Wirelessnorth.ca

As widely reported everywhere Ted has announced he finally got the iPhone. Rogers reports their Q1 earnings today, some notable points, ARPU (average revenue per user) is up almost $5 to a wallet crushing $72 thanks in part to a growth in Data ARPU (now 14% of revenues) and as Rogers seems to have lost some low end share to growing competition to the likes of Telus’ Koodo and other discount brands. (we hear koodo is doing well, despite the branding)

Meanwhile, further rumours have the Nokia N95 (and other n series?) coming to rogers as well. Certainly Rogers will price the hell out of the high-end Nokias but notice these two announcements would Rogers is finally (and smartly) dropping the hammer on their GSM advantage on Telus and Bell. Those two share a network based on the increasingly-orphaned CDMA standard not supported by nokia or apple.

The coming of May means an important tradition, the coming of the Spring quarter and new mobile pricing and marketing plans from all the big carriers. What shall it be this time?

Just off the phone with a CSR at Rogers for one who informed your editor of this little tidbit: the reason Roger’s roaming charges on data are so high (not unheard of for folks to run up 800-1000 blackberry bills on a few business trips to the US) is because Rogers has never had a roaming plan for data. There’s a thought. But, says the CSR as well as sources from other carriers, starting next week expect some new new rate plans across the board as each carrier launches their spring campaigns and Rogers clears the deck for iPhone.

Expect the iPhone in June or so. Expect it to be the second gen iPhone with 3G and a few other tweaks to the current model.

Thank goodness for decent blackberry plans on Telus and new GSM entrants on the horizon, elsewise your future is looking awfully Rogery and you might as well sign over all your future paychecks to Ted right now just to get it over with.

The thing about notebooks is that people tend to greatly underestimate the difference a pound or two makes. Shave off a pound or two from your notebook and you’ll surprise yourself where and how often you’ll want to bring your notebook with you, especially with with wireless networking increasingly everywhere. There’s a magical point around 3lb when you can comfortably hold onto a notebook with one hand or drop it in a bag/purse and almost not notice the weight. Your average 13.3″ notebook (like a macbook) weighs between 5 and 6 pounds.

Late last year, Asus released the EeePC, a notebook missing a few things – like a proper hard disc, or CD drive, and missing half the screen size of traditional 15″ notebook (but notably less than half the weight and price). Surprising a lot of people, maybe even Asus themselves, the little things are selling like smarties. Since a lot of big name OEMs have been rushing to pile in (pictured Asus, MSI and Compaq micronotes). Most of these new breed of micronotes are close to full PCs with 7-9 inch screens, respectable resolutions, small solid-state drives and WinXP or Linux operating systems. And weighs two pounds.

Relevance for WirelessNorth.ca? If it’s not even the case already, you are going to see notebooks/pcs of all description taking over as the primary bandwidth drivers of 3-4G wireless. And the breaking wave cheap/versatile micronotes and other hybrid MID devices will accelerate the trend.

At $300 to $400, with a full keyboard, running firefox and the weight of a paperback the EeePC or any micronote is pretty tempting, even if you already have a larger notebook. When these things hit $200 with built in wimax and/or 3G modem, why wouldn’t you own one. Why wouldn’t you own a couple?

You know these things are only going to get svelter, sleeker and cheaper. (Here’s a roadmap). Beware the stampeding pittler-patter of a million twittering little rubber feet.

If/when the Apple version ever lands, your network capacity managers at your favourite carrier shalt rub hands with glee, if not break down and weep.

Google made a nifty announcement yesterday that they were launching mobile image ads. Googles says image ads have a few advantages, they are specially sized for mobile, they link only to mobile-readable sites, they are stronger for brand-building and earn higher click-thrus. These ads are available in “Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the US” – no Canada. Not worth the investment apparently.

A source at Google Canada let us know that mobile text ads are available in Canada however offered no ETA for the availability for images.

A lot of people ask us this question, how will I monetize my content in the mobile world? And the answer is that advertising ultimately has to play big role in the mobile value chain. The trick is mobile content and and mobile advertising are a chicken and egg problem. They’ll both need to grow together.

A few industry speakers at ICE08 in Toronto referenced the statistic that mobile ads were fetching CPMs (cost per mille or thousand impressions) upwards of $80 (compared to a few cents to a few dollars for online ads). However no one seemed to remember exactly who’s deal that was (if you do let us know).

They say that advertisers are hungry for mobile inventory. Which make makes some sense if you ask me, the $80 may say more about a scarcity of M’s than a preponderance of C’s.

There’s no doubt that Canada’s history of high data rates and an epidemic of mid to low-end phones with weak browsers have slowed the market in Canada.

It’s not that big a deal to be shut out by one particular mobile ad platform. However, just once, WirelessNorth.ca would like to see Canada counted as a first world country in the new mobile economy.

And dear CRTC if you are out there listening, these market realities are just another little tidbit of evidence why an under-competitive telecom industry in Canada holds back Canadian content creators and holds back Canadian culture from having a voice in the future of media.

You may remember the stir caused by Niagara Networks in Canada’s upcoming AWS spectrum auction before they mysteriously pulled out. Rumour has it that their bid was indeed backed by T-mobile. The money was lined up but for reasons unknown T-mobile walked and with them so did the financial backers.

Either way, the dropout has left the spectrum auction with no participation from foreign carriers. Will the remaining entrants be able to get a new network off the ground in Canada with out the experience and economies of scope that would come from partnering with an international opperator?

We can hope, but we also hear that the strategy folks at the big three are sleeping a little easier recently without foreign players in the race.

UPDATE: The trouble with rumours, sometimes you get it right sometimes your don’t. Wirelessnorth has heard that T-mobile was categoricaly not behind niagara. not ever.

On the announcement of Wifi calling coming to Rogers, Martin asks “Great news! What about the Curve 8320?”. Don’t hold your breath.

As far as I know Rogers has expressed no signs of interest in the curve with wifi. As a RIM insider told WirelessNorth.ca, it’s been a hell of a job for them to convince any North American carrier to accept a handset with wifi. [notwithstanding that wifi-equiped nokias are plentiful in Europe and you can even buy skype plans for your n95 at hotspots all over london but we digress]. For Rogers, the pearl and home wifi calling would seem to be the comprimise.

The pearl is a consumer brand blackberry. This lets Rogers keep the wifi safely segmented to the consumer market and keep on gouging maximising return on corporate customers higher dependence and lower price sensitivity to blackberry voice and data rates.

What can you do about it? Put some Rogers stock in your RRSP. You’ll feel better about it.

ps. Don’t expect blackberry wifi from Bell or Telus either. For reasons unclear, the CDMA version of current blackberries come with GPS instead of wifi.

The word is out that Rogers will shortly be launching the 2nd gen blackberry pearl 8120 with wifi including the ability to make calls over wifi. The rogers wifi plan is similar to the T-mobile @home wifi service in the US. We snapped these pictures of T-mobile promo material in a T-mobile store in San Francisco earlier this year.

How does wifi calling work? When in range of a hotspot, your phone will route calls over the local wifi network instead through a rogers cell tower. The advantage to Rogers is that it relieves load from their network, savings which they in theory then pass on in some proportion to the subscriber. For subscribers the rumour is that the calls over wifi also sound noticeably better. Presumably with bandwidth to spare on Wifi, carriers can do with a little less compression than applied to standard mobile voice channels.

As long as you don’t leave the house too much, wifi also means finally a non-insane way to affordably transfer or stream data to a Rogers blackberry, and at good speeds as well.

One downside is that reportedly battery life suffers when enabling wifi on the blackberrry 8120.

Open questions remain: do you need to replace your home router? will it work with Rogers hotspots across the country? [tipsters out there let us know]

And if you want to know how Rogers service stack up to T-Mobile’s:

 
Yep, not a bad service but a year later at twice the price. that’s the state of competition in the Canadian wireless industry for you.

StartupNorth.ca turns 1 year old this week. So your illustrious *North editors are taking a brief respite from our ever-growning online media titanship to raise a glass or two. And y’all are invited [eh]. Jevon has the details:

To celebrate, Jonas and I are going to go grab a drink on Thursday. We will be upstairs at the Imperial Pub on Dundas street. It’s not the most glamourous location, but you can bet the beer will be cold, the people friendly, and it never does get too busy.

So, if you are in town, let’s say 7:30 or 8pm. Come by for a beer and say hello. Here is the Facebook Event Page

The olde WirelessNorth.ca itself is nearly 4.5 months young. cheers.

The great debate in mobile content has long been browsers vs apps with a clear set of tradeoffs between the two. Browsers is absolutely where the desktop computing is going but browsers on the mobile are inconsistent, underfeatured and messy. Apps on the mobile can be a lot more rich but here the hardware and OS fragmentation makes this strategy just as painful.

Toronto’s Viigo software used to be known for one simple app, the Viigo reader (get it here) one of the best rss news readers for the blackberry (and windows mobile). This week they’ve (pre)announced their second generation “tango” platform. Tango is a third way to deliver mobile services.

Similar to rss itself (and a first glace similar to Yahoo’s mobile strategy as well) Viigo will be offering an xml-driven cross-device content platform to anyone who wants to be on their “deck”. Viigo provides a cross platform client (basically a browser alternative built like a rss reader on steroids). Without much extra work, content providers can push straight rss content to the client wich Viigo bundles with sponsorship (they have a current deal to distribute the National Post on mobile this way) or, with Tango, the content provider can implement stuff thats a little more interactive like restaurant recommendations and travel bookings.

Take your own look at some example tango apps here.

Another interesting wrinkle is the revenue model. Viigo will split advertising and other revenues with the content providers – but with out a dime going to the mobile carriers.

Will Viigo have as much or more luck than the Yahoo’s, googles and apples (mozillas, operas, BREW etc.) of this world in creating the [holy grail of] a standard platform for the mobile world? Something tells me this is more of an interim play, more of an AOL than the Tim Berners Lee of the mobile internet. That said, if they can keep building on their loyal client base, Viigo may be just the thing a lot of publishers are looking for – a viable way to monetize in-demand content over mobile. At least until that distant day when the mobile web finally does get its standardized $h*t together.

Viigo’s Tango platform is scheduled to launch this June.

Corrected:Mark Ruddock of Viigo tells us that they definately are building carrier partnerships which would include revenue share.

Rogers has announced they will be launching LG’s fullscreen touch device the “VU”. Does this mean the iPhone doesn’t cometh if Rogers is launching this otherother white meat of touch-screen phone? The Vu is basically a North American version of last year’s “Prada” model phone in Europe. I guess the fashion branding would be lost on us un-sophisticates across the pond. The Prada phone was basically LG’s hasty iFauxne response to apple’s announcement of their device. At some point, we’ll see something like this from nokia too.

It aint’ no iPhone, but the device does have a few extra tricks up it’s sleeve including full HTML browser, fast HSDPA radio, and SD card support, and mobile TV features. Does this mean we can forget about the iPhone on Rogers?

Not necessarily. AT&T the only other North American carrier with the VU also has the iPhone.

Monday 14th saw the latest Mobile Monday gathering at the Fort York Armoury. Nick Patsiopoulos and Shyam Sheth, from Yahoo! And Google respectively, shared their company’s vision on the future of Mobile Applications. The choice of subject is no coincidence, following one of the most hotly debated topics in the industry – Is the future of mobile applications in native applications or within the browser? Several in depth online discussions have been made on the subject, for instance Dean Bubley and Michael Mace [see also Is the future in browsers or apps? previously on WirelessNorth.ca].

Yahoo’s Blueprint, the core platform for Yahoo!Go v 3.0, seems to be part browser and part native application. The philosophy behind Blueprint’s beta version is breadth over depth, with the intention of accelerating development of applications for the mobile web. Yahoo! Wants to give newbie developers to the mobile medium a standard set of tools, to overcome the hurdles of native application development. In summary, Yahoo!’s pitch to content developers is – you focus on building your data and idea, let us focus on presentment and look’n’feel on the multiple devices and OS’s.

But do I really want to have Yahoo controlling how my application/widget gets displayed? How would I differentiate my content’s user experience from that of the next app, if they all look the same? We all know looks matter – but here everyone is a good looking mannequin (Nick – if you are reading this – please feel free to comment).

Google in contrast, would like to take a more web centric approach, leveraging web tools and conforming them to the mobile space. Who hasn’t heard of Android. Google’s open platform philosophy and web-centric approach is here to stay – add Google Gears Mobile to the growing list of web driven mobile initiatives. Nothing new here, watch a few Android videos on Youtube and you’ll get the point. In summary – the IPhone is here to stay, we will have more iphone like devices, and the browser/web based approach is the way to go.

The most interesting comment in the post presentation discussion, centered around consumers, segmentation and devices. If Google’s and Yahoo’s focus is on the iPhone consumers, where does that leave average, non-sexy device users?

And Shyam made a valid point – the real users of mobile internet and services will be the iPhone (and other high-end device) subscribers. If that is the case, then as a content developer, one should really target the browser and high end device market. Don’t worry that the smaller devices don’t render well or do not have sophisticated browsers, that user is not really looking for a mobile web experience in the first place. And, with the churn in the device market, the average device capability will tend to what is considered higher-end today anyways!

Focussing on the smartphone type user, you are targeting an early adopter – they are the ones who really care enough about content and technology, and will drive the initial traffic to you. The mid-late adopters follow the popularity trends set by the early adopters. If you succeed with them, you have greater chances at mass market adoption (read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow).

But really, all these discussions are academic – if the road (and by road I mean the mobile data ) to the content have high tolls (and by tolls I mean high usage charges) and are blocked by the network operator. To have mobile content take off, mobile data needs to take off – and prices need to get cheaper to make that happen.

The next installement of MobileMonday promises to feature some guest speakers from Japan – the frontrunners in the mobile data and content space. Should be interesting and I hope they talk about how their cheap data rates helped accelerate data usage and drive traffic towards applications.