Backblog

In just over one year, Canada is scheduled to complete the digital television transition, as stations switch from analog to digital broadcasts. While cable and satellite subscribers will not notice the change, over one million Canadians that rely on over-the-air signals will be affected.  Despite the experience in other countries that left many consumers without digital converter boxes staring at blank screens, my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) argues the Canadian government seems content to leave the switch to the private sector, implausibly claiming "industry-led solutions will ensure a smooth transition for consumers."

My latest Service Provider Views column focuses on HUCS - Cisco's Hosted UC Solutions launch, which we were pre-briefed on at C-Scape. I've been wanting to add my take on this since then, and this column has been the right place to do that.

Ever since Panorama started in 2005, frequent blogging has been one of our keys to sharing insights and client experience with the ERP community. Over the years, we have focused on sharing best practices around topics ranging from ERP software selection, ERP implementation best practices, and organizational change management. This year, we’ve upped the ante by expanding our author base to include more of our 25+ employees.

In the July/August MIT Technology Review was an article Inexpensive, Unbreakable Displays that discussed some of the efforts at HP to create a process for roll-to-roll silicon electronics on plastic. The full article goes into quite a bit of detail about the process as well as some of the potential applications. No doubt, it is quite a shift from the brittle single crystal silicon solutions in electronics today.

The CRTC has launched a new public consultation on basic access, including a YouTube video designed to generate broader participation.  The consultation, which is part of a broader proceeding, includes five questions on telephone, wireless, and Internet services.  The deadline for submission is August 10, 2010.

Lisa Nirell’s book, Energize Growth NOW: The Marketing Guide to a Wealthy Company, is a bible for founders looking to energize their firms’ growth. Many of its points ring equally true, in my view, as guideposts for energizing sales growth.

It has been an interesting few weeks watching the developments in the smart phone market. With Apple launching their new iPhone 4 (with all the associated bad press related to dropped calls) to competing devices running on the Android platform to the announcement today of BlackBerry's new BlackBerry 6 operating system.

The CBC reports on a new study from Bank of America Merrill Lynch has an eye-opening rankings for Canada's major wireless providers.  The report finds that the Big 3 of Bell, Rogers, and Telus control 95% of the market, have the highest profit margin in the developed world and the lowest penetration.  Canadian carriers lead all 50 nations in highest average revenue per user despite below average data usage.

That should get your attention, right? For some, this is inevitable - and for others, this may seem unthinkable. Well, read on, and make up your mind. Is the desk phone on the way out, or not going anywhere?

One of our recent blog posts outlined The Seven Deadliest Sins of ERP implementations. A related poll question asked which of the seven variables were the biggest challenge for ERP implementations, and the results are interesting.

I am conducting research on the mobile application Foursquare (I still need participants). I have been conducting email interviews to better understand how and why people use Foursquare. As I have been chronicling my own usage as part of the research process, I thought I would include my own answers to some of my questions.

If you're interested in helping me out with these please let me know.

Last night I submitted my response to the government's digital economy strategy consultation.  A text version is posted below. A PDF version can be downloaded here.

The submission touches on a wide range of issues, including general concerns such as who leads the strategy, who pays for it, and the value in identifying openness as a general principle.  It then discusses specific concerns around infrastructure (broadband networks, net neutrality,  digital television transition, foreign investment), capacity to innovate (spam, security breach disclosure, Privacy Act, lawful access), and digital content (copyright reform, open data, open access, digitization, domain names).

In Q4 last year, Microsoft announced through its Interoperability @ Microsoft blog that it was planning to open up its proprietary PST email format used by Outlook. The data in .pst files has been accessible through the Messaging API (MAPI) and Outlook Object Model (two things of which my understanding is minimal at best), but only if the user has Outlook installed:

Just saw an announcement about HP and Microsoft working together to take the complexity out of moving to the cloud, by providing an appliance approach within an organizations data center. I heard about activities in this space for a while, but it’s nice to see it coming to light.

I'm conducting research for my PhD studies on Foursquare. I'm looking for Foursquare users to interview via email. All participants will receive a $5 (Canadian) Starbucks gift card.

It is stated that “of the estimated 14 million Millenial telecommuters, 69 percent of them report that they use whatever device, software, or site they want, regardless of corporate policies.” This issue is not new, as evidenced by this blog post from 2008, as companies start to have more telecommuters and employees become smartphone purchasers this consumerization of IT perspective is becoming even more widespread.

The Internet was once viewed as a "borderless" world that had little regard for the physical location of users.  That sentiment likely seems outdated today to many Canadian Internet users who have grown accustomed to clicking on links for audio or video services only to be advised that the content, site or service is not available in their area.

I'm doing consulting work for an organization looking to expand their e-Learning options. From my experience and readings about e-Learning, I believe it can take the following modalities, either in isolation or in combination.

In all sourcing agreements, pricing provisions are a critical component of the understanding between the client and service provider and are the basis for the business arrangement between the parties.

As we outlined in a blog post earlier this year, ERP implementations fail for five key reasons. Unfortunately, some of these failures lead to heads rolling, millions of dollars of budget overruns, and in some extreme cases, lawsuits against software vendors. In fact, the number of inquiries we have received to act as expert witnesses in ERP lawsuits has increased dramatically in the last twelve months.

In honour of Canada Day, I'm updating my list of Canadians who contributed to the Internet, cyberculture, or enabling technology. These are Canadian inventors, researchers, developers, business leaders, academics, and writers who either contributed to the development of the Internet and our understanding of it.

I’ve mentioned before the problems of the human attention span and the conflict with the ever increasing amount of information we gather for business and the need to engineer our environment to maximize our consumption of attention and decision making.