Archive: Wireless spectrum auction

(Originally posted November 30th, 2007 at hitmis.postopolis.com)

I wasn’t going to write about this - everyone else is. However, Ray sicc’d a reporter on me (thanks, Ray), and her questions made me think about a few things.

In short, by reserving a portion of available spectrum for companies other than the big three (Rogers, Telus, and Bell), the wireless provider pool should grow. And business theory suggests that more providers equals a better deal for consumers. Certainly, it means that a large incumbent company can’t just buy up all the spectrum and do nothing with it (from a Porter 5-Forces perspective owning all the spectrum would be a great way to block new entrants).

So, that’s the theory. And it remains to be seen if it plays out. But what is interesting to me is the players who are rumoured to be interested in entry - in particular Quebecor (owners of Videotron) and Shaw. Why those two? Well, they’re ISPs and cable companies. Shaw, at least, also provides home phone service over it’s network (VoIP, but they don’t call it that).

Why are these two interesting? Call it convergence. Now, as a consumer, I have one company providing entertainment, data, and voice services. One bill. Well, that’s not that big a deal. But, what if my cellular phone could seamlessly travel between my home WiFi network and the cellular network? What if I can seamlessly travel between any WiFi network (home, work, school, public…) and the cellular network? With my phone choosing the cheapest option at the time. Of course, this assumes WiFi networks are cheaper than cellular; hmm, or at least that some WiFi networks are cheaper.

Now, what if this integrated data, entertainment, voice service company also started looking at what services they can push out to their completely mobile customers? We don’t see a lot of folks watching TV on their cellphones in Canada. Is that because, like me, they prefer their huge HDTVs at home over 2-inch cell screens? Or, could it be that it’s just too expensive to get that much data streamed to your phone? Or a bit of both. Would more competition lead to more services? Would Apple finally launch their iPhone in Canada?

What do you think will happen in the near future? Will we have more competition? And if so, will it be there for the long-run?

Archive: Enterprise 2.0

(Originally posted on June 29, 2006 at http://hitmis.postopolis.com/)

It seems the corporate world is starting to take notice of the web-based tools and services that have made social software and ‘web 2.0′ so popular. An article in the Globe and Mail today discusses how businesses are able to use web services to enable collaboration and even building databases.

Michael Rhodin, general manager of IBM’s Lotus division, said the Web 2.0 method of “capturing collaborative wisdom…is a different take on knowledge management, which was fundamentally flawed.”

One of the latest entrants in this field is Vancouver-based Dabble DB, which came out of private “beta” mode this week and launched the public version of its service: An interactive database management tool that will spread joy to corporate project managers everywhere.

So I wandered off to check out Dabble DB and it looks pretty amazing from the demo. This is definitely a tool that would help small organizations or departments build databases to support specific functions. I wonder how scalable it will be. I guess I’m going to have to set aside some time to actually try the product for 30 days.