Gillian Shaw
Sun

1. Warpia Wireless USB Audio/ Video Adapter, Source R&D, $180 US

Recently launched by Source R&D, the Warpia USB adapter lets you stream media wirelessly from your laptop or desktop computer to your television. Put slideshows, photos, movies or streaming video on your big-screen TV or projector with a PC adapter that connects to a USB port on your computer and a display adapter that connects to a television, projector or monitor, offering both VGA and HDMI connectivity. Audio is supported through the HDMI port or through a 3.5-mm stereo jack. Wireless range is up to nine metres. www.warpia.com.

2. Powermat Home and Office Mat, Powermat, $100

Keeping all our electronic gadgets powered up can be a messy problem. If you’ve had it with octopus cords extending from every outlet, take a look at the new Powermat, in home and office or portable versions. The home and office mat charges up to three powermat-enabled devices wirelessly, plus one via a USB port. Comes with powercube universal receiver with eight tips. www.powermat.com.

3. BlackBerry Bold 9700, Wind Mobile, $450

From Canada’s latest entrant into the wireless market, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 comes with a no-contract price. The newly launched company is offering talk plans starting at $15 a month up to $45 for unlimited talk, text and voicemail, while in Wind home zones. BlackBerry data starts at $10 a month for unlimited use of such services as Facebook, MySpace, BlackBerry, Messenger, Windows Live, Google Talk and other networking services, to $35 for that plus e-mail for up to 10 accounts, as well as unlimited Internet, including tethering. Wind Mobile has launched in Toronto and Calgary, with Vancouver, Edmonton and Ottawa due to follow early in 2010. www.windmobile.ca.

4. M-905BTBluetoothNotebook Mouse, Agama, $30 US

Connect to any Bluetooth enabled notebook. With 1600-dpi resolution and eight-way scrolling technology that allows scrolling in eight directions without having to use the scroll wheel. www.amagazone.com.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Independent entrepreneurs can rent space for $200 per month

Gillian Shaw
Sun

“Co-working” and “hotdesking” are growing trends with companies that are abandoning high-priced real estate in favour of more practical — and less pricey — workspace solutions.

With inner-city Vancouver home to many independent tech and creative entrepreneurs, a newly opened shared workspace is a natural. It was created by Building Opportunities with Business, a non-profit aimed at supporting business development and job opportunities in the inner city.

High-ceilinged, spacious and located on the main floor of a building at 163 East Pender St., the shared open space gives tenants desk space, along with chairs, tables, couches and other furnishings that distinguish it from a less-inviting cubicle office. Art on the walls showcases local artists.

“If you are a creative person, you need a certain amount of energy. But you also need the ability to concentrate, and you need some peace,” said Lorraine Murphy, the night manager of the BOB space.

Murphy has been working out of cafes since another shared office, WorkSpace in Gastown, closed down earlier this year. “This has plenty of room. I like the fact we’ve got natural light with window seats. You can hang out with friends with a cafe or living-room kind of vibe in the front, and you can have your head down at a desk toward the back,” said Murphy.

“Co-working gives you that sort of energy without the chaos of a cafe.”

The shared workspace is only one initiative of BOB, which is also involved in job programs and an initiative to improve the facades of vacant storefronts in the Downtown Eastside and in Chinatown.

“We hope that this open shared work space can contribute to the revitalization of the inner city by providing a space for creative professionals to flourish, for ideas to percolate, to cross pollinate, for businesses to grow, a place where stuff gets done,” reads BOB’s announcement of the new shared workspace.

Wi-Fi, a fridge, microwave, filtered water cooler and secure bike storage round out the offerings that come at a flat rate of $200 a month.

“We’re looking for creative professionals, progressive thinkers, the socially responsible and ecologically conscious who want to be surrounded by others of like mind. Folks who want more than a cubicle and a 9-to-5, and dream of bigger things and a better Vancouver to call home,” reads the announcement by BOB.

For information on the newly launched centre, e-mail [email protected], or check the Building Opportunities with Business website at www.buildingopportunities.org.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Unwary Canadians are bilked online, watchdog says

John Bermingham
Province

It’s a case of “caveat clicker” when it comes to avoiding online fraud, according to consumer watchdogs.

The worst Top 10 Scams of 2009 have an e-commerce focus this year, bilking B.C. consumers and businesses of millions of dollars and identity theft.

Online fraud watchdog PhoneBusters.comsays e-mail, Internet and text-messaging scams have bilked Canadian consumers for $16 million between January and November.

Lynda Pasacreta, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Mainland B.C., said people have flocked to the Internet, without realizing they have to read the fine print before clicking “yes.”

“The key to avoid becoming a victim is education,” said Pasacreta yesterday. “We still see a huge knowledge gap. Web marketers are savvy to consumers who click first, and ask questions later.”

This year’s online scams run the gamut, from teeth-whitening products to text messages.

People sign up for a free trial, only to be hooked into monthly membership fees of up to $100, and can’t get them stopped. Or they get roped into monthly bills for premium text-message services, without realizing that they signed up when playing an online quiz or IQ test.

Another common scam is an investment opportunity, where a slick promoter entices investors to recruit others into the scheme, in return for commissions.

A survey this year by the Canadian Securities Administrators found that 48 per cent of B.C.’ers have been approached with a fraudulent investment, and 11 per cent invested.

“These investments appear lucrative, but often involve more hype than substance,” said Pasacreta.

Other popular scams include:

– Selling unauthorized, even counterfeit drugs and health products on the Internet.

– Cashback fraud, where a buyer sends a cheque for a larger sum, then asks the seller to transfer the difference, only to have the original cheque bounce.

– Office-supply scams, where telemarketers convince a business to make an order for over-priced supplies, then sends aggressive collection agencies demanding payment.

Government regulators say they’re going after the fraudsters, some operating from B.C., and are helping consumers who’ve fallen victim.

“We are seeing more consumers contacting us from places in the United States,” said Victor Hammill of the Competition Bureau.

Melanie Flint of Consumer Protection B.C. said it investigates consumer complaints, and helps them get out of contracts they didn’t understand, with the voluntary compliance of suppliers.

You can get more information on the Top 10 Scams, and how to avoid them, on the BBB’s website, at mbc. bbb.org.

© Copyright (c) The Province

Gillian Shaw
Sun

1 Handsfree Rearview Mirror Speakerphone, Yada, $150

‘Tis the season to find a solution to that pesky problem of trying to talk on your cellphone and drive at the same time. While the most effective solution is it to simply lock your phone in the trunk of the car while you’re driving, there are hands-free Bluetooth options and this one from Yada doubles as a rearview mirror. It clips over the mirror of your vehicle and works as a speakerphone, linked via Bluetooth to your cell or smartphone. It comes with a car charger and fully charged offers 25 hours of talk time and 650 hours of standby time. Only available through Canadian Tire. www.letsyada.com.

2 Beamer, Quirky, $38 US

A new idea from the collaborative design Quirky community, the Beamer is an iPhone case with a built-in light. It can be a flash for your iPhone’s camera or just act as a regular flashlight when you find yourself floundering around the dark. The LED is incorporated into a hard plastic case and it can flick on for 10 seconds for a photo shot or press the button twice in a row to leave the light on. It comes with a replaceable coin cell battery that gives up to 10 hours of light.www.quirky.com.

3 Endeavor HX1, Motorola

Motorola’s new Endeavor HX1 is the first Bluetooth headset to use of true bone conduction technology, making it possible to be heard even in noisy environments, like construction sites or nightclubs. Under regular background conditions, you can rely on Motorola’s CrystalTalk technology to deliver clear sound but if your work (or play) finds you trying to shout into your headset under impossibly noisy conditions, you can switch to the headset’s stealth mode in which the ear sensor uses bone conduction to tap your vocal vibrations and convert them to speech. It’s the same technology used by special military forces, so it’s up to the task of making you heard over the noise of your local club on a Friday night. www.motorola.ca.

4 Broadband2Go, Virgin Mobile Canada, $150

Virgin Mobile Canada has its new Broadband2Go, prepaid wireless 3G data without a long-term contract.

Broadband2Go is available with a Novatel Wireless USB modem priced at $150 through the Virgin Mobile website and at Future Shop. As part of the launch, buyers get their first month or one gigabyte of data at no charge if they activate the modem online. After that, data costs $45 for one gigabyte or one month of use, whichever comes first. It’s pricey compared to pay-as-you-go data offerings in other parts of the world but it’s a no-contract option for those who don’t want to be locked in to a long-term deal.www.virginmobile.ca.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Tablet personal computer launch to take on Kindle

Province

Apple Inc. is preparing to launch a tablet personal computer in late March or April, with manufacturer partners poised to roll out as many as one million units per month, according to an Oppenheimer research note.

The highly anticipated tablet is expected to pitch Apple into the digital-book market popularized by Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader. Apple declined to comment.

Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner said the new tablet could boost Apple’s earnings per share by 25 cents to 38 cents per quarter, assuming that it sells one million to 1.5 million units each quarter at an average price of $1,000 US and a corporate average net income margin of 22 per cent.

“Our checks into Apple’s supply chain indicate that the manufacturing cogs for the tablet are creaking into action and should begin to hit a mass-market stride in February,” Reiner wrote.

“The February ramp schedule suggests a late March or April commercial release, since Apple will need to build at least five-to-six weeks of inventory before going live.”

He said the tablet will have a 25-centimetre multi touch LCD screen similar to that of Apple’s iPhone.

Apple has also approached book publishers to distribute their content electronically, and has offered them a revenue cut of 70 per cent without requiring exclusivity, Reiner said.

He said that compares favour-ably to the Kindle’s 50-per-cent deal, and that Kindle only offers a 70-per-cent cut to publishers that give Amazon exclusive rights.

“As innovative as it is, we believe the Kindle has disgruntled the publishing industry [book, newspaper, and magazine] by demanding exclusivity, disallowing advertising, and demanding a wolfish cut of revenue,” Reiner wrote.

“The tablet is set to change that.”

Reiner forecast Apple’s fiscal2010 profit at $8.39 per share, compared with $6.29 in fiscal 2009, saying his estimate has not yet factored in the new device.

© Copyright (c) The Province

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Facebook rolled out long promised changes to its privacy settings Wednesday, giving users item-by-item control over the information they share and restricting minors to sharing content only with friends and people in their school or work network.

But at the same time, the world’s largest social networking site is letting users share their Facebook information with the online world, with an ‘everyone’ option that means words, photos, videos and other content can be picked up by Google and other search engines and viewed by anyone on the Internet.

Elliot Schrage, vice-president of communications, public policy and marketing for Facebook, told a conference call Wednesday that the new system is based on “contextual privacy,” letting users control the privacy level of “every single thing they share.”

He said the move was made in response to requests from users and from privacy experts. Canada’s privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has called for more stringent privacy controls in a report that criticized Facebook over its sharing of users’ information.

Facebook said it has been “working closely” with Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in coming up with the revamped privacy measures and promised further action to address the privacy commissioners concerns.

The changes for Facebook’s more than 350 million users will come to their attention when they sign into an account and are prompted to check the new options and review their privacy settings. Users can skip that review once, but it will pop up again when they sign in after 24 hours have passed.

It’s a shift to a personalized privacy model over Facebook’s old model where users might set privacy settings once and either not understand the implications or forget what they have chosen to make public.

The biggest change allows personalized and contextual control over words, photos, videos and other content that is shared, allowing users to opt to share it with friends, friends of friends or everyone. There is also an option to create customized groups so that only people in a particular group could see certain information or could be blocked from specified viewers.

Regional networks have disappeared in the change. While users can opt to show where they live, they are no longer automatically linked to a network that in the case of centres like London, in the United Kingdom, could amount to millions of users.

Instead, users can choose to be part of a network, such as a school or work network, where participants are verified according to their e-mail addresses.

For users who are under 18, even specifying the ‘everyone’ option will only make that information available to friends, and people who are friends of those friends, or a verified network.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Online world of Chinese-language apps rife with pirates, payment problems

Joanne Lee-Young
Sun

By the time Apple Inc. made its iPhone available through an official carrier in China a few weeks ago, some two million handsets were already unofficially buzzing there.

It’s a whole other online world–one rife with many pirates and payment problems– but some programmers in Vancouver have their eyes on a surging market for Chinese-language apps.

These techies may be few in number and hard to notice–most have regular day jobs; a few are transient; all are still seeking funding–but they are plugging into what could be a dramatic shift.

As Google chief executive Eric Schmidt recently declared, in five years, the entire Internet will be dominated by Chinese language (and social media) content.

Co-founders Joseph Luk and Zephyr Liu didn’t actually have grand plans for China when they launched ikamobile MovieFinder, an app that allows Android (Google’s smartphone operating system) users to quickly find show times, theatres and movies based on their location.

The two–Luk from San Francisco and Liu from Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province–met while completing their master’s degrees in computer science at the University of B.C. After graduating, they got together, mostly online–Luk was working in Tokyo, Liu in Vancouver –to brainstorm ideas and code.

Ikamobile Movie Finder was just getting popular (about 250,000 people worldwide have downloaded it now and it recently got a mention in the New York Times) when Liu’s spouse back in Chengdu couldn’t get a tourist visa to visit him in Vancouver. “His wife gave him an ultimatum: ‘Come home, or else!'” Luk said. “It just happened. He had to move back to China.”

At home in Chengdu, “it was trivial for him to translate” content and access local data, Luk said. This August, the company released a Chinese-language version of ikamobile Movie Finder for cities in mainland China. “We are working on deals with Chinese movie theatres and studios to allow users to buy movie tickets on their mobile phone,” said Luk, who is looking for funding in Silicon Valley, but also from angel investors in Asia.

Xiaofei Wang and Ying Su of Vancouver-based CompuSense BC, another startup, also met as classmates in UBC’s computer science program. Both were already graduates of Tsinghua University in Beijing, which is often dubbed China’s MIT. Wang worked for many years at Tsinghua’s national research lab, helping to develop China’s digital-television standard. Their product will allow Chinese language users to control home, office or industrial equipment such as air conditioners, security cameras, sprinkler systems and water pumps from a mobile device like an iPhone.

Wang is returning to Beijing, where his wife is expecting a baby, and where he will work with other Tsinghua alumnae to develop hardware, seek funding and attract customers in China. In December, he will participate in round two of a Chinese government-sponsored competition for encouraging tech startups. The goal will be to catch the attention of venture capital firms. Su, a Canadian citizen, will run a software application design team for the company in Vancouver.

Opportunities abound, but there are also challenges and failed attempts by Vancouver-based companies to get a slice of the mobile software market in China. Having someone physically on the ground in China is important for keeping up with the market, said Steven Shi of Vancouver-based startup DrillionNet, which is developing Mopon, a location based app that allows retailers in China to attract consumers with mobile coupons.

Shi has worked in Vancouver for about a decade and is developing the Chinese language app with a Beijing-based partner, his cousin, who is an advertising executive there.

“When you can stay on top of the wave, that’s a good feeling,” Shi said. “I go back (to Beijing) every year, but still, a lot of things change quickly. Maybe people feel that coupons are annoying? How do we handle that? We can’t simply have them pop up. What do people want?”

The other China minefield is its lively market of fake devices and pirated software. The majority of smartphones are rip-offs or are “jail-broken” to run apps outside of what is offered by official vendors. While this might send some developers running, Luk of ikamobile sees it as an important “school of hard knocks.”

In particular, he points to a so-called “shanzhai” movement in China, which actually celebrates the ingenuity and cleverness of home grown Chinese knock-offs. “You get this incredibly low-priced hardware that has crazy amounts of functionality because they just copy everything, albeit illegally. I think it’s unique to China and that we need to keep an eye on it. It’s like a grassroots movement of the people where they get chosen based on their merits,” as opposed to their brand or backer.

“There is a business model issue. Formy company, having one foot in China forces us to consider that value system as well. From the start, we have never considered selling our app for money. We automatically discarded that possibility. We are very careful about ads.”

In many ways, Luk said, the Chinese market is a crash course in the future. “If you can find a way to succeed in China, where there has never been a culture of paying for software, you can probably do it in North America, where things are moving to a more open and competitive environment and you will see less people willing to pay $5.99 for an app.”

Looking back, Luk, an American, says that when he got laid off from his Silicon Valley job in 2001, he had offers to do grad work at top computer science schools in the U. S. It was tough, for example, not to pick Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but now he is grateful for inadvertently landing instead at UBC with its cosmopolitan mix of international students, many who come just for that and because visa restrictions are looser than in the U.S.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Gillian Shaw
Sun

C2 Portable Backup Drives, Clickfree, $140 to $190 US

These are the next generation of the Clickfree portable backup drives, bringing hardware-based encryption and some other useful features. It can extract attachments from your Outlook or Outlook Express e-mail; it will do scheduled backups; and one drive can be used to back up multiple computers. Comes in 250 gigabyte and 500 gigabyte, with a larger version expected out soon. Automatic so you don’t have to worry about hitting the wrong buttons or backing up the wrong files. No excuses for not backing up your computer. www.clickfree.com.

Da Vinci Micro Aerial Vehicle

Ornithopter, Interactive Toy Concepts, $50

Add a bit of fun to the upcoming holidays with this high-flying toy from the Toronto-based Interactive Toy Concepts. Flying like a bird, it goes up, down, left and right, all following directions from the controller. Its wingspan is less than 13 centimetres, height just over 2.5 centimetres, length just under nine centimetres, and a very lightweight 3.5 grams. www.interactivetoy.com or www.thesource.ca.

Savant, Apple-based control and automation system, Evolution Home Entertainment Corp., from $6,500

Pricey, but beats building a new house. Savant’s home automation application creates an automated solution that combines audio, video, lighting, security, climate, communications and the Internet into one system, with customizable touch panels and remote controls. Savant’s system can turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a controller that can manage the house even when you’re far away. Now, if it could just get the kids to keep their rooms clean. www.savantav.com.

Kindle, Amazon, $259 US

Amazon’s popular electronic book, up until now only available for our American neighbours, has finally arrived in Canada. You have to order it from Amazon’s U.S. website though, so tack on border fees that, along with taxes, will bump to price up to around $330 Cdn. For that, you get a reading machine that lets you download books wirelessly, either via WiFi or through a 3G connection that is included in the price of the books or subscriptions you buy, so you don’t have to have a mobile data plan with a Canadian carrier. Store up to 1,500 books on the device. If you don’t want to keep them on your Kindle, you can also leave them on your own electronic bookshelf with Amazon. Kindle’s store has more than 300,000 books available for Canadians, not as many as available for the U.S., but Amazon says more are being added all the time. Prices are typically $12 or less. Unlike Sony’s eReader, the Kindle uses a proprietary format. www.amazon.com.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Mitch Joel
Sun

It’s funny how new things can sometimes feel old. And, in the same breath, it’s one of the most ridiculous things that can happen to a business. That “thing” is following whatever new and shiny object is currently the mass-media darling when it comes to technology and new media.

As new as Facebook still is (the company was founded in 2004, but only started opening its online social networking doors to those without a university e-mail address in late 2006), there are now many people who feel it’s “sooo May 2009″ and have moved on to other online social networking platforms like Twitter. Even Twitter seems to be feeling a little old-ish when compared to foursquare.

What? You haven’t heard about foursquare yet? (Fret not, we’ll look at the latest mobile/web craze that lets everybody know where you are in an upcoming column). The truth is, none of this is old, and most of these online spaces haven’t even hit the business equivalent of their puberty yet. With all of those people connecting and all of this media attention on them, it’s important to remember that Facebook is still fairly new and evolving … right before our eyes.

One of the most fascinating facts about Facebook came from the blog, ReadWriteWeb, this past July, where it was announced that there are now more grandparents than high-school students on Facebook (it’s a stat I quoted in this column about a month ago, but it bears some more in-depth explanation). On one hand, it totally contradicts everything the majority of us thought about Facebook. We all believed that Facebook was overflowing with university students more interested in posting frosh photos of themselves (and their friends), doing things that none of us would want in a public forum (let alone on a space that any and all of our future employers might see). On the other hand, that many grandparents on Facebook makes perfect strategic sense. And if you have teenage children, you know exactly what I’m talking about: The best person to monitor what your kids are up to online are those kids’ grandparents. In North America, it’s not uncommon for kids to have four, six or even eight grandparents. So, they join Facebook to see what their grandkids are up to. But then grandma gets a friend request from a third cousin who lives in Europe whom she hasn’t seen in over a decade, then she gets another friend request from someone she dated back in high school before she met granddad, and the next thing you know, it’s like a scene out of The Matrix, and grandma just took the red pill right down the rabbit hole. Now, she’s hooked on Facebook and getting all of her friends and family to join. Just like those high-school students … and just like you and me.

As this growth and transition of its user base continues, Facebook has been adapting. From issues of privacy and terms of service, to figuring out how to make advertising work and other monetization strategies, Facebook is not utopia. It has been challenged, and will continue to be challenged. What community with over 300 million active users doesn’t have its kinks? According to Facebook statistics, more than eight billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day, and the average user has 130 friends. Beyond the pokes, status updates, and rounds of Mafia Wars, there’s some other, deeper and more powerful connections happening … and this has a huge impact on how business works.

Earlier this week, Sysomos (a Toronto-based social media analytics company) released a report titled Inside Facebook Pages, which analyzed nearly 600,000 of these pages that are essentially profiles for brands of all kinds (organizations, companies, and celebrities of varying degrees of popularity). These Facebook pages have a similar look and feel to those of our personal profile pages, but they have additional functionality. The pages were introduced back in 2007, and have had a huge impact on how brands build community and connect to their consumers. This first large-scale study of Facebook pages looked at everything from popularity, amount of content posted, number of fans, and more. The report also provides businesses with a birds-eye view into what people are doing and what they are connecting to.

According to the report, the average Facebook page has 4,596 fans, and only four per cent of the 600,000 pages analyzed have more than 10,000 fans. Only 297 Facebook pages (about 0.05 per cent) have more than a million fans, and those pages have nearly three times as much owner-generated content than an average page. But those same pages have nearly 60 times as much fan-generated content. These stats reiterate how hard it is to get consumers to create content for brands, and how hard brands must work to truly build any semblance of community.

Just because Facebook is so popular does not mean it is any kind of marketing silver bullet for your business. In fact, just because people are there, interacting and connecting, doesn’t mean that they care about your business or brand. Beyond figuring out what the business case is for you on Facebook (which is a great first step), what we do learn from reports like Inside Facebook Pages is that brands can effectively communicate and connect with their consumers and fans in ways they could never do before. It’s exciting. It’s still early days. And it’s all still very new.

Mitch Joel is president of the digital marketing agency Twist Image and the author of Six Pixels of Separation.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Backup drive protects everything on your computer

Matt Hartley
Sun

Bryan McLeod just might be the best insurance salesman in the tech industry.

For the sake of his company, Storage Appliance Corp., he had better be.

Mr. McLeod knows the technology his firm sells isn’t something the average person tends to think about on a daily basis. After all, computer backup drives are hardly a sexy business.

Like fire or flood insurance, he knows that just because people don’t tend to think about backing up the thousands of digital pictures, songs and movies stored on their computer’s hard drive, it doesn’t mean they don’t need to, or want to.

“It’s not like when you buy an iPod,” he said. “With an iPod, you do the setup process… and then all of a sudden you’re listening to beautiful music.

It’s great. There’s instant gratification.

That’s how people think. What do you get when you back up? All you get is peace of mind. It is truly insurance.

You’re protected for ‘someday.’ ” In this case, the insurance Mr. Mc- Leod is selling arrives in the form of the Clickfree Automatic Backup, a line of computer storage products designed to make the backing up of digital files on one’s computer as simple and painless as plugging in a lamp.

Simplicity is the “secret sauce” that drives Clickfree, Mr. McLeod says.

Like the product’s name implies, users don’t need to do anything but plug one of the company’s drives into their computer via a USB connection, and the software on the device automatically begins the backup process and starts transferring files.

That dedication to simplicity is quickly gaining attention from some of the biggest names in the consumer electronics retail space. Clickfree devices are now available in 25 countries and more than 10,000 stores, including Best Buy and Office Depot in the United States and Future Shop and Henry’s outlets in Canada.

While there are dozens of technology heavyweights – including Hewlett- Packard, Seagate and Western Digital – building storage devices, Mr. McLeod contends Clickfree can differentiate itself by pushing the benefits of easy backup, rather than pure storage.

However, retailers not only need to be convinced to carry the Clickfree devices, but also to charge $30 to $40 more than similar-sized computer storage devices sold by competitors, a data point he admits is the biggest stumbling block to getting his devices on to store shelves. (For example, a 250-gigabyte Clickfree drive costs about $140) Of course, Mr. McLeod’s personal track record helps. This isn’t the first time he’s launched a device into a crowded market with a price tag well above that of his competitors.

Before he invested in Clickfree – which was founded by Toronto entrepreneur Ian Collins in 2005 – Mr. Mc- Leod was chief executive of a Torontobased company that made universal remote controls for entertainment systems, called Harmony Inc.

Prior to Harmony, universal remote controls often were difficult to program and cost as little as $10. But by creating a remote control that could download information about the different devices in a user’s home entertainment system over the Internet, Mr. McLeod and his team were able to sell Harmony remotes for anywhere from $100 to $500.

“It seemed like the higher we went in price point, as long as we added the proper features into it like colour LCD screens… the more units we sold, because it was just a way better experience that actually was easier to program and could control your entertainment system,” he said.

Eventually, Harmony was sold to Swiss computer peripheral giant Logitech SA for US$29-million in 2004.

After spending three years with Logitech running the Harmony business, Mr. McLeod left and took over at Storage Appliance Corp.

“One of the things I’m always interested in is trying to take a commoditized category and try to turn it into a value proposition,” he said. “The reason I look for existing categories to turn into a value proposition is because it’s way less work.” “When you design a new product, you have to think, are you designing a product looking for a problem, or are you designing a product by identifying the largest unsolved problem?” he said.

The first time he realized the true scope of Clickfree’s potential was when the devices made their first appearance on the U.S. shopping channel QVC in April 2008. The channel reaches more than 90 million homes and has a predominantly female viewer base.

QVC had purchased 6,000 Clickfree drives and planned to showcase the products during eight, 10-minute spots throughout the day. During the first airing, QVC quickly sold out.

Mr. McLeod was forced to crawl out of bed in the middle of the night to call his manufacturer in China and place an order for 22,000 more devices so the company wouldn’t lose the rest of its time-slots on QVC that day.

“It tells you there’s a massive pentup demand if you can show somebody that there’s a solution that’s demonstrably easier,” he said. “All those women watching knew they had a problem that needed to be solved, they didn’t want their photos to be lost, their videos to be lost, so they bought all 6,000 units in the first 10 minutes.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun