The primitive (but free) version of WordPress I’m using doesn’t allow the use of some of the more sophisticated statistic monitors that break down visitors by state – I’m not being cheap here, but the modest cost of using the more sophisticated version of WordPress also involves some Internet savvy I’m not comfortable with – my pal Ferdinand Steyer has volunteered to help, so I think I’ll do it shortly. In the meantime, here’s a map of reader distribution just from November, 2009
In The Mean Time Hearst News Paper Editor David McCumber Is Pissed Off At Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas .......
David McCumber Took Over The Fastest Growing Newspaper In America And Has Since Been Bounced Of ABC's List Of Top Newspaper Print And Online Gainers .
Maybe McCumber Should Fire Susie Costaregni AKA The Dish And Hire Chris Fountain.
But In The Early Summer Of 2009, Greenwich Roundup Started To Get Upset With Hearst Newspaper Editor David McCumber And Greenwich Time Reporters Like Niel Vidgor.
Greenwich Roundup Also Got A Little Fed Up With Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas.
So Greenwich Roundup Took Action And Cut Back On The Web Traffic He Sent To The Greenwich Time.
Previously, When Ever There Was A Hearst Newspaper Story About Greenwich Over 90% Of The Links And Web Traffic Went To The Greenwich Time.
But Then Greenwich Roundup Started Sending 90% Links To Other Hearst Newspapers Who Printed The Same Story, Or To Local Blogs Who Commented On A Greenwich Time Story.
Then Guess What Happened?
The Greenwich Time Fell Off ABC'S List Of The Top 25 U.S. Daily Newspaper Print and Online Gainers.
Sad But True The Greenwich Time Was No Longer The Fastest Growing Newspaper In America, Because Greenwich Roundup Had Stopped Sending Almost All Of It's Web Traffic To The Local Ungrateful Rag.
Greenwich Roundup Is Told That Hearst Newspaper Editor David McCumber Went Balistic When He Read This Report Showing That The Greenwich Time Fell Of The ABC List Of The Top 25 U.S. Daily Newspaper Print and Online Gainers
ABC Releases Top 25 U.S. Daily Newspaper Print and Online Gainers And The Greenwich Time Drops Completely Off The List....
......Hearst Newspaper Insiders Tell Greenwich Roundup That Tings Got So Bad That Greenwich Time
Web Editor Jonathan Lucas Began To Fear That He Might Lose His Job.
Recently, Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas Took Down The Old Greenwich Time Web Site And Put Up A Totally Redesigned Web Site.
But. Greenwich Roundup Hears That Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas' Web Traffic Numbers Are Not That Impressive.....
....As Greenwich Roundup Set A New All Time Web Traffic Record Of 4,901 Unque Web Visitors On The Michael Metter Story, Not One Link To The Greenwich Time Was Used In The Greenwich Roundup Post.
In The Old Days Before David McCumber, Niel Vidgor And Jonathan Lucas Upset Greenwich Roundup The Greenwich Time Would Have Been The First And Main Link.....
.....Hearst Newspaper President Steven Swartz Couldn't Believe What A Wonder Kid Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas Was.
In March, Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas Will Once Again Not Be The Webmaster Of The Fastest Growing Newspaper In America.
In Fact, You Read It Here First, Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas Will Not Even Make The ABC List Of The Top 25 U.S. Daily Newspaper Print and Online Gainers.
All Of The Greenwich News Stories Written By Hearst Are Published In Multiple Connecticut Newspapers.
However, Everyday Greenwich Roundup Will Throw Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas A Couple Of Bones By Providing A Couple Of Links To The Greenwich Time.....
.....Let's Hope That Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas Doesn't Follow The Example Of The Print Side And Start Cooking The Books And Playing With The Numbers On The Web Side.
.....Greenwich Time Web editor Jonathan Lucas' Only Hope Is To Wine, Dine And Pocket Line Greenwich Roundup As He Says, "Mr. Roundup, I Love My Job At The Greenwich Time And I Am Sooooooo Sorry I Upset You. Please, Pretty Please, Send Me Thousands Of Your Website Visitors Everyday."
Let's See How Well Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas Does In The Next ABC Report Due This March.
That's Right Greenwich Time Web Editor Jonathan Lucas Has Twenty Some Freak'n Days To Get His Numbers Up.
For The Record, Greenwich Roundup Will Match His Web Stat Traffic Growth Against Jonathan Lucas' Traffic Any Day Of The Week.
One Day Greenwich Roundup Just Might Report On The Dirty Circulation Secret At The Greenwich Time.......
When Is Greenwich Time Editor David McCumber Going To Pull The Trigger On Joe Pisani's Gal Pal Susie Costaregni. It looks like the Dish got fooled by again....
Inspired by a reader's point that Greenwich Times's Susie Dish's report of Brendan Fraser (he's an actor) eating breakfast at Pasta Verda, was kind of suspect because Pasta Verde does not, in fact, serve breakfast, we dispatched FWIW's ...
......Greenwich Roundup has been told that one of the best little games in town is sending fake tips of celebrity sightings to Susie at thedish2@yahoo.com .
Apparently, many fake reports get published by Susie.
All you have to do is write somthing like This......
Hey Susie,
I was in Greenwich Hardware last Thursday and saw Regis Philban buy a sledge hammer.
That sure is an awful big tool for such a little guy.
see ya,
Then wait and see if Susie publishes your fake celebrity tip in The Greenwich Time.....
The president and co-owner of the only radio station in Greenwich, Connecticut, is facing federal securities investigations and multiple lawsuits.
According to reports, last October the Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily suspended trading in Sponge Tech Delivery Systems Inc. a company co-owned by Greenwich resident Michael Metter, who is also co-owner of WGCH radio station.
The Wall Street watchdog commission halted the trading after questions were raised about the accuracy and adequacy of the company’s financial disclosures.
Two months after those concerns were raised; the SEC issued a notice to the company that makes a car wash sponge made of soap, that they intend “to recommend that the commission bring civil injunctive actions alleging violations of federal securities laws.
In addition to their SEC problems, the company is also facing lawsuits from investors and Madison Square Garden for non-payment of advertising bills.
Over the past year, tens of millions of American sports fans have asked themselves the same questions at some point: “What is that Spongetech sign doing in the outfield?” followed closely by “What the hell is Spongetech?”
Let’s handle the second question first. Spongetech (SPNGE) is a Manhattan-based company whose product seeks to answer a question no one has ever really cared to ask before, something along the lines of: “How do I cut out the bucket part of the equation when I wash my car or dog by hand?” Voila! Behold the soap-infused sponge, which at $9.95 is both biodegradable and can be used several times......
.......But to a certain sort of capital markets observer, Spongetech is something else, not seen in a long while: a full-bore pump-and-dump scheme that will, when all is said and done, likely have harvested the wallets of thousands of penny-stock speculators and earnest individual investors who thought they had found the proverbial "next thing."
It may not be the worst of such schemes. Unlike most pump-and-dumps, in which a few in-the-know sharpies drive a stock’s price to the moon and then sell it down to the basement, Spongetech has an actual product. Whatever is left of this company in the end, there will be something that someone—presumably the legion of bucket-haters among the do-it-yourself set—can dust off and sell in the market......
The company’s filings lead the skeptical reader to some pretty clear conclusions. The first is that Spongetech exists primarily to sell stock, and pretty much everything else comes second. At one point in early spring the company had more than 1.2 billion shares outstanding. Late Friday, as the pump collapsed, it had increased the authorized share count to 3 billion. By way of comparison, in the spring, the company—with reported sales of about $5 million a year—had roughly the same amount of shares outstanding as eBay (EBAY); with 3 billion shares issued, they would have a slightly larger float than Procter & Gamble (PG).....
......To keep the troops rallied, or, more accurately, to keep a new stream of suckers lined up, Spongetech went to the Internet stock promoters whose “investor relations” work churns out a steady stream of dubious e-mails and faxes promising trading riches to the inept, clueless, and the delusional.
They came up with some doozies.
There was the multiply SEC-sanctioned Larry Isen, a partner in the TGR Group LLC, which touted Spongetech stock in return for $30,000 in cash and 750,000 restricted shares. In an e-mail, Isen said he was only a minority partner in TGR with a small stake in the company and does not recall if he economically benefitted from Spongetech in any fashion.
He said he wrote about the company purely out of interest in its prospects. In addition to the five or so other promoters, there was the king of SEC-flouting touts, Jonathan Lebed, whose fee of 1,250,000 free-trading shares was footed by an investor named Doug Furth. Lebed did not respond to e-mailed questions.......
......Furth is no ordinary investor, however. The Solon, Ohio-based Furth is the owner, via his Signature Equity Fund, of 41 million shares or 5.1 percent of the company, as of last November.
An activist of sorts, Furth is a mainstay of the Yahoo Finance Spongetech investor message boards, where, as he admitted to me, he posts as “Alfie31555.” Furth insists that he disclosed his ownership stake on the Yahoo forum. A verbal bomb-thrower of the highest order, Alfie31555 brooks no criticism of Spongetech and has saved his bitterest vitriol for short-sellers and the reporters he sees as being used by them.
For example, Furst’s ire was aroused on Sept. 22, when the New York Post reported that a former lawyer of Spongetech had written a letter to the SEC claiming that his signature was forged on dozens of corporate documents he had not written nor had even seen. In a post on Sept. 23 at 10:48 p.m., Furth described Post reporter Kaja Whitehouse as “Nothing more than a paid whore for the shorts” and described her reporting as “giving life to their skunkworks as their puppet.”
Presumably Furth was no happier with Whitehouse’s subsequent article exposing the fact that five of Spongetech’s six largest customers are impossible to track down with addresses and phone numbers that appear to be fake. To top it off, Whitehouse discovered that a Web hosting service that specialized in concealing contact information created Web sites for three of the six customers on the same day three weeks ago.
.....the company booked $4.9 million in net income yet used $170,000 in cash, leaving it with a paltry $34,570 in the till.
The culprit for Spongetech’s weak cash position is the $14 million in accounts receivable balance as of the last quarterly report, but this misses the broader point: Even with so many sales being done overseas — the five customers who cannot be tracked down are all based abroad.....
.....If someone really is buying all of these sponges abroad—despite a marketing effort that is 100 percent focused on the American consumer—the company is stretching out their payment cycle way past the standard 30-day, or even 90-day, cycle...
.....I called and e-mailed the company and its public relations firms—Lippert Heilshorn, which resigned from the account late last week.....
.....So, since I live near Spongetech CEO Michael Metter, I stopped by his lovely Greenwich, Conn. house on Saturday afternoon for an impromptu chat. A gruff, bald fiftysomething man came to the door and insisted that Michael Metter was not home.
When I showed him a picture of Michael Metter I had printed from the Internet and pointed out that he looked almost identical, he became irritated. He refused to answer questions about the SEC investigation, the Post articles, or Michael Metter’s background as the head of a penny-stock boiler room insisting that “Metter is not going to do any interviews.”......
.....When I noted that he sure knew a lot about Michael Metter and his thinking, he walked away.
As I left, I knocked on his window and said, “Hey, Mike, can I leave my contact info?”...
A former attorney for SpongeTech, a New York company known for making soap-filled sponges it sells through infomercials, says the company forged dozens of legal documents tied to its issuance of stock......
...The accusations of forgery and "identity theft" come from Norfolk, Conn. attorney Joel Pensley, who said in a letter to theSecurities and Exchange Commissionthat he was "dumbfounded" to learn that his name was being used in "as many as one hundred opinion letters for various shareholders."
Pensley told the SEC that he would not have written such letters. "I question the legality of the transactions," he wrote.
A copy of the letter obtained by The Post shows it was addressed to Robert Khuzami, head of the SEC's enforcement division......
....."I am shocked and aggrieved that my name and reputation could be sullied in this manner," Pensley said in the letter to Khuzami. Pensley said in the letter that he learned of the forgery from New Jersey stock services company Olde Monmouth Stock Transfer Co.
A letter from Olde Monmouth's attorney, Richard Fox, also addressed to Khuzami, said the forged documents relate to stock issued to RM Enterprises, SpongeTech's largest shareholder. RM Enterprises is controlled by the company's executives, including Moskowitz and CEO Michael Metter, according to SEC filings. Metter recently denied to The Post that he's a director or officer of the company.
Fox, when reached by The Post, said he couldn't comment before abruptly hanging up the phone.
Someone appears to be pulling the strings on the biggest clients of New York sponge maker and US Open sponsor SpongeTech.
In its third-quarter SEC filing, SpongeTech said that six customers "accounted for 99.4 percent of sales" -- nearly $31 million in revenue -- for the first nine months of its fiscal year.
The firms are SA Trading Company, US Asia Trading, Dubai Export Import Company, Fesco Sales Corp., New Century Media .......
......Their addresses cannot be verified, phone numbers were disabled within hours of calls from The Post, and the Web sites for three of the companies were created on the same day two weeks ago.
......The Post's request, SpongeTech provided addresses, phone numbers and contacts for its largest customers through its outside investor relations firm, Lippert Heilshorn & Associates.
But efforts by The Post to verify the information fell flat.
Take, for example, Dubai Export Import Co. According to the document SpongeTech provided, it is located at 235 Peachtree St. NE, Suite 400, in Atlanta.
"They don't have an office here," said Julie Gudger, vice president of sales for Crown Office Suites, which leases offices in that building, including Suite 400. Gudger also had never heard of Ahmed Elsayed, the contact SpongeTech provided.
Gudger dismissed the notion they might have a virtual office. "I would know," she said.
A call yesterday to the Dubai Export Import number that Spongetech provided led to a receptionist who took a message for Elsayed. Within a few hours, the number was "disabled." ......
......Calls to the phone numbers SpongeTech provided for the other four companies also led to receptionists who took messages. They were all disabled shortly afterwards.
Misty Ryals, a receptionist for Select Office Suites, which rents out offices on the 5th floor of 116 W. 23rd St. in Manhattan, where SpongeTech says Fesco is located, said she has no record of Fesco Corp.....
.......SpongeTech said SA Trading is located at 111 NE 1st St., 3rd floor, Miami. A woman who works for Downtown Miami Partnership, which manages the property, said, "We have no other business on the 3rd floor but Excellent Executive Offices."
Carlson Ortiz, who answered the phone at Excellent Executive Offices, said, "I've been here for two years and I've never heard of that name," when asked about SA Trading.
Web sites for Fesco, Dubai Export Import and SA Trading also shed little light. All three sites were created on Sept. 10, 2009, using Domains by Proxy, a service that blocks information about the site's owner.
.......this has all the earmarks of the penny stock pump and dump schemes I used to pursue. It’s possible the poor guy’s the victim of nefarious outsiders seeking to profit at his expense. It’s also possible that Frankie Fudrucker will conduct his next political campaign dressed in a full burka. I’m betting I’ll witness Frankie’s comely form draped and hidden from sight before SpongeTech clears its name......
Besides, Metter ruined a dinky radio station that, while irrelevant, did once have its uses, like announcing snow days for the schools.
Did you know that WGCH doesn’t have an Arbitron rating now because the audience surveyors could find no one who admitted listening to the station?
I’m not sure if any of you are spending money on ads on WGCH but you could do just as much good by sending me the cash – I’ll take better care of it, I promise.
Nothing like reporting old news. I am sure he appreciates having his name out there in a negative fashion by a reporter who has taken absolutely no time to do any research on the subject or to contact him or the company.
Great job. It is at the same level as woodward and bernstein. I hope you are as anxious to publish old news if he is cleared.
Chris Fountain responds.....
“Old news”? I would say it’s developing news, unless the SEC investigation is over, which it is not. There’s a stock fraud going on here, whether perpetrated by insiders or outsiders is yet to be determined, but someone is being hosed. I look forward to following this story.
GREENWICH -- Michael Metter, president and part-owner of Greenwich radio station WGCH, is facing a federal securities investigation and multiple lawsuits against another business concern, his penny-stock company SpongeTech.
Metter, who lives on Tinker Lane in the backcountry, co-founded SpongeTech Delivery Systems Inc. in 1999 ......
.....Metter, reached overseas on vacation Tuesday, told Hearst Connecticut Newspapers that his counsel is in talks with the SEC and suggested that the matter could yet be settled or dismissed. He insisted SpongeTech would continue to be publicly traded, and he said he planned to distribute the company's products nationwide through Walmart stores..
SpongeTech's investor relations phone line goes to a voice mail message, saying the company is not talking with shareholders at this time except through news releases .....
.....SpongeTech's sales line is still operating, telling callers they can find the company's products at CVS stores or online. Calls by Hearst Connecticut Newspapers indicated the products were not for sale Tuesday at CVS, but Metter said the drugstore chain reordered last month.
The problems with SpongeTech have not affected the radio station, where revenues are up, according to Metter and the station's manager.
Metter, along with a few silent partners, bought the news-talk format WGCH in 2003 fromJohn Becker. He is not the majority owner but is the corporation's president.
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Meetings ar...
Halloween is coming...
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