David Politis

Salt Lake City-based Lipocine just landed a big time hitter in the financial marketplace: Robert Merrell.

As I understand it, Bob has just returned to Utah after serving a three-year stint as a mission president for the LDS Church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

Professionally, Bob was the financial leader at NPS Pharmaceuticals, formerly Natural Product Sciences, who lead the company’s monetary charge through multiple private and public financiangs, incuding the NPS Initial Public Offering (NASDAQ: NPSP) and three subsequent follow-on public offerings. All told, Bob helped NPS raise more than $300 million.

Between his stint at NPS and his LDS mission, Bob also served as a Vice President with Myriad Genetics Laboratories.

Bob was great to work with as a client while he was at NPS, and I wish him and the entire Lipocine team “Buena Suerte.”

P.S. Lipocine is a pretty interesting drug delivery company that is looking to lipids — organic compounds that do not dissolve in water but that are soluble in solvents — as vehicles for delivering complex molecular compounds as once-a-day, orally delivered pharmaceuticals.

So what should you do if you find your name (or your company name or a product/service name) misspelled in an article or editorial?

Simple, tell the author. That’s it? Yeah, that’s it.

Perhaps something like:

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Dear Firstname:

Thank you for writing about our company in the XX/XX/XX edition of XYZMagazine in the article entitled “Insert article title here.” (NOTE: You might even insert the URL to the article here too.)

{Write a quick sentence of appreciation here, perhaps about something you liked in the article, such as how the author described your product or company. Regardless, this should be a positive note of one or two sentences — no more. Then you point out the misspelling.}

However, I thought you’d like to know that the correct spelling for our company name is {insert correct spelling here}, not {insert name here as misspelled in the article/editorial} as found in {insert the number of the paragraph where the misspelled name first appeared}.

Anyway, thank you again for writing about our company.

Sincerely,

Your name goes here

P.S. One more thing. If it would be possible to correct the misspelled name in the online article that would be great. Thanks.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Although it was more than 25 years ago when I took my first journalism class, I know that professors still drill their journalism students with the mantra of, “Accuracy, Accuracy, Accuracy.” And misspelling the name of a company, product, service or person is one of the simplest of mistakes a journalist can make.

Luckily, fixing a misspelled word is pretty easy to do. And most journalists are more than happy to do so . . . IF you ask nicely.

I love spicy foods — unfortunately, my stomach does not.

Thankfully, I found Pepcid AC chewable, mint-flavored tablets a couple of years ago and they worked. So spicy Mexican, Italian or Thai food didn’t phase me anymore.

However, now I can’t find those chewable little pink tablets anywhere. To its credit, Johnson & Johnson does carry Original Pepcid AC and Maximum Strength Pepcid AC, both of which are not supposed to be chewed, rather swallowed with water. But (for some reason — perhaps more psychological than physical) I feel better faster after chewing up a Pepcid AC tablet than I do when I swallow one.

And as far as the new Pepcid AC Complete chewable pills are concerned, they’re nasty-tasting and leave a dry, chalky residue in my mouth for several minutes after chewing. (Heck, if I wanted a dry, chalky residue in my mouth I would have tried TUMS instead, or eaten chalk. Either would have had the same result!)

So . . . after calling the Johnson & Johnson - MERCK Consumer Pharmaceuticals Co. consumer hotline today (800-755-4008), I learned that the company has killed off the line of Pepcid AC chewable pills. AAARRRRGGGGHHHH!

I asked why and was told by “Mary Ellen” that the decision had to do with a lack of shelf space inside the stores. She also admitted that the Pepcid AC Web site was out of date and needed to be fixed to reflect the recent change in the product line.

She took down my info, so hopefully I’ll hear back from some PR person, but I’m not that hopeful.

Too bad. I LOVE Pepcid AC chewable tablets (major THUMBS UP!), while I HATE the chewable Pepcid AC Complete tablets (major THUMBS DOWN!).

Guess I’ll be looking for a new brand. Any suggestions?

So my first official notice that Omniture had indeed gone public was when I received a phone call from Grace Leong, business editor for the Daily Herald (Provo, Utah) asking for help in tracking down an executive from client vSpring Capital for comments on the Omniture IPO.

That wasn’t quite as easy as it might normally have been, given that I was in Ephraim, Utah at the time attending girl’scamp as a chaperone with my two youngest daughters, while the vSpring principals were out of state, but we did work things out as shown in this Leong-written story.

Wednesday morning (6/28/06) saw shares in Omniture price on the Nasdaq Stock Market at $6.50 per share (NASDAQ: OMTR), definitely below the originally targeted low-end of the anticipated opening trading range of $7.50 to $9.50 per share. (See my earlier post for thoughts on Omniture’s pending IPO.)

What was probably even more scary for Omniture’s initial shareholders was to see the first Omniture trades open significantly below $6.50, with some trades going through below $6.00 per share. However, stock finally closed the day at $6.53.

Now after three days of trading, Omniture’s shares closed on Friday, 6/30/06, at $7.29 per share on 854,000 shares traded for a 12 percent bump in a 72-hour period. Not bad.

So . . . can we expect a 12 percent rise in OMTR every three days? Ha! Probably not. Then again, I’m not surprised that Omniture’s share price has shown a nice upward trend in the first three days of training either.

I feel that any speculation on Wall Street that Omniture would be hurt by Google Analytics was speculation by individuals unclear on the differentiation between the features/benefits of Omniture’s flagship product, SiteCatalyst, and the customers it targets (mostly LARGE companies with very LARGE Web sites) versus the companies Google is targeting with Google Analytics (mostly small companies with smaller Web sites).

Sure, Google has tens of billions of dollars in the bank and it appears to be targeting just about any market segment that it can. And Google Analytics is also free, something that must have given some investors pause.

But really now, just because something is free doesn’t mean it is better than something that you have to pay money for. Remember what your auntie used to say, “You get what you pay for?” I think that cliche applies here.

Do I know what the future is going to hold for Omniture? Nah. But I do expect that Josh, John, Brett and the rest of the team will keep on doing what they’ve been doing for the past several years — providing the best Web analystics solution on the planet — and signing up new customers because of it.

[DISCLOSURE/UPDATE: Omniture was a client years ago back when the company was known as MyComputer.com. Additionally, although I was offered the ability to purchase friends & family shares as part of the IPO, I decided to pass on the offer. Thanks anyway, guys. dlp.]

Other stories on Omniture’s IPO you might find interesting include those posted on the ‘Net: One a positive story written on TheStreet.com and the other a negative story published on BusinessWeek Online.

You decide which you like best.