Wirelessnorth.ca

# Friends of WirelessNorth.ca James Eberhardt and Gabe Sawhney, collectively echo mobile have let us know they will be running an iPhone Developers class December 7th – December 8th at the Rich Media Institute. The course is targeted at flash and action script developers looking to get started in iPhone development. James and Gabe have also donated a 2 for 1 voucher for the course as a raffle at tonight’s WirelessNorth.ca mobile meetup. thanks guys!

# Apple has just announced they will be touring the world with their own developer workshops for the iPhone (sounds like a fun job). They are stopping in Toronto December 4th, which at the moment, is the only venue in North America not yet sold out. While there’s still spots, I’d recommend signing up for both!

# Free tickets for WirelessNorth.ca’s mobile/iPhone developers meetup tonight are now sold out. A few sponsor tickets remain (all funds raised go directly to the nacho, wifi and free beer budget).

We’re confirmed! This Thursday WirelessNorth.ca will be hosting a mobile developers meetup in Toronto. The theme of this meetup is the iPhone and celebrating the lifting of the NDA (so that developers can actually talk about and share ideas on iPhone development), but feel free to bring your blackberries too and what ever else you’d like to talk about. This is not a formal or a demo type event, just come on out and have a few beers and I’ll show you mine if you show me yours etc.

Should be fun, but it’s not a huge pub, so reserve your spot if you want to able to join us.

Time: 6:30 – 9:30 pm
Location: The Bedford Academy, 36 Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto, ON
To bring: Your self, your mobile app or your idea for one

Register: Free! but spots limited, click here to register

If you are an iPhone dev, you’ve already heard the news. Apple has dropped the (@#$!) NDA terms on iphone apps. This means you, we can actually talk to each other about iPhone development. There’s only one thing to do, hold an iPhone dev’s meetup and pub event to celebrate.

How about a Toronto meetup downtown, tentatively Thursday Oct 9 6:30pm-ish, details/venue to follow. Drop a note in the comments if you’d like to be there. Bring your ideas, your apps (just the, er, released ones, honest). Drop a note if you’d like to organize one elsewhere too.

^{photo by shapeshift}

On September 25th, across the country, thousands of interactive digital media professionals will voice their vision for the future of Canada’s creative economy. As a part of the first-ever National Digital Media Day, professionals working in everything from videogames to elearning companies are gathering to share ideas on how to strengthen Canada’s digital media sector amidst growing global competitiveness and the imminent federal election.

There are a ton of great events happening coast to coast, so there’s no excuse. Get out there! (And while you’re at it raise a wistful glass for fast pipes and open access).

Vancouver: New Media BC AGM and mixer, National photo walk with Kris Krug (and a barcamp 2 days later)

Calgary: DemoCampCalgary10, Sept 25

BarCampSaskatoon08 at the cellar

Winnipeg: New Media Manitoba keynote with Robert L. Peters

Toronto: Kensington Market block party, featuring demos of a 3D digital graffiti tagging system and a Skype megaphone, as well as a writing for digital media event at 1028 Queen Street West

Anyone, at specific times across the country will also be taking part in the mobile mass mob KISS event, where folks from across the country will pucker up in busy intersections, take mobile pictures of themselves and post to a montage site that will later be screened on a big screen in Vancouver that night.

facebook group

More info and Official Ning site for National Digital Media Day

If you have more events (the official events list is a bit of a mess), email us and we’ll update this listing.

Toronto WirelessNorth.ca readers may want to check out (tonight):

An open forum for Toronto’s tech/web/media communities hosted by:

Matt Thompson, SavetheInternet.com and SaveOurNet.ca
Steve Anderson, SaveOurNet.ca and The Campaign for Democratic Media
Mark Kuznicki, Remarkk.com, Open Community Evangelist, TorCamp

Date/Time: Tuesday, June 24th, 6:00pm
Location: Fionn MacCool’s, 181 University Avenue @ Adelaide, Toronto
Snacks will be provided, cash bar
Your donation/sponsorship to help cover costs can be made by purchasing special tickets above.

Canada’s digital future is at a crossroads, and our community has an historic opportunity to help protect and shape that future for the next generation.

Bell Canada’s bandwidth throttling of third party ISPs has thrust the political battle over Net Neutrality and related issues, which have raged for some time in the United States, onto the front-page in Canada. The stakes are high. Canada’s digital future must be shaped by citizens, entrepreneurs, Internet innovators and the free market….

This forum will be introduced by Matt Thompson, campaign strategist for SavetheInternet.com and co-founder of the new Canadian coalition SaveOurNet.ca. Matt will sketch out the two opposing visions and plans for the future of Canada’s Internet and innovation economy… He’ll also brief us on recent victories for the U.S. Net Neutrality campaign, and what they may mean for Canada.

Also on hand will be SaveOurNet.ca co-founder Steve Anderson, to report on the trajectory of Saving Our Net in Canada, his recent meetings with industry and public interest groups and highlight the newest additions to the SaveOurNet.ca Coalition.

Mark Kuznicki will serve as moderator and facilitate a town hall-style conversation on a number of key questions.

Digital access, ICT competitiveness and net neutrality encompass some big issues that potentially everyone in Canada. Metrics show that Canada is slipping behind other OECD countries in ICT competitiveness. Meanwhile, all mainstream media formats are shifting rapidly to digital formats. Important decisions made now will affect to what extent you favorite wired or wireless network operators will also be able to legally manage, throttle or otherwise limit competition for all the content and applications that flow on “their” networks.

The potential problems are clear, however, the solutions and prudence of specific proposed solutions (like manadated net neutrality) are amply debatable.

WirelessNorth.ca encourages folks from any side of the issues to come out and learn, discuss and debate Canada’s networked future. See you there.

UPDATE: facebook event page
Facebook group for future events in your area.

I made the trek out to the Rogers Headquarters this morning to cover the launch of the Nokia N95. I was sent in place of Tom because he is gone to sail a boat around the Carribean. Tough life.

I had secretly hoped that Rogers would unveil some sort of new pricing scheme, something that would be a preview of the monthly pricing for the upcoming iPhone. No such luck.

The N95, which was first released in March of 2007 (just over a year ago), is a fine phone. Everyone I know who has had one in the past year has loved it. In typical Nokia style, it is very hacker friendly as it runs Symbian, and you can install everything from games to your own webserver on it.

It is no secert: The N95 is a killer phone that looks great and we all wish we could have. It easily rivals the iPhone in everything except popularity, although the 10 million N-Series phones Nokia sold last quarter isn’t so bad.

When the phone is available next week, it will come with a 3-year contract as a bonus when you buy a 20$ a month add-on pack on top of any voice plan you want. Under the typical Vision plans you can get Video Streaming, Audio Streaming and a slew of other Vision features. The executives I spoke to weren’t terribly clear about how the plan would stack, but this is what I was able to gather.

1. Pick any voice plan
2. Add on a 20$ a month pack that includes
   • Unlimited Email (restricted to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc,. no POP)
   • 2500 SMS Messages
   • “A couple hundred MMSs”
   • Unlimited Web Browsing
   • Free 3-year contract
3. If you want to use GPS, you can either pay for Rogers Telenav product or you can use Nokia Maps, but data is pay-per-use for the non-Rogers application. The executive I spoke to quoted that the pay-per-use data would be at 1.5c/kb.
4. On a 3-year contract, most of the Vision features get included.
5. If you don’t want the 20$ addon pack mentioned above, you can just get the 7$/month unlimited web-browsing addon.
6. The phone will be priced at $399 on a 3-year contract

So, it didn’t happen. I didn’t get my revolution in pricing. They didn’t say “60$ a month for 1000 minutes and unlimited data usage on the device”, instead I was left more confused than ever. This application is pay-per-use, but this one is a flat fee. Application X is free, but you pay for its Data. Unlimited Email is included, but you can only use specific providers.

The list goes on. You are all used to it, we all think it is normal. I, however, have been helping my mother shop for a phone the last few weeks, and I can tell you that most people still can’t navigate these options.

By simplifying plan pricing, Rogers, Bell or Telus could make it much easier for people to buy new devices and, most likely, start using more and more services. As it is, pricing is still very unclear and has not improved in years. I am not complaining about actual data rates here, I am complaining about the daunting pricing structures.

The question is: Has Rogers twisted Apple’s arm and will they offer similarily confusing options for the iPhone? Will the Canadian iPhone come with Exchange support, undercutting the lucrative corporate email market that Rogers, Telus and Bell all specifically protect (by limited what email accounts you can get email from on cheaper plans), and will all applications fall in a single, large (or unlimited) data bucket the way pricing has been set for the iPhone all over the world, or will billing be segmented by Application. Will rogers try to put iPhone users on to their Telenav product, and charge per-use for the iPhone’s built in maps application?

The answer should be an obvious “No”. Of course Apple will demand a similar pricing scheme for the iPhone in Canada as they have negotiated in other countries. I hope that is the case, but if so, it really seems odd that Nokia is getting such a bad deal, so close to the launch of the iPhone.

My guess is that this discombobulated pricing is the result of internal politics. The Vision plans seem to come from a different group than other applications and options, and I imagine the same could be said for Blackberry and other Smartphone plans. Consolidated and clearer pricing may require not just a new vision for Rogers, but serious organzational changes.

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.

The good folks at MobileMondayToronto reminded me today that they are doing their 2nd annual discussion meetup with Yahoo and Google to talk about mobile application strategy. In attendance will be Nick Patsiopoulos Director, Network Services, Yahoo! Canada and Shyam Sheth Product Manager, Google Mobile. Should be fun.

There’s a catch though, the event has been moved to next Monday the 14th from the usual first Monday of the month.
More details here. So careful heading down to the Canadian Forces armoury on the wrong monday else you should find yourself enlisted in more than you bargained for.

If you don’t have one already, WirelessNorth.ca is giving away a free ticket to ICE 08 the “Interactive Content Exchange” march 26 – 28, 2008 Toronto Canada. This conference is looking pretty good. Regular price is $599. Of course there’s catch, or as we prefer to look at it, two opportunities in one. WirelessNorth.ca has an extra ICE ticket (thanks to DemoCamp17) but a shortage of hands to help blog the conference. So we’re looking for one person, who will cover ICE for WirelessNorth, 2-4 posts over the course of the two days on what you think are the best (or worst) stories of ICE and what it all means for you, the future, or the great WirelessNorth.ca

So, save yourself $600, get into the conferece, and get published on WirelessNorth.ca, drop a line to (editor at WirelessNorth.ca). If there’s a multitude of volunteers, the winer will be selected by some selective and subjective process we haven’t entirely thought of yet. Possibly related to how quickly you send in an email.

As a blogger, there’s one other official way to win a free ticket, ICE is sponsoring a contest to give away a pair of tickets to bloggers who write the best post somehow related to one or more of: “Innovation. Creativity. Enterprise. ” Details. Heads up though, the deadline is tommorow. The tag you want to use is “ICE08″.

Speaking of learning and hacking with iPhone and Android SDKs, head over to Montreal Techwatch if you are meeting up with other mobile developers to share and kick around ideas. Sounds awesome. The date Wednesday the 19th has been suggested, in downtown Montreal.

The event will go ahead if there are more than 4-5 people interested. Somehow, I don’t think that will be a problem.

Definitely thinking that WirelessNorth.ca should organize something like this in Toronto (and elsewhere) as well. Stay tuned, and subscribe to this blog for future announcements….

Update: Looks like the final date is set for Friday, 21 March at “Station C” in Montreal more details.