Too late, novelty’s gone, critics say

Cheryl Chan
Province

The iPhone is coming to Canada by year’s end, said Rogers Tuesday. CNS file photo

The long wait for iPhones in Canada will soon be over.

Rogers Communications announced yesterday that it has inked a deal with California-based Apple Inc. to carry the iconic, much-awaited devices nationwide.

“We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year,” said CEO Ted Rogers in a brief statement.

“We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.”

Apple released the iPhone — a combination of phone, music player and web browser — in the United States last summer and in European markets last November, leaving Canadian consumers champing at the bit.

Al Kilburn, who runs Compare Cellular, an independent Vancouver-based website on Canadian wireless carriers, said he expects Rogers to roll out the highly-anticipated phones around the end of summer to capitalize on the back-to-school and back-to-work shopping period.

“It’s an entertainment device as opposed to a phone,” he said. “I think it will be great for Rogers, but it depends on how they package it.”

Yesterday’s announcement was short on details with spokespeople for both companies remaining mum on the phone’s retail price, date of release and monthly plans.

“I’d guess with the type of product it is, you can only utilize it to its potential if you have a data plan,” said Kilburn, who speculated Rogers would come up with a combination data-and-voice plan, or even a special plan just for the iPhone.

In the U.S., the phones are sold by AT&T with a minimum two-year contract and monthly plans that range from $59.99 to $119.99 and include unlimited web and e-mail transmission. The phones are sold separately — $399 for eight gigabytes and $499 for 16 gigabytes.

In Germany, where T-Mobile released the iPhones in November, an eight-gigabyte handset sold for $557.

The iPhones had a reasonably solid demand south of the border, said Felix Narhi, a Vancouver-based equity analyst with Odlum Brown who expects Rogers, the country’s only network to run on the GSM system, to do well.

“Rogers knows they’re the only game in town,” he said. “Given how successful Apple has been with iPod and Mac, it’s going to be a huge draw for customers in Canada, as well, to get this product.”

Narhi said part of the delay in bringing the iPhone to Canada is negotiations over the monthly packages to be offered to users.

“Apple probably wants a flat-rate monthly all-you-can-eat data plan, which in general Rogers has not wanted to do,” he said. “Apple really wants people to surf for whatever they want and not to worry about minutes, which takes way from the experience and the utilization of the phone.” Currently, Rogers does not offer any unlimited data plans.

Narhi said the iPhone release could hurt Rogers‘ competitors Telus Mobility and Bell Canada

“It could affect them on the high-end,” he said. “Now that we have number portability . . . a lot of people who would want the latest gadget, who would only get it with Rogers, might switch over.”

However, Eamon Hoey, of Toronto-based management consulting firm Hoey and Associates, said the release of the iPhone in Canada will be too little, too late.

“It just doesn’t matter anymore. There are now alternatives to the iPhone, which has been introduced everywhere else in the world. It’s no longer a novelty.”

He said the delay in the release demonstrates how far Canada lags behind other countries and chalks it up to lack of competition in the wireless industry.

Kilburn said there’s been a lot of demand in Canada since the iPhone was released, but during the lag, competitors have come out with other similar phones, such as the Windows-based HTC Touch smartphone.

© The Vancouver Province 2008

Companies use new technology to target the right advertisements to the right consumers

Hollie Shaw
Sun

TORONTO — Are you male or female? Married or single? In the market for a barbecue, or a shiatsu massage? If you are online, marketers can find out.

A predictive technology known as behavioural targeting is “growing like wildfire” in Canada after lagging 12 to 18 months behind the more entrenched U.S. market, says Hunter Madsen, marketing director at Yahoo Canada Co.

And that means consumers’ mouse clicks are revealing an increasing wealth of information to online advertisers eager for their attention.

“Purchase interest, at the bottom line, is of the most interest to marketers,” said Madsen, who studied at Harvard as a social scientist before moving into marketing and technology.

He described behavioural targeting to an audience at an Association of Canadian Advertisers conference recently as “matching ads with consumers whose recent behaviours indicate they might be interested in hearing from you, [the advertiser].”

Internet giants including Yahoo Inc., and Microsoft Corp., have long perused the movement of consumers on their own sites. But more recently, they have extended that reach into vast consumer networks by collecting data and placing targeted ads for outside marketers on thousands of third-party websites.

Marketers are hoping the inferences that behavioural targeting draws — a web surfer’s gender, age, financial status and location — will provide a clearer window into gauging consumers’ desires. Using simple web cookie technology, users’ online movements help Yahoo to create profiles of who those consumers are, based on time of day and topics browsed in search engines. This profile is finessed as a constellation of cooperative websites share information with each other. Ads are then targeted at consumers based on that profile.

Yahoo currently analyses these “predictive patterns” for consumer purchase cycles in more than 450 product categories and also tries to determine if the subjects are “engagers” or more serious “shoppers,” Madsen said.

Teams aided by computers classify every different search, looking at page views and time spent on the pages, ads clicked, search queries and search links. “We stand back and observe where [people] are going in the network,” Madsen said.

If a web user visits a site based on a search for autos, he said, a cookie from that auto site will carry over on to the user’s next web hit, (for example, a news site), and then serve up an auto ad. When that user checks her e-mail account, auto ads also appear.

The intensity of searching behaviour helps distinguish shoppers from engagers, or more casual browsers, he said. “If you click on [a destination] enough, you might want to live there. If it is sporadic, you might want to travel.”

Through this technology, advertisers hope to generate a greater “click-through” rate on the ads, resulting — hopefully — in higher sales.

That is attractive to marketers because the click-through rates for standard banner ads on major websites such as Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, have always been poor and continue to slide, falling to 0.27 per cent from 0.75 per cent in 2006, according to the online ad monitoring company Eyeblaster.

Behavioural targeting is an increasingly popular tool for marketers because “it works,” Madsen said, citing a study by Jupiter Research LLC.

The study found that advertisers who had used behavioural targeting in the previous 12 months said they were 28 per cent more satisfied overall with their returns from targeted ads than those who did not use the technology.

During a period in which 1.6 million Yahoo users looked up auto insurance, targeted ads resulted in a 73-per-cent lift in the click-through rate and a conversion rate from online browser to buyer four times higher than normal.

Behavioural targeting is becoming more popular as more Canadians look to the Internet to browse, research and buy goods and services. By 2005, an estimated 16.8 million adult Canadians, or 68 per cent of the population, used the Internet for nonbusiness reasons such as e-mail, information searches or booking flights, according to the Canadian Internet Use Survey from Statistics Canada.

Seven million Canadians that year — or 41 per cent of all Internet users in Canada — ordered goods and services online.

Online revenue continues to climb. Web researcher eMarketer forecasts that Canadian consumers will spend $20.9 billion online on goods and services in 2008, a 33-per-cent increase over the 2007 estimate.

But behavioural targeting is facing criticism over privacy issues, particularly as consumers’ awareness of the practice grows. A 2007 study from the University of California at Berkeley said 85 per cent of those polled thought sites should not be allowed to track their web surfing in order to target ads at them.

Last year, Facebook drew widespread user revolt for its Beacon program, which revealed its members’ online purchases to their Facebook friends.

After an outcry, the company changed Beacon so the user would have to give permission to the social network before Facebook published any information. Most companies, like Yahoo, are more subtle in their approach, and defenders of the practice say targeting is good for consumers because the ads they see are more relevant to them.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Michael Geist
Sun

Earlier this month, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the agency that manages the dot-ca domain, celebrated its one-millionth domain name registration. While that represents an important milestone, a far more noteworthy development is that CIRA also quietly announced the implementation of a new “whois” policy that will better protect the privacy of hundreds of thousands of Canadians and serve as a model for domain-name registries around the world.

The whois issue has attracted little public attention, yet it has been the subject of heated debate within the domain-name community for many years. It revolves around the whois database, a publicly accessible, searchable list of domain name registrant information (as in “who is” the registrant of a particular domain name).

When CIRA was first established, its whois policy permitted detailed disclosures about domain-name registrants. A typical whois entry included the domain name itself, the name of the registrant, and comprehensive contact information including postal address, phone and fax numbers, as well as e-mail addresses.

The ready availability of such information proved useful to law enforcement, which often used whois information as part of cybercrime investigations. Similarly, the pursuit of intellectual property infringement claims, such as domain-name cybersquatting cases, relied upon access to whois information to commence legal challenges to domain-name registrations.

Notwithstanding these uses, CIRA recognized that its policy of publicly disclosing personal information was generating significant discomfort among many registrants. Citing privacy and spam concerns, many registrants preferred to conceal their identity from the public (although CIRA and the domain-name registrar responsible for the registration would have access to the personal information). Moreover, registrants of controversial domain names, such as domains used for websites devoted to public criticism or political advocacy, often wanted to shield their personal information for fear of public censure.

As privacy and data protection commissioners began to express reservations about the legality of requiring domain-name registrants to disclosure their personal information, CIRA proposed a new policy in 2004. After two major public consultations, mounting opposition from law enforcement about its loss to “unfettered” access to whois data, and years of operational delays, CIRA last week began informing registrants that the new policy will take effect on June 10.

Under the new policy, CIRA will continue to collect the same contact information from registrants as under its current policy. However, it will no longer require that such information be publicly available through its whois directory. In its place, CIRA will only require the public disclosure of limited technical information, although individual registrants may voluntarily “opt-in” to provide more personal information.

While the CIRA policy protects the privacy of individual registrants, corporate or organizational registrants will typically have their full information publicly disclosed. The policy recognizes that corporate information does not raise specific privacy concerns since corporate information does not constitute personally identifiable information. Moreover, consumers may often want to access corporate whois information when judging the reliability of a website.

In order to ensure that domain-name registrants can still be contacted, CIRA has also established a unique message delivery system. CIRA will allow the public to contact domain-name registrants without access to their personal information by relaying the message through a web-based submission form.

The Canadian changes may be long overdue. However, they also instantly catapult the dot-ca into a global leadership position. With more than a million Canadian domain-name registrations, the resolution of the whois issue ensures that the Canadian domain-name space is set for continued growth as it now features a “privacy advantage” over other domains struggling to strike a similar compromise.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.

He can be reached at [email protected], or online at www.michaelgeist.ca

© The Vancouver Sun 2008