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So listen, Research In Motion is kindof a big deal. RIM is by far the single greatest success story in Candian tech since Nortel. There’s a lot of good people, a lot of smart people, a lot of friends at RIM. We all just got to believe.

WirelessNorth.ca Top 10 inarguable reasons to still believe in RIM

1. Cash! Despite all this gloom, RIM is still turning in fat profits. Profits! Almost 700M this quarter. So ok that’s on declining units, share, margin in a growth industry, but the business is still banking cash. With a hoard of cash in the bank, RIM can afford to ride out several quarters while they complete a much-needed product transition.
2. It’s not like market, analyst, media expectations of RIM can sink much lower. It can only be up from here right?
3. The competition is slipping too. Both Apple (for reasons unknown) and Google (for being distracted with tablets) have slowed down their cadence of new releases. The iPhone5 has slipped to at least fall. This gives RIM a rare window for their catch up products to be at relative hardware parity… before the next round of dual core, big screen and even makes-you-breakfast-in-the-morning features out-pace them once again.
4. Actually iOS is almost 5 years old and starting to show it (um, multitasking anyone?), and Android is just a little younger (and stole much of it’s design cues from Apple). Sure RIM are starting essentially version 1.0 of a new mobile OS with QNX, but this is RIMs chance to rethink and genuinely leapfrog Apple and Android with a more modern platform. Remember that RIM’s current boat anchor of an OS was itself once the epitome of a slick, advanced (roughly 5-year) old OS before the iPhone first landed and changed the whole landscape in ways RIM’s mature products and ecosystem was ill-equipped to compete with.
5. Some people still really love blackberries. For real, like real people! We’ve overheard business types actually fighting IT depts. to get a blackberry rather than another smartphone. For people who really care about communication, email and calendar, the blackberry has a legit keyboard (unlike iPhone) and a batterylife longer than a baby’s fart (see Android). Blackberries are still very good at what they’re good at: being productive.
6. Remember the last time a once-legendary device maker temporarily retarded and kindof forgot to innovate for half a decade? Well, they realized the error of their ways and stormed back at the last moment with a highly innovated and widely lauded new platform. Oh – wait – that was Palm.
7. It’s only been 4 years since the iPhone, there’s probably tons of people in the world that don’t realize yet that easy touch scrolling and pinch zooming is a really really nice feature to have for web browsing, maps or thousands of other apps vs the pathologically horrid pointy/clicky experiences blackberry curve offers today. Who cares if touch screens aren’t even a standard feature on all RIM’s new phones in 2011?
8. Don’t worry about these announcement of “layoffs”. It’s bollocks, A little bird told me that since at RIMs bonus are paid out in June, so a lot of the smart talent was about to quit anyway.
9. Please disregard reading the previous three items. In fact stop panicking, put away the prayer matt, the horsehair shirts, stop trashing that poor stock like it’s a western coastal city after a hockey game everything’s going to be just fine because…
10. What’s the top reason there’s hope for the great Canadian home team Research in Motion? At least the bastards haven’t (yet) sold out the entire line to Windows Mobile 7

^{Disclosure: your editor presently holds no equities long or short in RIM}

The openmedia initiative has really grown up. Check out their newly launched website, report and action plan. We here at wirelessnorth.ca are inclined to believe in a lot of the points. We like the ideas of better utilizing spectrum auction funds, we like the ideas of spurring(or requiring with new construction) investment if firbre connectivity. In addition, reforms to the CRTC to give that organization more teeth and a clearer mandate would be welcome. You may or may not agree with all the stated problems or remedies proposed by openmedia.ca but you have to agree that they are raising the quality of the debate. More of this please.

Read more: Casting an Open Net [openmedia.ca]

Thanks to Drew from Google for sending in this tip. Google is opening their Waterloo office on May 10 for anyone from the community who wants to stop by. They’ll be streaming events from GoogleIO in California as well says Drew “We will also be having local Googlers speak about mobile development and how we developed Chrome to be ultra secure from the ground up. This is a free all day developer training event with food as well.” We at WirelessNorth have always enjoyed visiting our local googleplex, recommended.

Sounds really cool. Click here to sign up while there are still some spots.

Better late than never, but we were getting a lot of requests to repost. In case you missed it, presented this Septemeber to a standing-room only crowd, and the top rated session at FITC Mobile 2010 in Toronto, with charts from WirelessNorth.ca Probably though, you had to be there or something ;)

Q3 data is just coming out, so watch for an update sometime soon-ish.

This a.m. we had a chance to stop by Marketing Magazine’s Mobile Marketing Conference in Toronto to catch on the latest on marketing and selling real stuff through mobile.

The big theme so far is that a) consumers are diving in to mobile b) brands, businesses, retailers are keen (and realize they have to) follow c) no one knows exactly what they are supposed to be doing yet. Overall it feels a lot like the early days of the web, marked by some interesting success stories, and some apps that sink without a trace.

Live blogging notes thus far:

Huge discrepancy between download rates and usage rates. Most apps get used only once. That indicates that people try before they buy but also that app makers haven’t figured out compelling apps yet either. Everyone reports downloads but the real stat is monthly unique users. Always ask about usage.

Apps need to drive real utility, simply “matching luggage” experience or “store finders” not necessarily enough.

It can be hard building a mobile channel as Canadian company or brand as your scale is much smaller than the US market. On the flipside, Imatiaz Jaffer of the European agency IcomMobile explained that they have expanded to Canada because it’s a great place to build mobile. He even repeated a line we’ve heard before “Right now, Canada is a hotbed for mobile development”.

For Canadian companies, getting visibility in app stores vs big US brands and retailers can be a challenge. But you can still be successful. One panelist “for a 20k app budget you’d want to spend another 100k in promotion of the app”.

Christopher Bennett (best buy) apps can be great for “unassisted sales” items that sell well are like iPads or products where consumers know exactly what they want already. [interesting not talking about mobile for providing extended product information in store]. A great retail app that works well in mobile “so they tell me” is also the victoria’s secret app .

@Pryl gave us an excellent keynote on the benefits of native apps vs. web apps from a marketer/business’ perspective.

Advantages of apps instead of mobile web:
- Apps are buzz worthy (fewer people get excited to pas on or buzz about a web app)
- Though webkit is closing the gap, still a richer experience
- You can use hardware features (camera, mic, accelerometer etc.) beyond just location
- Apps can work offline
- Good as an extension of your brand

The problems with apps
- Fragmented platforms building for every platform could kill your whole digital budget
- Driving consumers to your apps through QR codes etc. still a kludgy tough process
- For marketers: lag time and friction of the download and install process [hadn't thought about this]
- For in-retail environments a consumer can get to a mobile web page (or SMS) much quicker than an app install which can be very important for instant gratification

Web apps
- Better standardized much easier to support many phones (though still optimizations can be a pain)
- Quicker to first engagement with a customer than an app download and install
- You can update a mobile web page anytime without having to constantly push app updates

As of 2010, Canadians pay the highest mobile bills in the entire world. Released earlier this summer, WirelessNorth.ca got our hands on the latest global telecom report from BofA Merril Lynch. The report itself (with data from Q1 2010) is a blockbuster, wealth of information on wireless carriers around the world and we’d encourage you, and especially the good folks at Industry Canada to take a look.

Surveying more that 50 developed and developing countries where information is available, one country comes out on top when it comes to the most revenue extracted per subscriber on a monthly basis. And that country is of course Canada. What you are looking at here are the world rankings of mobile ARPU (Average Revenue per User). To you and me ARPU is your monthly bill, before GST/PST/HST etc. (through taxes and high spectrum license fees, our government is culprit here too)

This data is total bill including both voice and data. Canada does not have the highest proportion of data to voice charges though data usage in Canada is growing fast (we’re finally catching up after a late roll-out of 3G compared to many countries). Interestingly, Canadians are estimate to pay slightly less per minute of voice (10 cents vs 11 cents) on average than our nearest neightbour the U.S.. What is really driving bills in Canada over the top are the egregious fees like system access fees (the fees many plans still pay whether you access the system or not in a month), and especially “value pack” fees like 15$ a month for the luxury of call display and handful of voice mails.

Now don’t get us wrong. We at WirelessNorth.ca are ardent technophiles and capitalists. We’d love to see every Canadian tech company besting the world at making money and being successful. But telecom itself is a special case. There are enormous positive economic externalities to every other sector of the economy that come from having ubiquitous, high quality and affordable access to telecommunication services.

Wireless subscriptions are nothing less than the basic infrastructure, the plumbing, roads and bridges that drive the digital economy. And this is exactly where high, unaffordable-to-many wireless services will hurt Canadians and hurt the rest of Canada’s innovation economy:

While we’ve seen a ton of improvement in wireless services over the last few years, we still suck at penetration. High costs of both basic and advanced services are keeping many Canadians un-connected. Taking one more look at the data, we can scale our USD ARPU data by relative USD GDP per capita to get a better perspective on shape of the demand curve for mobile services:

What you see above is that as average affordability improves, penetration increases significantly. Countries with perhaps poorer land-line telecom tend to cluster above the curve (less alternatives to wireless) and developed countries below. It’s interesting to see the U.S. with just slightly better affordability and significantly higher penetration.

One final comment is that there are many countries with similar or worse relative affordability than Canada that have better adoption. These gaps could indicate that other factors like digital literacy are also a factor.

So what have Canadian Carriers been doing with all this excess revenue? One thing is reinvesting it in marketing (not so helpful) by launching a barrage of new national flwanker brands. Another is reinvesting in networks (more helpful). Canada now boast several of the fastest 3G+ networks in the world (faster than even the so-called 4G networks in the U.S.).

What hasn’t changed are Canadian Carrier’s world-leading 3 year contract lengths. But, of late we are seeing evidence of price wars for new client acquisition with more and more aggressive discounts on high-end phone subsidies (very helpful, death to crappy feature phones – so long as you do the math and the teaser pricing followed by 3 years of contract pricing don’t bankrupt you faster than a US homeowner).

This fall, the new entrant carriers are finally hitting full stream, so consumers could benefit if we see an accelerated price war. But even those new entrants have some very expensive spectrum bills to pay off (that’s another whole story).

In the meantime, don’t let the trade associations, or any other industry-fed wags fool you.

It’s 2010 and Canadians pay the highest (%#%@!) cell phone bills in the world.

With six major conference events over 5 days in Toronto, this year’s Mobile Innovation Week is looking solid. Head on over to the official MIW site for more info on each of the events and to pick up tickets.

Great to see this kind of though leadership in mobile coming together in Canada. Recommended.

If you look at it one way, no matter how you get your next smartphone, the the monthly charges are going to cost you approximately the same for the next three years. At a typical $90/month that’s $3000 over three years. You have two choices, you can pay $3000 over three years at the big carriers (maybe somewhat less at Wind or Mobilicity) AND pay for an expensive unlocked phone ($779 for that lovely 32GB iPhone4, and something equally speedy for the next top-end BBerry or Android), or you can save $500 and lock in to a 3 year contract.

The sad fact is that there are no special deals for anyone who opts out of the 3-yr contract and phone subsidy game. If you take service from the big three, you are paying for everyone else’s hefty handset subsidies whether you sign a contract or not.

The contract doesn’t lock you in to using the same phone for 3 years. At least it doesn’t cost you any more to upgrade more often than every three years, and locked phones have nearly the same resale value as unlocked.

It is fun and handy to have a SIM-swappable unlocked phone. But is that worth forgoing $500 in free hardware every three years? For some people, especially frequent travelers, an unlocked phone can be a lifesaver in roaming fees. But then you could get that contract phone anyway and root/jailbreak or trade it in on eBay.

Canada may be renown as the world leader in contract length, but that shouldn’t stop you from taking back what meager compensation you can each time that clock finally does come up. Right?…

Discuss.

Not to mention Vancouver, Montreal and a lot of other great mobile development happening across the country, but it’s great to see Toronto (and Canada) earning some international recognition.

White boards abound, as groups of 20-somethings huddle around computers tweaking software that delivers CNN Money, Time and other tier-one news feeds to the BlackBerry and iPhone.

Only, Polar Mobile isn’t in Silicon Valley. It’s in Toronto. Conservative, cold, conventional Toronto — which is home to one of the world’s biggest clusters of mobile-application companies this side of Silicon Valley.

“It’s very much a hotbed,” said Michele Perras, director of the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre, a non-profit mobile-apps research and consulting organization. Perras estimates there are 200 mobile-apps-development companies in the greater Toronto Area, while another 750 GTA companies now have mobile-content offerings.

Proximity to several schools with world class computer-science and design programs, such as the University of Waterloo and the Ontario College of Art & Design, is one reason for Toronto’s emergence as a mobile-apps hub. Availability of public and private-sector funding is another, as is access to entrepreneurs and engineers who cut their teeth working at or with Blackberry maker Research In Motion Ltd.(RIMM), whose headquarters are just one hour west of Toronto in Waterloo, Ont.

just a few years ago, would you have expected such a headline?

LINK: Toronto Becoming A Hub For Mobile-Apps Companies [WSJ]
Non-paywall version: here

In theory, cable TV is a dead media. We have sufficient technology, today, that we can stream any episode of anything ever recorded, anytime, in real time, and in HD to any broadband household. A few decades from now, this whole idea of only being able to watch pre-selected recorded content at certain hours of the day is going to seem awfully strange and quaint. Not to mention the bizarre ritual of millions of subscribers manually making millions of copies of that content on their PVRs when perfectly good original copy already exist on the cloud.

Now in reality, traditional cable/satelite tv isn’t going away anytime soon. The service is reliable, it offers an important easy/lazy level of usability that pc-based alternatives haven’t nearly matched yet. But clearly the writing is on the wall. And services like netflix streaming, and boxee, and youtube, and many others are closing in.

BUT! great news for endangered cable executives everywhere: guess who controls all of the last-mile internet pipes in North America? It’s like having foxes as the sole provider of the chicken pipelines.

Even Michael Hennessy Telus’ top lobbyist has been sounding the alarm that the real net neutrality issue isn’t net neutrality, it’s vertical integration. This concerns, because Telus doesn’t have the same media assets as Bell and Rogers.

When companies with substantial media assets and huge legacy distribution businesses (a.k.a. cable tv) also own the only pipes into your home, it would be crazy not to expect them to use every available lever to favour their own content stack over any others.

And so on the eve of netflix coming to Canada, Rogers cuts their broadband caps (again).

Rogers “extreme” cable option is advertised as 15 Mbps with an 80GB cap at $60/month before taxes and other fees.

For the record, at full theoretical advertised speed, 80GB would earn you 12.9^* hours of usage a month, or just under 30 minutes of usage a day.

^{80GB = 696,320 megabits / 15 megabits per second / 3600 seconds in an hour = 12.9 hrs}

ps. why would this apply to wireless? Well for one it’s all the same players, for another tv and video streaming can be wireless too, and perhaps most importantly all of this logic could apply to separating voice service from wireless pipes as well.