Too late, novelty’s gone, critics say

Cheryl Chan
Province

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

 

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

 

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

The picture is abundantly clear

Jim Jamieson
Province

What it is: Sony-Ericsson K850 Cyber-shot mobile phone

Price: Starts at $199 on a three-year contract.

Why you need it: You love the idea of being able to combine your mobile phone and digital camera in one device.

Why you don’t: Your camera needs dictate that you have a dedicated device for picture-taking.

Our rating: 4

I t has been a few years since we saw the first grainy pictures produced from a camera phone.

In the interim, the mobile phone’s ability to take credible pictures has grown immensely. No longer just a toy add-on, the picture-taking capabilities of some camera phones are now on par with quality point-and-shoot digital cameras.

That’s the case in Sony Ericsson’s latest offering. The two technology companies joined forces to produce multi-media phones and the recently-introduced K850 fits that profile.

Exclusive to Rogers Wireless, the K850 a candy bar style phone that features a five-megapixel camera with xenon flash and front facing-camera for video calls.

The device has access to Rogers‘ high-speed wireless network, which will facilitate video calling, fast music downloading and picture and video blogging.

As for photo dedicated features, the K850 has auto focus, an automatic lens cap, a 2.2-inch screen and something called BestPic, which is for shooting sports.

The camera takes nine pictures with one click of the shoot button, letting a user pick the best and delete the remainder.

It also features advanced digital camera features, such as Photo fix — to automatically improve light balance — and PictBridge to improve ease of printing.

Rogers offers a free eight-GB memory card (it must be redeemed online) with the phone.

A word of caution: this phone is aimed at consumers who are more interested in snapping photos than talking or texting, so consider that when checking it out.

© The Vancouver Province 2008

 

Sun

Chatterbot, WowWee, $50

Having a Fairy Godfather blathering away by your computer might work for kids doing homework — since we know all they’re doing is chatting with friends anyway — but it could wear thin with your cubicle neighbours at the office. Also in dog/cat and devil/angel versions, the Chatterbots come courtesy of WowWee, maker of flying and grounded robots. With more than 2,000 keywords, jokes and different actions in their repertoire, some of it at about the level of bathroom humour, it plugs into the USB outlet on a computer. It can synch with your calendar and comment on upcoming events or add batteries and plug into an MP3 to work as a standalone speaker. Works with PCs or Intel-based Mac computers. The perfect gift for someone you’d really like to annoy with a steady stream of wacky banter. www.wowwee.com

iWave Cube, $130

metres) and taking up the space of two small computer speakers, it’s a portable microwave so you don’t even need to leave your desk to heat up those nachos. Just what you need after sitting at your computer for hours — an excuse not to stand up to heat some food. Don’t blame us for that aching back. Weighing only 5.5 kilograms, it plugs into a standard outlet and comes with a built-in carrier handle and a view-through door. www.sharperimage.com

LG Rumour, $75 with a three-year plan with Bell Mobility

With a full QWERTY keyboard, a camera, camcorder and MP3 player, the Rumour is an all-in-one cellphone. The keyboard slides out, offering access to Facebook and it comes with Windows Live Messenger pre-installed so you can keep up your social networking on the go. The Rumour is Bluetooth capable with a four gigabyte expandable memory port. It’s available now through Bell in both white and black, with SaskTel and Virgin Mobile slated to add it to their lineups later this year. Check it out at www.ca.lge.com.

Westinghouse Digital 26” LCD HDTV/DVD Combo Unit, $600

For the cottage, the boat or the dorm room, this is another all-in-one and this time it’s all about entertainment. A trim package houses a high-def television, with front loading DVD player and multiple HD input connectors including two HDMI. It delivers 1366-by-768 resolution. At: www.westinghousedigital.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

72 per cent of Canadian homes now have at least one cellphone

Gillian Shaw
Sun

The traditional land-line telephone seems in danger of heading the way of the telegram.

Cell, cable and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services are gaining ground, with less than 25 per cent of Canadian homes relying solely on land-line service, according to a residential telephone survey released Wednesday by Statistics Canada.

Land lines as the only household phone service dropped to 24 per cent (3.1 million households) by December 2007, down from 29.6 per cent (3.8 million households) in December 2006.

British Columbia and Alberta are leading the shift away from land lines, while in Newfoundland-Labrador and New Brunswick, callers are holding onto the traditional service in higher numbers.

“There are no surprises in this survey, it bears out what we’ve seen,” said Shawn Hall, spokesman for Telus. “There is strong growth in the wireless industry and moderate loss in our home phones as that area of the industry faces increased competition.”

Hall said that while the cable companies are appealing to traditional land-line customers, Telus is making inroads in television service, which has been the traditional market of cable companies.

Hall said deregulation of the home phone business has also helped with the company bundling broadband Internet access and other services to compete.

In Alberta, only 14.3 per cent of households rely on a land line only for phone service, while in B.C. that number dropped to 20.8 per cent in 2007, down from 27.8 in 2006.

Canada-wide, land lines are still found in 86.9 per cent of households, but their dominance as the only phone service is in decline. Across the country, 72.4 per cent of households reported having at least one cellphone in the 2007 survey, up from 67.1 per cent in 2006.

More than six per cent of households across Canada reported they rely on a cellphone only for service, up from around five per cent in 2006.

British Columbia has the highest rate of cellphone-only users, at 10.2 per cent. Cable or VoIP services with or without other services are used by 13.1 per cent of households in the province, up from 8.9 per cent in 2006.

Canada continues to lag behind other countries in cellphone use, but Hall said it is catching up with the United States, and our low land-line services compared to places like Europe mean there is not as much incentive for consumers to switch to cellphone-only service.

“In Canada, you have the lowest home-phone service prices in the world,” he said. “In other countries, their home phone rates are less attractive.”

Canada-wide, 14.9 per cent of households use cable or VoIP, up from 10.7 per cent in 2007.

The survey — which was carried out for Bell Aliant, Bell Canada, MTS Allstream Inc., Northwestel Inc., SaskTel and Telus — also found that just 0.9 per cent of Canadian households don’t have any phone service, a figure that is down slightly from 1.3 per cent in 2006.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

Gillian Shaw
Sun

If you live outside the Lower Mainland and haven’t had to dial 10 digits to make a local call, you’d better start thinking about reprogramming that auto-dial.

Starting this June, everyone in British Columbia and Alberta will have to start dialing the area code along with numbers to make a call.

While Lower Mainland phone users have had to punch in 10 numbers for all calls for several years, people living in the 250 area-code region in B.C. or in Alberta were still able to get through with simply seven digits for local calls.

Increasing demand and a dwindling supply of phone numbers mean that starting June 23 everyone in both provinces will have to dial 10 digits for local calls.

Callers will have the summer to adjust to the change, with a “permissive dialing” period that will remind them to dial 10 digits the next time.

However, starting Sept. 12, there’ll be no such luxury, and all calls must include the area code or they won’t be connected.

Areas of B.C.’s Interior where there is high demand for phone numbers such as Kamloops and Kelowna, can also expect to start seeing 778-prefix numbers.

“The Lower Mainland switched over a few years ago,” said Telus spokesman Shawn Hall. “That was because the 604 area-code was running out of phone numbers, and now the same thing is happening with 250 — it is because of the increased use of wireless numbers.

“Now people often have several numbers, one for a home phone, a desk phone, a cellphone, cellphones for the kids, a BlackBerry — there is more pressure to supply phone numbers than there are numbers available.”

Hall said if the change wasn’t made now the industry would start running out of phone numbers for Alberta and BC starting early next year.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has approved a plan to extend the 778 area code currently in use in the Lower Mainland to the entire province, and a second area code, 587, is being added to Alberta to meet increased demand for numbers there.

Existing customers won’t see their numbers changed and the geographic boundaries that determine long distance call will remain the same.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

Playing Beamz is addictive fun

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Internet long-distance provider Skype announced Monday a flat-rate service that will let users call land lines around the world for only a few dollars a month.

For Canadians that translates to $2.95 a month for unlimited long-distance calls to landlines and cellphones across Canada and the United States. The company defines unlimited as 10,000 minutes a month, or the equivalent of five hours of talking each day.

For $9.95 a month, Canadians will be able to call people on their landlines in 34 countries, and for $5.95 they can make unlimited calls to landlines in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey.

It’s the latest price offering in an industry where the lucrative profits of long-distance calling have long since disappeared, and where Skype, a pioneer of Internet phone service that is now owned by eBay, is struggling to make money on what has largely been a free service among Internet users.

“It’s getting to be almost near impossible to make money out of this long-distance business because the margins are so slim and the volumes that you require — in terms of minutes of calling — are so great that only the specialists are remaining in the market, Skype being one of them,” said Eamon Hoey, a telecommunications consultant with the firm Hoey Associates. “If you look at the telephone companies, they have almost lost total interest in this market.

“They are not very competitive with most of what you’ve got out there, and I think they are just trying to harvest what they have. They’re trying to maximize their revenue and their margins within a declining market.”

Skype, which was acquired by eBay in 2005 in a $2.6-billion US stock and cash deal, has failed to generate revenue to justify the price tag, and caused eBay to take a $1.4-billion charge on its books last fall in relation to the deal.

Its announcement Monday marked the first time Skype has offered subscriptions giving users a flat monthly rate for calling landline numbers in 34 countries. The subscriptions come with various options, from unlimited calls to landlines in the country a user chooses, to unlimited calls to landlines in the 34 countries.

“This move is a natural step for Skype. Skype was founded on the principle of making free voice and video calls available to people all around the world,” said Stefan Oberg, vice president and general manager telecoms at the Luxembourg-based Skype. “And now we’re making it even easier for the Skype community to call their friends and family who are not yet on Skype.

“Our subscriptions give people an easy, hassle-free choice for how and when they want to catch up with their loved ones,” Oberg said in a release announcing the new subscription service.

Hoey said Skype’s new subscription service isn’t likely to impact long-distance rates in Canada.

“You get a price decline because somebody in the market has pricing power, and Skype does not have pricing power,” he said. “I don’t think Skype has the capability within the market, certainly not within the Canadian market, to dictate price.”

Hoey said the quality of Skype’s service doesn’t appeal to some users.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “It works for some people — my daughter used it when she was at university because it was cheap to call her buddies.

“But don’t call me on that thing. The quality of service is just not there.”

Voicemail is included in the subscriptions. While the new service doesn’t lock people into long-term contracts, the company is offering one-third off its rates for new subscriptions for a three-month or 12-month period for customers who sign up before June 1.

The company has 309 million registered users that it says have made more than 100 billion minutes worth of free Skype-to-Skype calls. Skype’s peer-to-peer software for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Pocket PC platforms allows users to make free Skype-to-Skype voice, video calls and instant messages.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Are you getting the message yet?

Jim Jamieson
Province

What it is: LG Rumour

Price: Starts at $74.95 on select plans on a three-year contract.

Why you need it: Your mobile phone exists more for tapping than talking.

Why you don’t: You’re a traditionalist who likes to do your messaging from a full-sized keyboard.

Our rating:

T alking has become a secondary activity for a growing segment of mobile phone users.

It’s no longer just young people who are using their phones to send texts, e-mail and instant messages and want to stay in touch wherever and whenever through social networking sites such as Facebook.

With this in mind, Bell Mobility just launched the LG Rumour, a mobile phone designed to make this capability as simple as possible for those who enjoy sending messages.

The LG Rumour is a bar phone with a slider keyboard (full QWERTY) — along with a numeric keypad — that includes a media player, 1.3 MP camera/camcorder, speakerphone and access to Windows Live Messenger, Facebook and GPS Nav.

This device is far from the only phone on the market with these kinds of specs, but is a lower-priced alternative to some of the other models.

Bell Mobility also announced the launch of Mobile e-mail, a push e-mail service for smartphones that operate on Microsoft Windows Mobile devices, as well as select Bell Mobility phones. The service also offers full personal information management (PIM) capabilities such as calendar, contacts, tasks and notes.

Bell says Mobile e-mail also features advanced security tools, including the ability to remotely lock the device or wipe all personal information in the event of loss or theft. It also has the capability to restore all personal information, if necessary.

Mobile e-mail is included with any data rate plan for smartphones, which start at $15 per month.

© The Vancouver Province 2008