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by Stockwatch Business Reporter

The TSX Venture Exchange fell 8.18 points to 668.36 Monday, the start of a shortened trading week. Ron Schmeichel, a prolific shell packager in Toronto, has kept busy this December. Last Friday, his halted capital pool shell, WB III Acquisition Corp. (WXX), received approval from the TSX-V to complete its qualifying transaction by acquiring Tictoc Planet Inc., the developer of a free ephemeral messaging app called Frankly. Mr. Schmeichel anticipates closing the QT tomorrow (Tuesday) and he hopes the target will begin trading on the TSX-V by the end of the year. Tictoc has already closed a $26.2-million private placement of 8,596,700 shares at $3.05.

The shell will roll back its shares 1:20.333, leaving it with 737,704 postconsolidated shares, and then issue a total of 20,957,606 postconsolidated shares to the shareholders of Tictoc. WB III will also change its name to Frankly Inc. and resume trading under the ticker symbol TLK. As of Nov. 2, approximately 1.9 million potential users had downloaded Tictoc's app, Frankly. Users can send messages or photos to each other, but once opened the message or photo deletes in 10 seconds (similar to SnapChat). The sender of a message also has the option to delete a sent message if the intended recipient has not yet opened it. As well, friends can create anonymous chat rooms with each other such that each friend will know who is in the room, but no one will know who is insulting whom or lying about something. The company says this "preserves plausible deniability." It also says that active users send around 25 messages a day, although it is unclear how many of its users are active. There is a particular demographic that has taken to this type of social networking. Tictoc says 80 per cent of its users are teenagers, and 80 per cent are female, so 80 per cent of 80 per cent, which is 64 per cent, are female teenagers. This type of software raises an interesting question: what would a user be saying that cannot see the light of day for more than 10 seconds?

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