For those who are into Apple products, a brand-new Apple flagship store will open its doors this Friday, at 5pm, 1321 Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest.

Apple flagship stores are known for their superior customer service & experience, within a distinctive lush store, much alike the attention to detail found in their computer and electronic products. Another distinctive trademark of Apple stores is that you can take orders and check out anywhere, with Apple staff having their own payment systems, making it a great shopping experience compared to the one you can find at Best Buy or Future Shop.

In the U.S., these stores have on average $4,300 sales per square feet, per year, one of the highest ratio you can find in retail, and has helped Apple regain market shares since these were pushed by Steve Jobs.

Since other Apple resellers like CompuSmart closed shop lately, this is a more than welcomed new store.

The 3 existing telecommunication companies, namely Bell Canada, Rogers and Telus won additional frequencies in most provinces. Rogers Wireless alone brought to the table $999 million, in an auction that was planned previously to gather in total just $1.5 billion. If you had any doubts about the profitability of this industry, the auctions just confirmed that it’s a cash cow for the existing carriers.

For consumers, the most important fact to remember from these auctions is the arrival of 2 new companies, Globalive and Quebecor. Globalive managed to get frequencies in all Canadian provinces, except Quebec, while the media group Quebecor is now covering all Quebec, plus South-Eastern Ontario. Since previous reports from these companies confirmed that they will both use the GSM standard, they could (at least in theory) offer a nation-wide wireless access to their customers through a partnership. Of course, this will also mean lower prices for consumers, due to increased competition. Quebecor especially is known for this business strategy when they acquired Videotron and then slashed prices, reviving the cable in Quebec. I expect (well I hope) the same thing to happen; with much lower plans offered to consumers, which will then boost mobile usage, with new user behaviours & mobile applications.

So what’s next? Each bidder has 30 days to pay the auctionned spectrums; and the federal government will also see through each bidder’s structrure, which has to be at least 47% Canadian-owned. Each new carrier will then have to compete (or partner) to get key locations to install their antennas; followed by the roll out. This is estimated to cost $500 million, taking at least 1 year. (which means if you were waiting for a 2nd carrier to get an iPhone, you will have to wait for at least the 2nd half of 2009)

When you walk past, crying babies begin to burble. You call people and they hear a smile over the phone. Your emails cause people to forget their troubles. When friends ask for help, you’re always willing to lighten their load and brighten their day. You make the sun shine and the grass green and the birds sing …

… We’re looking for a Community Gardener who will help us grow and nurture a community of players, fans, and supporters of our game

Funny.

For those who were not aware, MontrealTechWatch was down from yesterday early morning till 8.00pm today 17th of July.

It might seem normal and in the-order-of-things that the server comes back; for most sys admins, it’s just a matter of opening a ticket and the tech support would restart somehow the whole thing. But this time, it was radically different. Just a few hours ago, it was considered to be un-recoverable *sweats* , and with it databases **shivers** plus all generated files for the past 2 years ***faints***. We tried one last hack, which miraculously worked.

For those curious about technical details, this server hosts many websites and services. It hosts for instance a RoR site, graciously hosted since it’s a friend’s, plus another experiment, using Phusion Passenger. I’ve discovered that mod_rails has a big memory problems and leaves around dead processes; which I intended to solve by writing a god-like ruby script that would kill & clean processes, and even if the parent process was defunct and couldn’t be killed. Fast-forward, yesterday morning, this script launched the system command kill -9 1 … with the script owned by root user… which is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the head … while jumping from a plane 30000 feet high. XenServer can’t even restart, reinstall snapshot backups, relaunch, nor be re-setup, and all files & databases were deemed lost and inaccessible.

MTW is taken very seriously and I know of its importance; and this should never happen again. There’s one thing to blame here, which is trying to use experimental scripts on a production server. If this was a company, I would have fired the Linux idiot who wrote the script. Oh wait… Anyway, thanks for everyone who were there, it’s much appreciated. I’ll look into getting an additional resource as a sandbox and get a bulletproof environment for MTW

The acquisition comes also in a week where Blizzard and Activitision have merged. Add that to EA’s efforts to buy Take Two Interactive and we’ll have just a couple of behemoths in the industry, maybe just in a few years. I expect cost of production to increase, as titles takes more resources & time; with small video game programmers having to face huge barriers of entry, since they cannot in any way produce the same level of work as a specialized fx studio like Hybride. Those independent programmers will actually have to move to casual gaming, for the web; or produce games for devices like the iPhone.

To my knowledge, it’s a first in Canada, where file-sharing is still legal (well, until bill C-61 comes). Here, the legal team from media groups Musicor, Zone 3 Musique, TVA Groupe Inc, succeeded into making the administrator of the website, M. Sébastien Brûlotte, admit that the website was damaging the entertainment industry. They were in fact threatning M.Brûlotte of $200.000 in damages if he won’t “play nicely”.

QuebecTorrent has had 100.000 members during its lifespan, with torrents tracking in total 2700To. Compared to other websites like isohunt or thepiratebay, it is a relatively small torrent tracker though; and it’s likely that the owner of the website didn’t want to go through all these legal hassles for a website which is obviously a side-project.

The court judgement is interesting though because it sets a precedent in Montreal and in Canada for future similar cases, for companies or individuals considering p2p.

For the anecdote, the judge ordered the M.Brûlotte to display the court’s decision on the website till july 2009. The defendant complied; but the notice is drowned by advertising, plus a liberal dose of pop-ups and pop-unders.

(just for fun)

It’s an iconic day, celebrating Apple’s dominance in consumer electronics, and also Apple’s major influence in mass culture. I’ve seen articles stating that the next generation of computing, following Moore’s law, would be netbooks such as Asus’s eee PC; but seeing the frenzy downtown, I’m ready to bet on the iPhone.

I will end here for the article; here’s a small funny video though for those who want to see more of the shiny gadget.

(click to see the video at bombe.tv)

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• most of the bloggers who covered the event started to mention Twitter and its fail whale, which is now legendary. Evan Prodroumou’s Identi.ca was then seen as the saver of the day. Now the question is, can this be pulled of by any other company? Could you arrange to launch a service when the market leader is experiencing growth problems? This is extremely difficult in my opinion, but nevertheless, Evan managed to do it, and this should be something that should be thought about.
• Most of the reviews of identi.ca mentionned that it was a clone of twitter, and that it lacked features here and there. However, most of those reviews were also enthusiastic, and the vast majority said it was good enough. Actually, identi.ca was beta-tested amongst a small close group during two months, with Evan busy resolving bugs and dealing with rough edges. We saw the introduction of remote subscriptions, OpenId login, replies, the bridging to im and gtalk, etc. If you are developing a website, the lesson here is: release and get feedback early, as it tells you right away what works and what doesn’t.
• Reaching out to communities and opinion leaders. There is a tendency amongst startups to reach directly to big websites like TechCrunch & associates, and also do a parallel push on social media aggregators like digg or reddit. Granted, there was a link submitted to digg; I believe though that what worked was pinging the FLOSS people, people working on the Semantic Web, on Wikis, on Creative Commons, and the tech community in Montreal/Canada. When those communities published a post about identi.ca, such as Dave Winer, big media websites like ReadWrite/Web or The Inquisitr came naturally to the service. I’m sure there is something here that we all can learn from.
• just introduce one simple feature, which was federation of statuses. There are many ways to replicate twitter; Plurk is doing for instance easier conversations, you could also imagine a vast array of new social features that Twitter can’t; but Evan focused on one approach and his take was the most elegant.

So far, identi.ca has already more than 10.000 users, and the laconi.ca sofware is already used by a handful of servers. It’s also the most viral web service I’ve seen in Montreal, and I don’t expect the attention to stop soon.

I know Evan is also considering this as a business, which should be Identi.ca’s next step. With Open Source software though, there are many paths to choose from (see SugarCRM, Zimbra, Magento, or giants like Red Hat and mysql) so I’m not worried about.

Photo: plane taking-off, AtomicShark