Fellow swarmer and Web 2.0 aficionado Thomas Purves unleashed a hurricane of pent-up Canadian anger with his post on the Canadian mobile industry. Titled, "Canada Worse Than Third World Countries When It Comes To Mobile Data Access," the story pretty much nails the reasons why Canadians should be angry about paying so much more for connectivity.

While you are at Tom's site reading the posting be sure to "Digg" it.

Our high mobile connectivity prices and, until recently, inability to retain mobile phone numbers were bound to catch up with us. Turns out that other first world countries have been beefing up their communications and information technology sectors by making them more ubiquitous while Canada's market Neros fiddled. The result: this year Canada dropped five places from 6th in the world to 11th in the World Economic Forum's yearly ICT rankings.

1. Denmark 2. Sweden 3. Singapore 4. Finland 5. Switzerland 6. Netherlands 7. US 8. Iceland

9. UK 10.Norway 11.Canada 12.Hong Kong SAR 13.Taiwan, China 14.Japan 15.Australia >>Rankings in full

According to the WEF they used:

The Report uses the Networked Readiness Index (NRI) to measure the degree of preparation of a nation or community to participate in and benefit from ICT developments. The NRI is composed of three component indexes which assess: - environment for ICT offered by a country or community - readiness of the community's key stakeholders - usage of ICT among these stakeholders.

You do not have to possess a crystal ball to see Canada's future if our current system continues unaltered. Next year we could be in the mid teens and may fall too far behind to be globally competitive. We live in a networked world. Business is done on an instantaneous, global level. If we lack the infrastructure and adoption of our global competitors then there will be more than a few obsolete car manufacturing plants closing in the next few years.

We have to stop propping up telcos who refuse to be globally competitive while, at the same time, demand regulatory protection of their collapsing markets.

Our U.S. based friends at http://www.Centernetworks.com have launched a video competition for Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. How do you enter? It is easy. Just shoot a video up to four minutes long of you giving your best elevator pitch -- you know, the one you uncorked one-hundred times at the Canadian Venture Forum.

Entrants can get prizes as well as a prominent position on Centernetworks' main page for a few months. Here is what CN's editor Allen Stern writes:

CenterNetworks.com, a source for Web 2.0 news, reviews and insight, today announced an online video contest to help internet start-ups and tech entrepreneurs "tell and sell" their story, generating expert feedback for young Web 2.0 companies.

Starting now through April 30, entrepreneurs are invited to record and submit a video pitch about their company, which will then be featured on the CenterNetworks.com site. In addition to exposure on CenterNetworks, they will also receive an expert review from CenterNetworks writers, including feedback and insight on crafting their corporate pitch and message.

"The video contest is an excellent way for entrepreneurs to get their message out to the masses without the high cost of traditional exposure outlets," says Allen Stern, CenterNetworks Editor. "Events charge upwards of $20,000 for a two-minute spot, but this is free of charge, plus a chance to get expert, industry insight to help hone their message and shape their story. The value to a start-up is immeasurable."

Go to their site for more information on the competition. Who knows, maybe you will find someone to fund your start-up.

Here is a press release from the SD Card association that illustrates the impact recordable mobile T.V. is having on the Japanese market:

ORLANDO, FLA., March 27 /CNW/ - The SD Card Association announced todayat CTIA 2007 that the 5 million Japanese consumers who watch mobile TVprogramming on their phones -- and can record the programming with SDHigh-Capacity (SDHC) and SD memory cards -- will more than double in 2007 to12 million mobile TV viewers. Thirteen handset models feature SD recordingtechnologies today and three-quarters of all mobile phones in Japan areequipped with SD slots.

"The remarkable regional success of mobile TV in Japan provides a glimpseinto the global market opportunity for video content," said Paul Reinhardt,executive director of the SD Card Association. "SDHC memory cards provide therecording technologies and digital rights management protection to supportworldwide mobile TV success."

Both SDHC and SD memory cards enable consumers to securely store andwatch video when they want. SDHC and SD cards have built-in specifications forcopy protection rights management (CPRM) and SD-Binding specifications tiestored content to authorized devices from carriers. The SDA is working with the leading mobile TV technologies, includingMediaFLO, DVB-H and DMB, to increase the portability and interoperability ofcontent in and between devices such as mobile phones, car navigation systemsand portable DVD players.

The Internet -- as we commonly use it today -- has been around now for about fifteen years. To say that it has changed the way we do things is to understate the obvious. Virtually every component of knowledge-driven human exchange has or will be influenced by this remarkable communications platform. The reason why is partly technical to be sure, but the underlying technology is not the only reason. If the Net had not been conceived of as a fundamentally democratic system where no node had dominance over another or no circuit hierarchical influence over a competitor, then it would not be as influential as it is today. The Internet has given us the power to change the world for the better through the rapid exchange of ideas and information. Look at the http://www.wikipedia.com as a classic representation of this ideal.

Some economists and business theorists argue that the Internet represents one of the greatest wealth generating opportunities ever.

All is not good in Net-land though. There are large corporate and governmental forces who don't like the idea that you can phone Australia for virtually nothing using your Skype connection or bloggers with open-source news networks, for example, can influence elections. It is funny how companies embrace innovation and "free market" ideas when they can dominate but revile those things when their companies have to change or be superceded.

A few big companies do not want to be dissintermediated, so they've come up with a plan.

Their scheme goes something like this: You will have to pay more to ensure your circuits can effectively carry VoIP transmissions. Or, certain kinds of content will only be available to you if you pay more. Right now, everyone has access to the same content. If those arguing for a tiered system get their way (...read more...)

The ICE Conference (formerly iSummit) is over for another year. Lack of electrical outlets and a usable wireless system capable of handling a geek-filled audience made live-blogging pretty well impossible. That said, this conference unlike, say, MESH, did not require live blogging. Why? Well, ICE 07's theme could be described as "How do big media companies monetize all this digital stuff anyway?" We are talking big, juggernaut companies like Bell, Telus, and Rogers who really don't need Gagglescape's help promoting themselves.

Not that we hadn't heard the messages all before. Let's face it, digital media is now mainstream and is a money-making commodity managed by accountants who, by their nature, are concerned with the bottom line of the industry. The corporate presentations were trade-show stuff. Not to say many in the audience expected more. They probably didn't. But if you came looking for the latest Web 2.0 and social-networking trends you were left unsatisfied.

Still, the organizers did a great job and the conference went on without a hitch. Lots of old friends reconnected and new friendships were made. At the end of it all I suppose that's the important message (along with there is money to be made in this industry and we - big companies - know how to do it).

One event that snuck in some younger thinking was the CHUM U-Pitch challenge. Hosted by the always knowledgeable Amber Mac and including as a panelist TorCamp's David Crow, the presentations had a bit of that "American Idol" flavour to them. Who would win? In the end my favourite from the Murmur guys came second.

Grand Prize Winner
Where'd You Get That? by ChickAdvisor Inc.

2nd Prize
Torontopia by Gabe Sawhney

3rd Prize
Reach For The Starz by Digital Goldfish

I'm off to OCAD's Mobile Nation Conference today. Stay (...read more...)

I'm blogging the ICE 2007 conference semi-live from the Carlu in Toronto.

Keynote speaker: Robert Sawyer, Futurist.

Moore's Law is impacting media channels... In the next ten years we will have seven times more computing power than we have today.

Small mobile screens are a stepping stone and will be around for about eight more seconds.

Rate of change is ramping up exponentially - asymptotically which is ten years down the road. The future is VR.

Storage capacities will become almost infinite -- think bigger and grander.

This is a "Dancing Bear" moment. Initially cool but after a while you are not interested. Mobile is like that now. Aim high in what you are trying to do.

Star Trek fan clubs are showing the incredibly high quality films. People on desktops doing professional special effects.

Gap of VR and reality is closing. Soon simulations will be indistinguishable from reality. The creative and nimble will lead the marketplace.

There is money to made in aggregation - like YouTube. However, we are competing with amateurs.

Branding becomes enormously important in this kind of distribution. Brand yourself!!!

The future is a drunken slut you can take home every night - you have to be prepared to engage with it.

Think bigger, more open, and wider. Be a visionary. The future will be here before you know it.

In the digital world there is infinite economies. It is no longer based on scarcity.

GeoFencing is a ridiculous notion. We are trying to force the market backwards.

"No media organization can cancel the future." U.K. quotation.

We need an end to silo thinking... then end to things that we once considered separate. Find synergies or combinatorics.

Broadband is the new crustaceous asteroid: today is the age of the blurring between the professional and the consumer.

Image from the John Street Media Corridor Project CD-ROM, 1995/6

The Ontario College of Art and Design announced earlier today that their Mobile Media Lab has received a $360 thousand dollar research grant from the federal government. OCAD plays host to next week's Mobile Nation conference, from March 22 to 25.

OCAD President Sara Diamond was instrumental in bringing this area of exploration to OCAD, and sees its evolution as essential to the near future of the Ontario and Canadian economies. She says, "Mobile media and communication is the future of entertainment, education, tourism and even health care provision. We're developing products that consumers all over the world - from the UK, to India, to Argentina - will want to use. We're collaborating with the best children's media producers in Canada on this project as well as top tier fiction and arts entertainment media. Imagine your computer game-playing child as an active physical participant in playing and learning outdoors with the help of a mobile device, instead of sitting at home."

Portage will create a virtual theatre, a vibrant entertainment park, on a downtown Toronto street, installing a number of experiences in the John Street corridor that are triggered or controlled by cell phone users. These experiences are "locative" - that is, they provide cultural or information content relevant to a specific geographic environment. They're also interactive. Players can change content, upload information and experience the environment they're in by interacting with content that changes as they move through the street. And cultural producers can use the underlying technology, a new design engine called MEE, to port their content - be it an "indie" film short or a virtual museum tour - to the cell phone.

Just a follow up to the John Street Corridor project noted above: I designed the (...read more...)

The last two years or so have seen an ebbing of Canadian venture capital activity in the early-stage sector. Why is that? The reasons are varied and too detailed to explore in one posting -- just read back over Gagglescape's numerous postings on the subject.

The trend does seem to be influencing the entire sector and boils down to one basic principle: bigger deals generate bigger returns.

Venture Capital legend Apax Partners typifies the trend. This week the venerable VC institution closed its doors to new venture investments in its new 10 billion Euro private equity fund. Here is what VCRatings has to say about Apax:

The changing nature of the venture capital market is pushing some firms into a hybrid model. And the firms such as Apax that pursued the hybrid model are concentrating on private equity. The reason is to be found in the numbers. Apax's 4.3 billion 2005 fund has already returned 57%. No time to cultivate many, small deals when fewer, bigger ones are so lucrative.

Of course this could just be a mature firm expanding into new markets as its ability to compete in them grows. The fundamental market need for early-stage funding hasn't gone away. What has changed is that the mechanisms to generate return on a capital investment have become so efficient that lower return/higher-risk markets are not as appealing to investors.

About six years ago I was working feverishly on an acquisition for thinkthinkthink Inc. Our target? We wanted to buy a company founded by a professor at the University of Toronto. That company used A.I. algorithms to create natural language based online ad placements. The deal fell apart after the Internet market meltdown. It turns out the idea was ahead of its time.

Venturebeat.com has a story this month about "peer39," a New York startup that is using natural language and machine learning to increase ad conversion rates.

That company has raised $3 million from New York-based Dawntreader Ventures according to chief executive Amiad Solomon.

Natural language is the holy grail of the online ad industry as most everyone in the industry realizes that the next surge of revenue growth will be from non-geeks -- people who are not comfortable with the existing Internet.

Former digital titan Xerox is creating a Google-killing natural search engine according to Endless Innovation:

"A subsidiary of Xerox has signed an agreement to jointly develop and license search engine technology that they hope could lead to the next Google or Yahoo!. The agreement between Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and Powerset, both based in California, includes a long-term collaboration and technology licensing, with the Xerox subsidiary providing technology in exchange for royalties and an equity stake in Powerset.

Powerset’s search engine work focuses on “natural language,” which involves using ordinary, familiar sentence structure in searches, leading to easier, more accurate search results. The two firms have been working together since 2005."

Is there a company in Canada working in this sector?

The Seaboard Group released a report yesterday critical of Canada's big cellular providers. Titled, "Lament for a Wireless Nation - A Cross-National Survey of Wireless Service Prices: Canada, the United States and Europe," the paper says Canadians pay too much for their wireless services. More importantly, that additional cost means fewer people per-capita use mobile devices in Canada and we continue to fall behind countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

"Canada is dead last in the 30-country OECD measurement of wireless penetration. Oddly enough, Canada's wireless prices lead the world — there may well be a correlation," the report said.

The report's conclusions are as follows:

• Heavy cellphone users in Canada pay 1.5 times more than their U.S. couterparts

• Canadian wireless penetration rests at 58%, second last in the OECD.

• It's a full 20 percentage points behind the United States, the country's main trading partner.

How does Canadian cellphone penetration compare with other major industrialized countries?

• Canada has 56 cellphones in use for every 100 Canadians, less than any other industrialized country.

• The United States has 75 cellphones for every 100 Americans.

• Britain has 102.2 per 100 people.

• Germany has 86.4 in use per 100 people.

Of course, the Canadian cellphone providers are saying that the Seaboard report is a biased publication paid for by companies who are trying to enter the Canadian market. CBC reports:

Telus Mobility vice-president of wireless, broadband and content policy Michael Hennessy dismissed the study, saying he viewed it as the first salvo in an attempt to allow other companies to piggyback on local carriers and enter the wireless industry.

Whatever the reason for the report, these figures show that Canadians are losing out on the growing and economically essential mobile infrastructure marketplace. If we fall (...read more...)

Gagglescape's sister site, http://www.corporateknightsforum.com announced the CKmagazine's $100 Billion environmental challenge. Here is the text:

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics: it is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen. The Investment Proposition: If we start investing 1 per cent of our annual global GDP today, we can avoid GDP losses of 5 to 20 percent tomorrow.

"Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it"—Commonly attributed to Mark Twain, 1897

That was true back in 1897, but not anymore, according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The report, which is an expert-reviewed synthesis of the most up-to-date scientific research published on climate change from around the world, upped the ante. It concluded that it is "very likely" humans are causing global warming, or, in quantitative terms, more than 90 per cent certain (up from "likely," or more than 66 per cent certain, in 2001).

So now that we have proved Mark Twain wrong, what are we going to do to fix it?

Most people, from the leader of the Green Party to the chief executive of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, as well as our current Prime Minister, genuinely agree that it is time to pull back on the high-carbon throttle and carve out a new low-carbon path for our economy.

Just after the IPCC report was released, Prime Minister Harper made clear which path Canada would take: "I think the first realistic step in any such plan will be to try over the next few years to stabilize emissions and obviously over the longer term to reduce them." A few days later, the usually laissez-faire economist told an audience at the Canadian Club in Ottawa that he was going to crack down on industrial (...read more...)

This weekend at Ryerson University another "Unconference," an example of the BarCamp phenomenon, took place. PodCampToronto, as this one was called, was a two day extravaganza about all things related to podcasting and vloging. The user-organized conference model where a loose association of people gather without so-called "experts" to learn about what is going on in the community, is revolutionizing how we learn. Oh, and it may just put regular conference organizers out of business. Think disintermediation here.

The technology that provides the armature for these conferences is, of course, the Wiki. Here is what the WIkipedia says about the medium:

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] [1]) is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring.

People who have something to say book themselves as speakers. People who want to attend sign themselves up. This conference also added real-time video feeds online. Go to the link above and follow it to the calendar page. There you can link to videos of the event.

More about wikis and BarCamps later. Today, however, I'm off to a conference -- the old fashioned kind.

In case you are one of the three people who have not seen this remarkable film, well, here it is:

Story by Nate B. Habermeyer of the Ciris Group

The creation of the OrganizeMY Electronic Filing Cabinet For Dummies, the first major global software release from the For Dummies brand, is a case study of how a small company can play in the big leagues. Mike Schweizer, CEO of Org-Matters Solutions Inc. and the software's creator, designed the life-organizing software to grab, save, file, and track important documents and save them locally in encrypted form. The application provides the means to organize those documents in a file structure while also enabling users to track necessary actions, such as doctor appointments or bill payments.

Schweizer’s new software impressed BMO so much that it is giving away a promo version of the software as a free download to all its Mosaik MasterCard customers. BMO saw that Schweizer's software could help them help their customers to simplify their lives.

Schweizer's software won over management at John Wiley & Sons, who saw the connection with their For Dummies brand. Between the two, BMO and For Dummies assemble a user-base of millions through their world-recognized brands.

As Michael Schweizer said:

"…we’re thrilled to bring the Electronic Filing Cabinet to market under the umbrella of the For Dummies brand. When it comes to delivering simple, easy-to-understand "how-to" reference material, For Dummies has a unique leadership position. When people see For Dummies, they know it’ll be easy."

The Web 2.0 crowd wonders when an online version will be launched . . .