Wirelessnorth.ca

Spinvox is a neat little app that converts your voice messages to text and delivers them to your handset by email or SMS. This is handy for making your voicemails searchable and archivable or for those people get a lot of voicemail. You probably know who you are. We reported earlier on Rogers adding Spinvox so it seems only fair to mention that Telus users can now have Spinvox too. No word yet on comparable pricing of the Telus offer (Rogers was $15/month). Drop a line in the comments if you know.

Also no word yet on a service that works the other way. e.g. a system somewhere you could text every once in a while and it would call up by computerized voice your mum or whomever and tell her you are doing just fine these days thanks, and how are you?

Startup idea in the making?

Apple and RIM . Like Jr high sweethearts dancing a full arm’s lengths apart, but intent on trampling each other’s toes anyway, Apple announced today two kindof big things:

1. The iPhone is getting a mess of new enterprise features. Despite the hype though, remember that none of these software updates will help your iPhone magically sprout a Querty keyboard (One point still for the kids from Waterloo).
2. The apple software SDK

the crucial bit:

-The AppStore is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iPhone applications
-Your app will be updated over the air automatically
-If an app gets updated, the AppStore will “otomatically” tell you it has been updated
-Also built into iPhones, you can download it on your computer and transfer it too if you want, but we think most people will do it from the iPhone
-Just tap on it and it’s wirelessly downloaded to the iPhone using a cell network or WiFi
-Top 50, top downloads
-Categories for games, business, finance, health, lifestyle, music, etc.
-AppStore, put it on every single iPhone that everyone will have access to with the next release of the software
-Jobs: “Your dream is to get your app in front of every iPhone user. You can’t do that today, but we’re gonna solve that”
-Scott is back. “Once you have all of these amazing applications, how do you get them on your phone?” Back to Steve Jobs.

This is significant because:

• By pushing software SDK updates to phone (post sale), Apple is effectively reinventing it’s mobile platform (It’s truly a platform not just a device) with every new release
• The total package of the iPhone looks a lot different than it did just a year ago, but running on the exact same hardware.
• This is hugely disintermediating to the carriers as substantial and potentially valuable new services and content is being pushed directly to the consumer without their involvement, buy-in or pre-loaded bundling agreement.
• The carrier has been made a dumb pipe.
• Apple is charging 30%(!) of revenues to content providers
• 30% leaves a lot of incentive for mobile content/app/service vendors to seek out other ways monetize their content. But you might imagine that being on the apple deck of the apple mobile ap store could be a powerful distribution channel.
• Everything will also be available on the wifi iPod touch – which further bends the definition of mobile, and even more so cuts out the carriers.
• Note that iphone store will be “exclusive” distribution channel but that jailbroken phone users will still have other options (as many iphone users already install 3rd party apps today without apples permission)
• Spore runs on it. That’s neat.

The Apple iPhone is not yet officially available in Canada.

This announcement adds more weight to “post-June” as the likely date.

Most Canadians already know what an iPhone is. A surprising number use one already.

So the telecom industry in general has been trying to come to grips with this inexorable shift of personal communication from calls and texts to a mix of all sorts of things that seem to come out of nowhere like “social platforms”. On it’s own, this bit of wisdom isn’t particularly news. With a stampede of widgets, apps, promotions and deals carriers have been slapping facebook, myspace and everything else all over their devices and ad campaigns for some time now.

With a battle cry of “Social Networking, we’ve heard of it!”, RIM too is now getting into this game.

Co-CEO Jim Balsillie announced today at Canadian Music Week (always a good week for music) that his company is getting in to social media, and what’s more, social media plus music.

“Architecturally, music and the social networking are going to merge,” he says.

This argument makes some sense. In fact, if one wasn’t too busy arguing that this is clearly the case already, you might also be arguing that the future sure looks that way too.

Potential theories on exactly how RIM plans to effect this strategy are thin on details, but could be plotted on a spectrum ranging somewhere from “top secret” to “by magic”.

So, on the surface, a mildly interesting market prognostication from RIM, but more importantly, another smoke signal of RIMs intent to move more aggressively into the consumer space.

Social music being considered, in most cases, not a core enterprise productivity application. Depending where you work I guess.

Apple and iTunes be warned?

Rogers is recently selling PC cards connecting to their (theoretical) 3.6MB HSPA. Aside from the fact that there is no usb dongle option, this is good news. And the prices are shockingly reasonable* considering the source. $65 per 1GB of monthly usage. Now this is is before taxes, 911** and system access fees etc., and, already twice the price 1 GB USB dongle that say 3 would sell you in the UK (15pound a month including VAT)… BUT for Canada a 2x is better than the 40x data price disparity we`re used too. The best feature of this plan though is what happen if you go over 1Gb. The plan gracefully, and automatically upgrades you to the next (2GB) plan for only $10 more. This is awesomely customer friendly. The catch -unfortunatley- is that you cannot apply this plan to any other Rogers device or move your SIM card to your blackberry and expect to get away with it.

$10 for an extra GB is also kindof funny considering that Rogers charges $50/MB of overage after the first 10MB of usage on their standard Vision plan. One Gigabyte equals 1024 Megabytes.

1GB of outside internet traffic on a PC card = $65
1GB of outside internet traffic on a standard rogers vision phone plan = 1024 – 10 = 1014MB x $50 = $50,700

Of the two plans, I’d recommend the former. *cough*

According to Alec Saunders, there is an option for not quite the same plan but something close to it if you ask a customer service rep the right questions:

Tom – I saw the same 1, 2, 3 GB plans you did, and phoned Rogers customer service. I explained that I had a sophisticated phone with a 5 megapixel camera, and wanted a suitable dataplan to go on it. The rep suggested a 1 GB plan for $65. I asked if this was the same as the HSPA card plan, and she said no. She wouldn’t sell me the 2 or 3GB plan. Still, it beats the tar out of the old $100 for 200M plan I had on my Blackberry.

An HSPA phone like the N95 with a good plan the ability to “tether” or share it’s internet connection is one way to get the best of both worlds. How to buy a Nokia n95 in Canada.

*Goodluck trying to surf the Rogers site on a firefox browser. It’s a strange animal to them, their web designers and layout engineers have never heard of the beast.

**It`s an excersise for the reader to determine how exactly how to dial 911 on a PC card in the event of an appropriate emergency.