Backblog | Trends

The Internet Society is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. They are a global organization devoted to maintaining a free, open, accessible, and viable Internet. I've recently blogged about the Internet Society's call for people to submit ideas for a new Internet Hall of Fame they are establishing.

RIM’s co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis clearly did not want to step aside. Lazaridis laid RIM’s foundation and Balsillie helped him build on it, and what they wrought was wonderful and a beacon for Canada’s tech sector.

TV as we know it is dying, but most people don’t perceive yet the dramatic change that is bubbling below the surface. In a stunning report released at CES, Accenture points to a wholesale collapse of traditional TV viewing. The study found that “the percentage of consumer watching broadcast or cable TV shows, movies, or videos on TV in a typical week plummeted from 71% in 2009 to 48% in 2011.”

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2012 is a wrap for another year. If you didn’t go, you certainly heard ALL about it.

What is geosocial and how does it provide ways for people to link products and services?

The “consumerization of IT” – or the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend – has emerged front and center, and a lot of CIOs aren’t very happy.  A recent article in Computerworld calls it a “thorn in the side” of most IT departments, and cites complexity, support, and security concerns.

Why do people use mobile devices? Which ones do they use and is their use growing? Yes it is - tablet use, for one, is growing rapidly - and this offers opportunities explains Nick Jones.

After another couple of month’s silence precipitated by some minor surgery, the holiday season and, quite frankly, too much “same old – same old” news, a couple of articles have caused me to, once again, put my fingers to the keyboard. The first, a blog – unfortunately his last with CIO.com, by Thomas Wailgum, IT in 2020: Will it Even Exist?, and the second by Marilyn Weinstein, again in CIO.com, The Power of IT Drives Businesses Forward. While the two titles might appear contradictory, I felt they were both saying the same thing in somewhat different ways, and that what they were saying is important – although not new.

I had an opportunity to spend some time wandering around Vancouver last weekend and the one store that caught my eye was HMV at the corner of Burrard and Robson. Initially a flagship store for this retailer in Vancouver, HMV has tried to reinvent itself adding electronics and a variety of other mechandise to stave off the hemorrhaging from loss of sales of its traditional business — music. For that it can thank the revolution started by Napster with the final nail in the coffin being the launch of Apple’s iTunes store and a new model for purchasing music in which users were able to personalize their selection and disaggregate the individual tracks from the album.

Napster Canada has advised its customers that it is shutting down operations effective December 16, 2011. The move comes weeks after Napster US became part of Rhapsody and users were assured that Canadians would be unaffected by the move.

In a pair of editorials recently (http://goo.gl/Tv2gE and http://goo.gl/0qSGQ) I discussed the problems at RIM and criticized the company both for its actual performance and for the way it communicated (entirely failed to communicate) with customers during the recent data outage.

This last year was another eventful time for the ERP software industry. Vendors continued to consolidate, the rate of ERP failures and lawsuits accelerated, and enterprise software technologies continued to evolve.

I recently attended a conference on locative media and the definition of locative media offered, and one that is often assumed, is that locative media are mediums that address a physical space through digital technology.

Akamai has released its latest State of the Internet report.  The report ranks Canada 13th worldwide for average broadband speed, down from a tie for 9th in the last quarter.

Bill Buxton opened a half-day conference on locative media this past Friday at Toronto International Film Festival's (TIFF) new building, by noting that it is not just realtors anymore asserting the importance of location, location, location.

Steve Jobs died too young and with a great deal of promise unfulfilled. Since the announcement of his passing — a shock, even though we should have been prepared for it — industry watchers, partners, competitors, friends and many, like me, who never met him, have offered tributes to the man who reshaped the computer industry.

Place is no longer a brackdrop for our information seeking, creation, and sharing. As I have blogged about there are multiple location-based mobile apps. Such apps enable information to be customized based on a user’s geographic position. Various commercial applications and research projects have shown users value geographic relevance in their information seeking scenarios.

You may have heard some buzz around the notion of gamification. The term has been characterized by some as the next frontier in web and mobile, one predicted to become as central to marketing as social media has become.

Earlier this year, I looked at the convergence of social media and mobile library applications. I found this was an area that could have a lot of potential to augment information services, but found little innovation in this area. The intersection of increasing user involvement in creating, finding, and sharing their own information, combined with the direct and ubiquitous access of mobiles has prompted discussion in library literature, but it appears little action - yet.

The International Telecommunications Union yesterday released its Measuring the Information Society 2011 report, which benchmarks information society developments worldwide.  The centrepiece of the report is the ICT Development Index, which tracks 11 different indicators focused on access, use, and skills (the eleven indicators are: fixed telephone line subscriptions, mobile subscriptions, international Internet bandwidth, households with a computer, households with Internet access, percentage of individuals using the Internet, broadband subscriptions, mobile broadband subscriptions, adult literacy, secondary and tertiary enrolment).

How's that for a big topic? I think about it a lot, but its demise looks increasingly inevitable, especially the way the FCC is talking these days. Much like the railroads, when the system becomes too expensive to operate, the operators start making noise and giving reasons why it needs to be scaled back or done away with altogether.

Using computers to facilitate brainstorming sessions has been (occassionally) talked about in academic and management fields for the last two decades, but I have never heard of it actually implemented in a real-life scenario. Back in 2008, I blogged about the potential and problems of electronic brainstorming, but I haven't encountered the topic subsequently.

Canada was scheduled to complete the digital television transition today [August 31, 2011], with stations switching their over-the-air broadcast signals from analog to digital. The transition represented a tremendous opportunity to advance the Canadian digital agenda leading to higher quality digital over-the-air broadcasts, freed-up spectrum that could be used to facilitate greater telecom competition, and the promise of billions in new revenues to fund a national digital strategy.

The past year has not been kind to Research in Motion Ltd., Canada’s leading technology company. The Waterloo-based maker of the BlackBerry smartphone has seen its share price nosedive in the wake of less than stellar launches of new products such as the Playbook, disappointing earnings guidance, and plans to cut its global workforce.

By now, you’ve heard about Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility. As the largest deal in Google’s history (a whopping $12.5 billion!), there has been, unsurprisingly, a flurry of debate and discussion. There may be some significant change on the horizon, but what does it mean for the industry?

To most reasonably informed Americans, there are some really basic things that its representatives in government should do, but lack the political will to execute. Without real reform, the middle class will continue to decline, forcing entrepreneurs to go to other markets, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of an increasingly smaller minority of people will accelerate the decline of the American Empire. Here are a few obvious steps that should be taken:

I've got some not-so-random thoughts to share from the last 2 days of Cisco C-Scape 2011. I'm not your typical industry analyst, so my take here is a bit different, and I just might get you to see collaboration a bit differently. If you want straight up analyst coverage, just mine the Twitter feeds that have been going non-stop.

There comes a time in the lifecycle of every business when it will inevitably hit a turning point. It may come in the form of a large-scale shift in business practices or perhaps as simple as reallocating funds for the next fiscal year. Change is necessary. Even the companies that produce staple products like toilet paper or band aids go through periods of experimentation or a refresh of the brand. Bottom line is that people (the consumer) get bored easily, and if you do not adapt to changing consumer landscapes, you will be left in the dust – ask Blockbuster. Did you ever think that the concept of ‘Video Rental’ would be a story you would have to tell your grandchildren about?

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's birthday. To commemorate this milestone and recognize McLuhan's ongoing relevance to communication and media theory, various organizations and people have been holding events or writing about McLuhan. Although McLuhan is generally regarded as Canada's preeminent communication scholar and is still well known for his theories and concepts such "The medium is the message" and the "global village", his role as predictor and shaper of digital technology is less well known.

In honour of Canada's birthday, I'm updating my list of Canadian individuals and companies who contributed to digital culture or technology.

The OECD has released its latest round of data on broadband services in 33 of the world's most developed countries [update: While today's release [June 23, 2011] is new and incorporates this information into the OECD Communications Outlook 2011, a reader points out the broadband data was first released two months ago].

It is definitely possible in this obsessively convenient world for you to literally never leave your house and still be completely social, stay current, be entertained, and even build a successful business. Pretty much anything you want to do, you can accomplish from a 10’ x10’ room.

I remember when there was no Google and Yahoo ruled the roost. Google clearly dominates now in functionality and commercial success, but over the years I've maintained a devotion to Yahoo that began even before there was a Google. My experience with Yahoo, however, provides a lesson of how to lose customers and also reflects Yahoo's progressive irrelevance.

Silicon Valley like its metallic namesake is shiny and alluring to those in the tech and digital media sector. In comparisson, Ontario often seems dull and staid. Although Canada has had its share of tech and Net success stories over the years, the news and blogs are saturated with coverage of the happenings in the Valley. Often Canadian tech companies are only covered in mainstream media when they sell out or move down south.

Earlier this month, Bell and Quebecor, two giants in the Canadian broadcasting and telecom landscape, became embroiled in a dispute over Sun News Network, the recently launched all-news network. At first glance, the dispute appeared to be little more than a typical commercial fight over how much Bell should pay to Quebecor to carry the Sun News Network on its satellite television package.

The CRTC issued its universal service decision this week, which included analysis of funding mechanisms for broadband access, broadband speed targets, and whether there should be a requirement to provide broadband access as part of any basic service objective. Consumers groups and many observers were left disappointed.

This recent TED talks video, featuring Wadah Khanfar, the Director General of Al Jazeera, entitled, “A Historic Moment in the Arab World,” discusses the ways in which a young tech-empowered generation have inspired a democratic revolution and offers and optimistic view on the way that media, especially social media, has helped this group create a new reality where they can walk out their fronts doors and affect change.

Some pretty interesting research that Skype has just released. They call this "The Living Workplace", and it explores how technology is changing how we work, how we view work, where we work, when we work, etc.

The Liberals have released their election platform and included within the section on the economy is the outline of a digital economy strategy.

When the usage based billing controversy grabbed national headlines last month, I posted several long pieces on the issue. My first post attempted to unpack the issue, focusing on the some the misleading claims about the supposed need for UBB at the wholesale level and putting the use of data caps in Canada in context.

Yesterday was the deadline for parties to the CRTC's hearing into usage based billing to submit their comments. Bell stole the show by dropping its wholesale UBB proposal and substituting it with a new acronym - Aggregated Volume Pricing (AVP) - that should allow independent ISPs to retain some flexibility when it comes to their Internet service plans.

I'm not afraid to admit it I haven't had cable tv in over 8 years - until recently that is. Partly this is due the ubiquitous crap on tv and it's partly due to the fact that I'm a horrid tv addict.

I was offline yesterday and thus missed the official launch of the federal government's open data portal.  Like many, I think is great that the government has finally moved on this issue as Canada has trailed far behind many other countries in making government data openly available for reuse for far too long.

Several weeks ago I posted the first installment of a 2-part blog that explored what the proliferation of Cloud-computing solutions means for contact center services, and I touched on the array of appealing offerings on the market today. Can the many potential Cloud-based solutions be beneficial for contact centers? Are truly virtualized operations achieveable? I encourage you to read part 1 if you haven't already.

A simmering battle over governance of the Internet is set to take centre stage in California this week as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based non-profit corporation charged with the principal responsibility for maintaining the Internet's domain name system, holds one of its regular meetings in Silicon Valley.

In the wake of social media’s influence on the political events in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, social media has now stepped up again to help inform the public about the situation in Japan since the tsunami hit last week.

It was chilly today so I didn't feel like getting out of bed to attend the conference I registered for. So I didn't. I just turned on my computer and laid back in cozy warmness. Yes, the Internet has truly allowed me to not only stay in my pajamas while working, but now to not even get out of bed. Most enjoyable conference experience ever.

Over the last year, I have been researching and contemplating usage of the location-based mobile application Foursquare. A one-time avid user, my own usage has lessened significantly over the last few months. This is due to the loss of novelty for me, a lack of critical mass of my friends using it, almost non-existent financial incentives, and Foursquare's interface limitations.

Industry Minister Tony Clement told a University of Alberta audience yesterday that "We asked (the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to review their decision, and if they come back with the same decision the cabinet would overrule it because it wouldn’t be consistent with government policy...promoting competition and choice."

As public frustration with the state of telecommunications services such as Internet access and wireless competition mounts, a relatively obscure government consultation on spectrum deserves far more attention.

Peter Nowak has a terrific post that responds to ten frequently heard myths about usage based billing.

As is often the case with House of Commons committee hearings, yesterday's Industry Committee hearing on usage based billing saved the best for last.