Posted by Editor in Carriers, competition, deals
After Industry Canada spent over a million dollars trying and failing to launch a cell phone comparison tool for Canada, someone has gone and done it for free. That someone is J Ben Benjamin in partnership with web shop einfiniteweb.com. While not so much yet the world’s prettiest website, it’s gets the job done. You can compare voice minutes by time of day and incoming vs outgoing, data and text and a slew of other options (tip: look for data under “advanced search” took us a while to find that).
This is commendable work. Despite some progress the carriers have made recently towards simplifying plans, overall rate structures remain highly obfuscated in Canada. Therefore tools like this one that can bring any additional transparency are of great value.
A few caveats though, there are a few things the calculator does not take into consideration. On the cost side remember that all minutes are not created equal and nor are all “evenings”. On Rogers, for example, a minute can be one second long and an evening minute may start hours later than on a seemingly identical Fido plan.
The other factor not considered here is quality or value for service. A cheap plan isn’t much good if the network coverage doesn’t reach you or if all the handsets available are ancient crap (here’s looking at you flanker brands).
Some fun games you might be able to play with this tool: Check out the price discrimination by province! Find the best plans for the rather short list of specific phones actually worth buying: BBerry, Droids, Iphone, Pre etc. (once they all come out). Sounds like fodder for future articles.
LINK: www.cellphoneratecalculator.com
Posted by Editor in applications, deals
OZ and Wellington Financial announced today that they closed a 10M venture financing round for the mobile company. OZ is a 5 year old mobile “consumer messaging” company headquartered in Montreal
OZ builds cross-device client applications for mobiles that allow operators and device makers to package up popular messaging and social services (like IM, flickr, myspace) through a slick app that runs natively on the a variety of devices.
That OZ were able to raise 10M in debt financing speaks to traction the company has been earning with their industry partners and to the confidence of Wellington in their future revenue streams. That 10M and the fact the fact that are able to create such value as essentialy a middle-ware services also speaks to the capital intensive nature and ongoing challenge of translating any kind of online experience across the heavily fragmented world of devices.
It seems to us that a number Canadian successful stories in mobile, like OZ, are often are not widely recognized. Canadian mobile entrepreneurs have a tendency to be B2B stories, quietly making money selling through or to the traditional carrier value chain. Not many Canadian mobile consumer brands come to mind. Even RIM who everybody knows does sell only through carrier partners.
Very recently however, the possibility of a real Canadian mobile content market is starting to emerge with new entrants, more open smart(er) phones and data rates beginning to approach sanity. WirelessNorth.ca is interested to see if the balance in strategy shifts. Will the likes of OZ, or Viigo, and/or the next wave of mobile entrepreneurs continue to focus on making or powering the carrier deck. Or will they step in to the limelight in their own right?
