Backblog

On Tuesday, Facebook annnounced that their Timeline profile would now be available to users worldwide. Although it's currently available only for personal profile pages, many have predicted that brand pages will soon follow.

When old becomes new again, ISVs look to telecom for pricing inspiration. For decades, the telecom industry has been honing what other industries are only now getting into – business models that start with simple subscriptions then add complex pieces such as sign-up/activity/event fees + bundles + add-ons + incentives + promotional products. SaaS operators are evaluating new ways to create multiple revenue streams from each customer by blending limits and usage (usage being the “activities” in which end-users engage in consuming or interacting with goods and services).

For many years, the most prominent critic of the Canadian online music market has been the industry itself. The Canadian Recording Industry Association (now known as Music Canada) has consistently argued that few would want to invest in Canada due to the state of our copyright laws.

Unfortunately, ERP implementations still aren’t any easier than they were 15 years ago when I started in the ERP world. Despite the enterprise software industry’s best intentions to mitigate risk with cloud ERP systems, implementation accelerators, and other tools, ERP failure rates are still high and most projects still take more time and money than expected. For example, our 2012 ERP Report, which will be released next week, shows that nearly half (44-percent) of all ERP implementations fail to deliver at least half of their expected business benefits.

For journalists, bloggers and techies alike, last week passed in a whirlwind of headlines covering the controversy surrounding SOPA, the proposed anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. Some of the powerful language used to characterize the dispute? Protest, blackout, fear and censorship, to name but a few. Some of the bill's opponents, namely Mashable's editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff, have declared that the passing of SOPA, if it were to occur, would be a regression into the "Dark Ages".

While preparing for my recent survey exploring sense of place and location-based services, I wanted to find out the mobile device types and usage patterns of participants.  I have previously offerred my take on the definition of mobile device and blogged on What exactly is a mobile device.

My post this week on the behind-the-scenes demands to make Bill C-11, the current copyright bill, more like SOPA has attracted considerable attention with mainstream (National Post, La Presse) and online media (Mashable, Wire Report) covering the story. The music industry alone is seeking over a dozen changes to the bill, including website blocking, Internet termination for alleged repeat infringers, and an expansion of the "enabler" provision that is supposedly designed to target pirate sites. Meanwhile, the Entertainment Software Association of Canada also wants an expansion of the enabler provision along with further tightening of the already-restrictive digital lock rules.

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.

If you're local and interested in where mobility is heading in 2012 - and who isn't? - you'll want to join me at the next MobileMonday Toronto event.

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.

Deloitte Canada has been running this event for 11 years, and yesterday's TMT Predictions 2012 in Toronto is the biggest one yet.

As much research continues into how we use location based services on mobile devices to access geotargetted information, I've been considering other ways we can access information about place.

You may be a physician, software developer or may just see a business opportunity. Millions of dollars are bing invested in health IT and electronic health records. Healthcare costs continue to climb and the only logical solution appears to be process automation as has happened in other industries such as travel and banking. EMR adoption has stalled in a number of provinces. There must be an opportunity for a new EMR system. Right?

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is the largest trade show of its kind worldwide. With 140,000 attendees, all the glitz and hype it’s all too easy to miss some really interesting new products that can be game changers.

It is more than one year since the US HITECH Act was announced, which defined the Meaningful Use incentive program to encourage adoption of EMRs by eligible providers including physicians and nurse practitioners. (Note: The terms EMR and EHR are used interchangeably in the U.S., although in Canada they applied specifically to physician systems vs. regional provincial electronic record systems.) So, what has happened in both countries over the past 18 months and how do the national programs compare against one another?

Would it surprise you to learn that only 30 per cent of Canadians own a smartphone? It surprised the heck out of me.

Leaders across all industries are realizing that product and service quality along with innovation are only as strong as the people and the processes behind it…But, what are the critical components of an effective employee reward and recognition program?…Is there a framework that companies can use to enhance and promote the effectiveness of their current business environment, to drive increased business performance and profitability?

The music industry may be ailing, but the emphasis placed by some on copyright reform may not be the answer. Michael Geist, speaking at the 2011 Nova Scotia Music Week, elaborates on reasons why.

One of the common themes we discussed in last week’s ERP Boot Camp is the ways that companies typically outgrow their ERP systems over time. Organizations change, enter new markets, respond to customer demands, and maybe even acquire other companies, leaving their more static ERP systems misaligned with business operations. In addition, companies also are often guilty of implementing software that is not aligned with business needs at the point of go-live, often because the company’s needs change during the course of the implementation or because the software was not implemented well in the first place. Simply stated, an ERP system that may have been a good fit 10-12 years ago is typically not well aligned from a business perspective later in the organization’s life.

Sometimes I think the ERP software market is a sham. After over 15 years consulting in the industry, I still see far too many overzealous system integrators and VARs hell bent on mismanaging customer expectations in order to close a sale. Worse yet, most that I run to in the industry fail to recognize perhaps the most important fact of ERP implementations: they have very little to do with the software itself. Sure, a good software solution is a prerequisite to a successful ERP transformation, but the reality is the business and organizational issues are hands down the most important things to adequately address when deploying successful ERP systems. Key among those business and organizational issues is user adoption.

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.

The past 12 months in law and technology were exceptionally active, with legislative battles over privacy and copyright, near-continuous controversy at the CRTC, and an active Supreme Court of Canada docket. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) takes a look back at 2011 from A to Z:

What does the term ‘Outsourcing‘ mean to you? Do you automatically think of a Slumdog Millionaire call centre, where hundreds of underpaid workers read from a script and barely speak English? Or does it make you mad, assuming that any company that ‘outsources’ is trying to cut corners and eliminate jobs?

This morning [December 15, 2011]  I attended a breakfast session hosted by IT World Canada, and it was a good update on the state of the channel, especially for serving the SMB market.