In a week, when Apple FanBoys are lined up outside the Rogers and Fido stores to purchase their iPhones and get locked into Rogers’ draconian service plan for the next three years, yours truly wil be cooling his heels waiting for a shipment from the UK to arrive at his door. In this package, likely a week after the launch, will be contained a couple of 3G iPhones from a friend in London.

This is a critical opportunity for you to vote against Rogers with the only ballot that counts: your wallet. You too will be able to purchase unlocked 3G iPhones from him on eBay about a week later.

Why go to the trouble? Well, let’s just say I’m conflicted. I want the new iPhone (love my old one) but I don’t want Uncle Ted taking my purchase of one as an endorsement of his brutal pricing plan. The Globe & Mail makes the following comparison:
“For example, for $75 a month, Rogers provides 300 weekday voice minutes, 750 megabytes of data and 100 text messages. In the United States, a customer gets 450 weekday voice minutes, unlimited data and 200 text messages for the same price.”
750MB for a frequent iPhone user, particularly one who uses the navigation and web browsing tools, is nothing. But in particular it’s the three-year lock-in that requires the greatest consideration. At that end of the deal, Rogers has you by the short-and-curlies. And your obligation to them will almost certainly outlast your 3G iPhone. Needless to say, many of us are pissed.
So how does it work? Well, let’s just say that you can finally thank the French for something.
Thanks to French law, it is illegal for Apple (or any mobile phone handset maker or carrier) to sell a locked phone in the French marketplace without also making the same device available in the popular pay-as-you-go mode, fully unlocked and portable to any carrier.
This puts a stick in the mud for Apple’s lock-in plan and means that France will likely be selling a substantial number of 3G iPhones, until ZiPhone learns how to software unlock them, to eBay resellers like my friend.
So yes, please go and sign the petition at RuinediPhone.com but, since I know you’re going to buy one anyway, get the French iPhone instead of buckling under peer pressure to lock into Rogers’ data plan. It might cost you more in the short run (ironic) but in the long run you will force things to change.
Software unlocking has already forced several key changes in Apple’s strategy that favour the consumer. But a flop of Rogers’ package pricing on the Canadian market can send a clear signal to both companies, and their shareholders. Industry Canada, which should be paying attention, can and most definitely should censure Rogers, and its wireless competitors for a long history of market-limiting pricing (not limited to the iPhone launch in Canada) that has rendered our country a wireless backwater.

Despite the fact that I often find myself on the opposing end of the table on most of what Microsoft does, I was really hoping to be able to agree with Ballmer on his assertions regarding Microsoft’s rejuvenated focus on search as quoted in today’s Financial Times article. I was hoping that, on the heels of their disastrously failed hostile takeover effort of Yahoo! that MSFT had a plan for Search that extended beyond paying people to use its engine, which has led to some amusing arbitrage opportunities reminiscent of late bubble-era scams.

Of course, Microsoft can afford to write these cheques practically ad infinitum, but if your tools are so lacking in perceived utility that you need to bribe people to use them (even if the graft is partially subsidized by affiliate fees), perhaps this is not really the best you could hope for from your marketing team.

You can’t take on Google by trying to buy, or even out-feature, your way into the blank-text-box Search Engine arena. Except for some regional players, like Russia’s Yandex, they’ve won and will not soon be replaced.

What Ballmer, and lots of other people, are missing is that the Search marketplace as we know it is poised for a change. Much of this change emerges from the fact that Google fundamentally owns the global Search Market, but much of the opportunity extant in this space comes from the fact that the technology behind search, and how people will make use of search engines in the future, will be a whole lot different than what you see when you type in www.google.com today.

…. but, there is light at the end of the tunnel for folks who are on the outside looking in at Google’s substantial (and impossible to dislodge) market share:

For most people, web search is a kludge.

Think about how you use Google today. Think about why you type things into that blank text space beckoning to you on your Firefox browser, or why you surf over to Google.com and enter a few snippets of text into that empty area amidst the sea of clutter-free Google whiteness ten, twenty, or maybe many more times per day.

In some cases, you overheard something being discussed in a coffee shop. Or you saw a billboard ad. Something offline motivated you to head to the blank text box and ask it to do your bidding. That is Google’s fundamental market opportunity and has remained largely unchanged since the first search engines began emerging in 1995.

This is, however, just a fraction of the reasons why many of us head to search engines. Often the reasons are as much motivated by inadequate information at one site as by anything else. An example: You’re reading an article from a wire service like Reuters, which rarely include photos, about a car or a submarine or a mountain. You’d like to see what that looks like, so off to Google you go. Or you’re looking at a new LCD on eBay, but the seller hasn’t listed the number and type of inputs that come with it; so off to Google you go to try and find the specifications.

In short, most often we go to Google to search for things because our browsers aren’t good at building pathways between like objects on the web. These types of Searches are what I call context-driven. You shouldn’t need to do this. You shouldn’t need to interrupt your surfing to drop off to a third-party site in order to add flavour to the web objects which have already garnered your interest.

What if you could press a button and instantly be delivered relevant information that is contextual to that which you are/were looking at? What if sites displaying articles from wire services (notable for their sparseness) were able to draw in information - in realtime - which added relevant photos, videos, or related stories?

Some of this is already happening, albeit rather jerkily. One of the leaders which started doing this some time ago was Sphere, which was recently acquired by AOL. It took them some time to draw the same conclusions as I have, and they had a difficult time monetizing these services. But on a great enough scale the same technologies which make relevant content possible also make relevant advertising possible. And while click-thrus will be fewer in quantity they can be greater in quality and therefore infinitely more valuable, thanks to much more accurate targeting.

Being accurate in driving these sorts of searches is hard. Whereas Google relies on its users to sift through its top 30 or so recommendations to find the most relevant information, contextual search engines need to be able to do that with high accuracy on the first few matches with little to no meatware — sorry, Mahalo. Many of the current buzzwordy trends such as the Semantic Web initiatives, Social Search, the shift from RSS to Atom, and API-accessible semantic processing are key enablers to make this easier, but there’s still a considerable amount of R&D necessary to beat Google’s current level of accuracy in this regard.

As a result, you need a long lead to get there, and few of the companies dabbling in the Vertical Search space have raised enough capital or have investors who have committed to developing these opportunities. But in the long run, this will augment Web Search and replace much of the traffic that is today driven by Google’s simple, primitive, empty text box.

What’s clear is that Microsoft’s desperate attempts to lure users to its essentially equivalent service to Google’s can only cost its shareholders. A new paradigm is necessary and, fortunately, the opportunity is ripe for the picking, right in front of us all.

This is a rare opportunity where the solution lies in good, solid R&D and product realization — not in leveraging semi-monopolistic product integration or in brute force advertising spending. Is Microsoft bold enough to understand, and embrace, the fact that Search is shifting? Do they have the product and engineering people to make this happen?

My friend Daniel Gibbons is shopping for a CMS for his new project. He’s posted interesting and in my view fairly accurate comments regarding Drupal and Wordpress. I’m quite the fan of WordPress, have spent a little bit of time with Matt and the Automattic crew and think quite highly of them.. and of course I use it for a bunch of sites, both corporate and personal.

Still, a couple of years ago I recommended that we deploy a Drupal site for EQO, where I was the VP Marketing. As seems to be common with a lot of Drupal projects, there was much forking of code and a great deal of customization required to make the thing feel like a true web interface. As a result it’s been a challenge for EQO to keep their site up-to-date with the latest versions and to reconverge with the growing Drupal codebase.

(more…)

Via MARKETWIRE:

Read the rest or post a comment »

This afternoon I was interviewed by Chris Heuer at the Blogtropolus Lounge @ Web 2.0 … we talked about Pulse and Something Simpler’s market-leading Relevance Engine. This should help the confused to understand what it is that we do.

The essay that I refer to in the interview is here: Relevance Engines and the Friendly Shopkeeper.

I keep forgetting to blog about this, or perhaps it’s because I’m ashamed of my wardrobe and bad hair day, but FindFindr did a far-ranging video interview with me on a rooftop in Gastown. I did my best to be interesting. They did their best in the editing room later. Enjoy!

Something Simpler will be trawling the aisles of Web 2.0 in San Francisco, and we’ll also be in situ at the Blogtropol.us Blogger Lounge for the first two days of the Expo. We’re giving away an Apple 23″ Cinema HD Display, and there are plenty of other fabulous prizes available, including a Nikon D80 Digital Camera and (rumour has it) a MacBook Air.

It’d be great to see you there… you can pre-register to join us at http://blogtropolus.eventbrite.com. There’s also a Ustream Channel for those of you who won’t be here in San Francisco. More info below…

Read the rest or post a comment »

Google’s App Engine is, despite claims to the contrary, not a competitor to Amazon’s EC2 and S3.

As Silicon Insider correctly points out* the limitations in terms of a true “utility computing” service are simply too severe. We do a lot of our heavy lifting around here using EC2, SQS and S3, something we couldn’t possibly do with Google App Engine (and not because we don’t like Python, we do!).

What it is, is a beautifully played move against Facebook; it’s a simple way for developers to build applications that can harness the information that Google has about the end-user. How? Well, if Google are smart they are likely to expand the way in which Google App Engine applications can access other Google services (with the user’s permission of course).

This gives the applications an amazing amount of contextual information about each user, allowing developers to come up with the next generation of personalized, highly relevant and (with Open Social) social applications; all tied in with how end-users normally go about their online lives.

[* The Silicon Insider claim that “App Engine is designed for lightweight apps” is, however, plain wrong. Unless that is you consider applications like GMail and Google Reader “lightweight”]

… and the web application hosting business cowers in fear. Now, my friends, people are discovering what Google’s REAL differentiated IP is..

Application scaling is a real problem for the managed hosting business unless some software company comes up with a platform/solution that lets them leverage their existing computing infrastructure. This is allegorical to, and is probably as big an opportunity as, SAN and NAS a few years ago … big incumbents like EMC and Network Appliance with totally vertical solutions (Google and Amazon in this case) competing with guys using software and off-the-shelf hardware (the hosting companies licensing the wares of some as-yet-non-existent software company).

(more…)

Thanks to AOL, Instant Messaging is now an ecosystem. This morning they announced OpenAIM, effectively a programatization of the OSCAR protocol, AOL’s long-since-reverse-engineered network interface for Instant Messaging. This effectively legitimizes what has become common practice — hacking IM for fun and profit. Both Adium (for OSX) and Meebo use the open-source libpurple library to access the various Instant Messaging networks. At my insistence, EQO implemented this as well.

That AOL is now embracing, rather than oscillating between pretending they don’t see and vaguely threatening to block and/or sue third party developers leveraging and enhancing their Instant Messaging platform is a huge leap forward — both for the third-party developer community and for AOL and AIM themselves. This should not be considered to be a strategic advantage for AOL: I would hope that this should cause YahOo and MSN to follow suit.

Read the rest or post a comment »