced up-to-date financial statements. As a result, activist investors could make proposals, such as removing directors, and the company would be unable fully to respond.

New York state has a similar provision, although it requires shareholders representing at least 10 per cent of a company’s stock to support the call for a special meeting.

Many companies involved in the options scandal have been unable to produce full results because of the options backdating scandal.

Comverse Technology, which has not held a shareholder meeting for more than 13 months because of probes into options backdating, is the first group to fall foul of the provisions.

It is under attack from Oliver Press Partners, a New York hedge fund, which wants seats on its board.

Comverse has asked the SEC to waive the ban on shareholder communications if OPP succeeds in calling a meeting.

“There can be no assurance that OPP or another dissident shareholder will not attempt to nominate additional directors or replace the entire board,” it said.

The SEC, which declined to comment, rarely grants such waivers.

The FT reports that Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal traded blows on Monday as the finalists for next Sunday’s French presidential run-off appeared ­separately – just minutes apart – on the same television programme, competing for the swing voters of the centrist François Bayrou.

For once, Mr Sarkozy seemed on the back foot. He complained bitterly about an unprecedented televised debate on Saturday between Ms Royal, the Socialist runner-up in last weekend’s first-round vote, and Mr Bayrou, the third-placed candidate of the centrist UDF party.

The neo-Gaullist favourite told Canal Plus that the debate, which he refused to join, was “a return to the little deals between friends” that had characterised the unstable fourth republic.

“If I had finished third or fourth, I would have had the grace to let the final be played between the teams that came first and second,” he said.

Mr Sarkozy listed the 35-hour working week, pension reform and national debt reduction as areas where his ideas were closer to the centrist values of Mr Bayrou, whose 6.8m voters could swing the outcome of next Sunday's run-off.

He even hinted that the centrist UDF leader could become his prime minister, saying: “We could perfectly well work together.”

Setting up a potentially decisive televised debate between the finalists on Wednesday, Ms Royal hit back minutes later on the same programme by claiming that Mr Sarkozy was playing the victim.

The Socialist challenger said: “I am observing with great amusement as he who launched the toughest attacks is posing as a victim before the French people. I don’t think this will fool anyone.”

Ms Royal hinted that she would seek to make Wednesday’s clash a debate about Mr Sarkozy’s aggressive character and his record in the unpopular outgoing ­government.

“French people want to see the differences in our temperaments, records, careers, proposals and programmes,” she said. Asked if Mr Bayrou could be her prime minister, she said: “I am ruling nothing out.”

Ahead of this week’s ­televised debate, news ­programmes have been re-broadcasting footage of a 1993 meeting when a youthful-looking Ms Royal and grinning Mr Sarkozy were already at each other’s throats, with the Socialist attacking her rightwing rival for his “steamroller” approach and saying “that’s enough”.

In Saturday’s jovial exchange of views between Ms Royal and Mr Bayrou, the Socialist candidate vowed to end the ideological confrontations of the two-party system, modernise the state and strengthen parliament, echoing some of the centrist’s favourite campaign themes.

Mr Bayrou welcomed Ms Royal’s open approach but refused to endorse her candidacy. He also sharply ­criticised some of Ms Royal’s policies, particularly on state interventionism in the economy, nuclear energy and Europe.

Ms Royal’s unconventional tactics appear to have been reaping some electoral ­dividends. Although Mr Sarkozy has topped every opinion poll since last Sunday’s vote, his lead appears to be narrowing. The latest Ipsos/Dell poll put Mr Sarkozy down slightly at 52.5 per cent, with Ms Royal inching up to 47.5 per cent.

The finalists’ faults are likely to be as important as their qualities.

A TNS Sofres poll in Le Monde found that 46 per cent of voters would cast a ballot to reject one of the candidates. Negative voting intentions were highest among Bayrou voters (65 per cent) and Royal voters (72 per cent).

The New York Times reports that while Walter Zai was in South Africa watching the wild animals recently, people around the world were watching him.

Mr. Zai, a 37-year-old Swiss engineer, used his mobile phone to send out constant updates and images from his safari for an online audience.

“You feel like you are instantly broadcasting your own life and experiences to your friends at home, and to anyone in the world who wants to join,” said Mr. Zai, who used a new online service called Kyte to create his digital diary.

The social networking phenomenon is leaving the confines of the personal computer. Powerful new mobile devices are allowing people to send round-the-clock updates about their vacations, their moods or their latest haircut.

New online services, with names like Twitter, Radar and Jaiku, hope people will use their ever-present gadget to share (or, inevitably, to overshare) the details of their lives in the same way they have become accustomed to doing on Web sites like MySpace.

Unlike the older networking sites, which are still largely used on PCs, these new phone-oriented services are bringing the burgeoning culture of exhibitionism to more exotic and more personal locations. They are also contributing to the general barrage of white noise and information overload — something that even some participants say they feel ambivalent about.

But such services have the same addictive appeal for young people as BlackBerrys do for busy professionals, said Howard Hartenbaum, a partner at the venture capital firm Draper Richards, which is an investor in Kyte.

“Kids want to be connected to their friends at all times,” Mr. Hartenbaum said. “They can’t do that when you turn off the computer.”

Central to the technology of Kyte and similar services is the marriage of mobile phones and the Web. Users download Kyte software for their phones at www.kyte.tv and can send their photos and videos — however grainy — from the phone to their online Kyte “channel.”

Viewers can tune into the programming on their own phones or on the Kyte site, or they can have the channel show up on their own Web site or social network page. In some cases the video stream can be watched live. Those who are watching the same channel can swap messages with each other and with the channel’s creator, even if he or she is silently stalking wild animals.

Daniel Graf, Kyte’s 32-year-old co-founder, sees each of the world’s hundreds of millions of camera-phone owners as a potential television broadcaster.

“To run a television network used to require expensive cameras, a satellite connection and studios,” Mr. Graf said. “But the production costs have gone down to zero. Now you can share your life over a mobile phone, and someone is always connected, watching.”

Mr. Graf said he was considering several approaches to making money from the service. They include charging companies that want to contribute promotional programming, or advertisements in or alongside the most popular channels. He said he would share that revenue with the channels’ creators. “Whatever works in traditional TV works here,” he said.

Another company proving the potency of the sharing impulse is Twitter (www.twitter.com), which is also based in San Francisco and has lately captured the enthusiasm of bloggers and tech insiders. Twitter, spun off this month from a company called Obvious, lets people broadcast short text messages from their phones and computers to those of friends and strangers.

Mobile phone companies in the United States have long tried to get users to send text messages, but with limited success, especially in comparison to the ubiquity of text messaging in Europe and Asia.

But for many Twitter users, text messages have become a form of self-expression and public performance. They are flinging messages that would seem to be of slight interest to anyone: notifications that they are online, or listening to music, or going shopping, or even performing activities of a historically more discreet nature.

“About to head out to the gym. Sweet!” wrote Chris Messina, a 26-year-old San Francisco resident, in a recent Twitter post visible to his group of friends on the service. And a few hours later: “Wow, totally rocking out to Led Zeppelin.”

Twitter’s fans include some high-profile technology pundits and even John Edwards, the former senator who uses it to inform followers of his whereabouts on the campaign trail.

Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, said high-speed social networking can become a moneymaker.

“I believe it can be profitable,” Mr. Dorsey said. But it is not entirely clear how, and how soon, he added. Twitter, which says it has several hundred thousand users, could ultimately consider displaying advertisements, or charging frequent users, especially those who send out promotional messages. Social networking sites like Facebook are largely supported by advertising.

Mr. Dorsey said that whatever business model the company decided to employ, it would not be effective until more people got on board.

“We have a few business models in mind right now. But they’re not interesting until we have a massive number of users,” he said. “We are entirely focused on growth right now.”

The mobile phone companies themselves are trying to get into the mobile networking game. Chief among them is Helio, a year-old mobile phone carrier aimed at young people. The company, a joint venture of Earthlink and SK Telecom of South Korea and based in Los Angeles, is making social networking a central part of its business and is betting it will be fundamental to attracting new subscribers.

Helio has an exclusive deal to offer MySpace features on its phones, which tend to be slicker and more multimedia-focused than those from more mainstream cellphone companies. At the end of 2006 (the last time Helio publicized its subscriber figures), 70 percent of its 70,000 members used MySpace, said Michael Grossi, senior vice president of strategy and business development at Helio.

Social networking “is at the core of the company strategy,” Mr. Grossi said.

To further capitalize on the trend, Helio plans to introduce a handset by the summer that has a fold-out standard keyboard for easier typing and socializing.

Tiny Pictures, a San Francisco start-up company, is taking a slightly different approach. Its service, Radar (www.radar.net), is similar to Kyte in that users send their camera-phone photos to the Web or to the phones of other Radar members. But users share their pictures only with friends they have invited to view them.

John Poisson, chief executive of Tiny Pictures, said the service was explicitly intended to be private because mobile social networking works best and will be most lucrative if users know the people they are sharing with. “Exhibitionism will exist as long as there is voyeurism,” he said. “But we are in the business of helping people stay in touch with the people who are close to them.”

Of course, there is such a thing as being too in touch. Mr. Zai was disconcerted by the instant feedback to his safari photos that popped up on his phone.

“Getting all kinds of communication in such a remote place is a bit confusing,” he said. “I kept responding, ‘I don’t really have the time to talk to you now. I have to make photos of these elephants.’ ”

The NYT asks  how much sexual innuendo can an advertiser pack into 15 seconds?

Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, offers an answer in a new campaign for Viagra, so far shown only in Canada. The ads feature middle-aged men and women talking in a made-up language, save for one word.

“Viagra spanglecheff?” says a man to a friend at a bowling alley.

“Spanglecheff?” his friend asks.

“Minky Viagra noni noni boo-boo plats!” the first man replies, with a grin that suggests he is not talking about the drug’s side effects. The ads end with the slogan, “The International Language of Viagra.”

Pfizer has always straddled a line marketing Viagra, insisting that the drug treats a serious medical condition, impotence, and deserves insurance coverage, while promoting the drug with wink-and-a-nod ads that have irritated regulators.

In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration told the company to stop running ads that included the lines, “Remember that guy who used to be called ‘Wild Thing’? The guy who wanted to spend the entire honeymoon indoors?”

The ads come as Viagra is losing market share to other impotence drugs. Last year, Pfizer’s Viagra sales totaled $1.7 billion, including $800 million in the United States.

Maxine Thomas, an executive at Taxi, the agency in Toronto that produced the campaign, said the ads take advantage of Viagra’s name recognition. “It’s not as though we need to tell people what it does, because they already know,” she said. “Consumers can fill in the blank for themselves.”

In the United States and Canada, drug companies can advertise medicines without discussing side effects, as long as they do not mention the condition the drug is supposed to treat. Such spots are called “reminder ads.”

But Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said the new Viagra ads are merely a reminder that drug companies will say anything, even if it is incomprehensible, to increase sales.

“In an ideal world, companies would have to sell drugs based on accurate and balanced information,” he said. “That doesn’t seem to work well enough, so instead of that they’re substituting gibberish.”