Along with all the discussion, there’s been lots of road construction/traffic analogies that try to explain the decision in more ‘real world’ terms — this article even suggests that UBB will somehow allow ISPs to free up cash to invest in better infrastructure to support all of us driving “the Hummer versions of bandwidth vehicles” (according to the article). Unfortunately, reality is somewhat different.

What UBB really allows, is for ISPs (and in some cases, even forces ISPs that don’t want to) to charge Canadians more for something they already provide. What Bell has asked for is essentially the ability to charge more money for what they have (in most cases contractually) signed up to provide their customers. All with the nebulous promise from Bell that all this cash will be turned around and invested into infrastructure.While it’s easy to demonize Bell, I think that most companies would love to be allowed to charge more for something they already provide — I’m sure a car manufacturer would be happy to get double the current price for a car through a governmental policy change. However, it’s the CRTC’s job to ensure that Canadians are protected, and too often the CRTC’s interpretation of their mandate is that that should include Canadian corporations (a long standing idea in policy in Canada where the belief that handing money over to Canadian companies is going to benefit us all).

Michael Geist points out the importance of competition (or in this case, lack of competition) in the Canadian ISP market. Decades of strict foreign ownership rules have stifled innovation and kept prices artificially high in Canada, and now the few choices that Canadians have for alternatives from the big ISPs are being threatened. While these types of policy decisions seem difficult to comprehend to Canadians, they are part of an ongoing trend in this country. Little or nothing is done to protect new entrants (see this week’s reversal of the decision allowing foreign-owned WIND Mobile to operate in Canada) into telecommunications markets in Canada, yet policy moves like UBB are adopted to protect the larger companies that already provide over 90% of internet service in this country.

There have been some positive comments about foreign ownership in particular from those in the government — now what we really need is action. The Canadian telecommunications market is in dire need of reform, and the CRTC should be spreadheading that reform for Canadians — instead of pushing policy decisions that aim to protect the status quo.

I’m not sure the parallel is entirely accurate — since with Windows, the hardware manufacturer is no providing a customized version of Windows (which is usually the hold up for delivering new Android versions — the hardware manufacturer needs to build their own UI into the updated Android version).

The article actually spends more time talking about Apple than about Windows — and how Apple is better at providing updates to their mobile software. The problem with Android however, isn’t so much with Google’s lack of updates (Google’s actually been pushing out updates on a fairly regular basis — although they never really like to provide dates or changelogs). The problem with Android is that the hardware manufacturers have been given so much flexibility (which the article does mention) with what they’re going to do with the OS. Personally, I’d rather stick with stock Android — but I doubt Android would’ve been able to gobble up market share without Google providing OEMs with the ability to customize Android to such an extent.

A successful twitter marketing campaign in 140 characters?

Due to the large twittersphere population (approx. 200 million), and of the ability to enable instant communication, twitter has become an integral part of online marketing. However, the key to a successful and exciting online marketing campaign through twitter can be constrained by the 140 character limit posed by tweets. The key to success therefore lies with a number of tools and features which can aid your twitter marketing campaign regardless of the 140 character limit.

Creativity and expressiveness:

The goal of a tweet is to communicate interesting, unique content in the shortest way possible. However, it is vital that you can communicate important campaign information, offers, promotions etc to your customers on twitter without breaking the 140 character limit. So how can you do this?

• Short but sweet tweets. Whilst the character limit renders it difficult to detail the ins and outs of your marketing campaign to customers, it still allows for punchy advertising slogans to be tweeted to a large audience.  To save character space, use a URL shortener such as Bit.ly to add a link whilst saving character space.

• Twitzer. The Twitzer tool allows you to say more than the 140 character limit allows. Through creating a separate URL in your tweet, the customer who sees your tweet can access more detailed information on your marketing venture. This is a handy tool which provides a way for your customer to access the important legal information, terms & conditions and so forth of your marketing campaign.

• Twitpic. Any successful marketing campaign relies on eye-catching images that grab attention. But how can you show images through twitter? The answer is through Twitpic. This tool allows for you to upload marketing campaign images to twitter, which can be viewed by anyone within the twittersphere. This tool enables any company to express their campaign brand, company identity and artistic flair through twitter.

• Twitbadge. This tool creates a widget where you can embed your tweet onto other social media platforms. This tool in essence enables you to combine your different social media channels to meet the needs of one effective marketing campaign. With Twitbadge, re-post your marketing campaign tweet onto Facebook and other platforms, meaning you can quickly notify your customer market of your campaign in a variety of ways.

• Hashtag. It sounds simple, but don’t forget to give your campaign its own unique hashtag. This is a quick way to brand the campaign and tweeters will be able to spread knowledge of the campaign using this tag.

How to follow the buzz:

Hopefully, your marketing campaign will interest the customer market on twitter and you will receive thousands of new followers and customers. The best way to check the success of your campaign and to “follow the buzz” that your marketing campaign has created on twitter is to use these tools;

• Tweetdeck. This tool creates a dashboard where you can monitor your tweets and the tweets of followers/those you follow whilst also being able to simultaneously monitor any tweets that use your marketing campaign’s hashtag. Thus, with this tool you have one central place to monitor your entire twitter marketing campaign.

• Tweetscan. Enables you to search for any tweets on any subject (sort of like a twitter search engine), thus enabling you to see how many tweets are being posted by users with regards to your campaign.

• TwitterMeter. Allows you to scan the frequency in which certain search terms appear, – for example the name of your marketing campaign!

In short, there are many features of twitter which enable you to conduct a successful marketing campaign free from the 140 character restrictions placed upon your tweeting power. Remember, the instant communication enabled by twitter allows for you to respond to your customer’s concerns as soon as they are expressed. Learn to adapt your marketing strategy to meet the evolving needs of your customer market throughout the duration of your campaign.

While this is probably a little creepy to most people, in that your cable company knows this much about you (although it should come as little surprise, given the amount of time and energy companies spend to learn how to get you to spend your money with them), this seems like a natural and necessary progression for TV advertising. TV ads are still the bread-and-butter for most companies that want to advertise, and they’re often wasting ad cash showing their ads to people who couldn’t care less about their products.

In many ways, this seems to be taking the contextual advertising that is standard fare on the web and moving it over to TV. Always interesting when you start to see what was once a ‘start-up’ ad space like the web start to influence the more mainstream ad spaces like TV.

One particularly interesting point to note is that Tim Denton, chair of the CRTC, pointed out that newcomer ISP’s, even if they can match prices, are still at a disadvantage because they “will be required to pass along all the network limitations (such as traffic management practices and bandwidth caps) imposed by the incumbents.”

Considering the government has already backed down on the previous decision to force incumbent ISPs to no longer hobble the speeds they provide to the newcomers, Canadians shouldn’t hold their breath for the government to step in and remove the traffic shaping and bandwidth cap limitations that ISPs impose on their customers.

As far as the device itself goes, I’m extremely satisfied with it. The Android user interface is snappy on the Nexus One and the operating system itself is a huge improvement over Windows Mobile 6.5. But let’s not turn this into a review of the phone — that’s not really what I’ve been thinking about in terms of the Nexus One.

Last night I was reading an article posted on Wired about Google’s potential lessons learned from the Nexus One, and it made me think: OK, Google’s got this out the door, but what’s next?

And I guess that’s the point — I don’t think Google even really knows what’s next at this point. But there’s a few points of my own that I’d like include that Wired neglected to mention.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me though, is the speed at which wireless technology is coming at us. Google aimed quite high with the Nexus One, and the phone’s got some pretty killer hardware specs. But of course, the mainstream wireless providers have already come out with bigger and better hardware (like HTC Droid Incredible and HTC Evo). I think Google could have pushed the envelope a bit further with the Nexus One in terms of hardware, with a few simple upgrades like a forward-facing camera or more megapixels in the main camera.

I don’t care much about either feature — but it’s these small things that differentiate you from your competition. Otherwise, smartphones are pretty much all the same (and even all mobile operating systems are starting to look the same, especially with BlackBerry OS 6.0 around the corner).

So maybe I’m being a little hard on Google since I’m comparing phones that didn’t exist yet when the Nexus One launched to Google’s phone. But that’s my point, Google knew they’d be upstaged with new hardware — so setting the bar higher would’ve at least delayed the inevitable a little longer.

But once you’ve got that harder in the phone, then what? Well, to elaborate on Wired‘s second point, marketing really does matter. And not just some cheesy ad with people smiling and using your product, explain to me why your product is better (and in many ways, it is a great product, but no one knows unless you tell them).

And finally, my only really big complaint about the Nexus One — a lack of real corporate email support. To get all the security features and functionality you would expect from corporate email, you need to download TouchDown (a fantastic product by the way) for about twenty bucks.

Hey Google, ever think of just buying TouchDown and integrating it into Android?

Thinking back, my original decision to go with Windows Mobile was largely based on interoperability — I run Windows at home and at the office, and I wanted a phone that would work seamlessly with my work and home machines. Funny enough however, my Windows Mobile phone ended up having pretty much zero interaction with any of my machines, except occasionally moving some music from my home computer to my phone.

The services I did end up interacting with the most on my mobile were almost all Google services — I use Gmail, Google Maps and Google search by default, and ended up using pretty much nothing made my Microsoft (I access my work email through Outlook Web Access on my phone, since my firm doesn’t support non-BlackBerry mobile devices here in Canada).

I’m looking forward to the switch to Android, and I’m excited about the Nexus One. While a little pricey, I think it will be a substantial step up in user experience from my Windows Mobile 6.5 device (the HTC Diamond). I had also thought about waiting for the HTC Desire (mainly because of the integrated FM radio, which I use about once a year ), but after hearing that it wouldn’t work on 3G in North America, decided to just take the plunge and grab the Nexus One.

So while I’m off to the Android, I’m still curious to see where things are going to go with Microsoft’s foray into Windows Phone 7. I came across a post about Windows Phone 7 this morning on Slashgear, and while I have some deeper concerns about the upcoming mobile platform than the author does, I do agree wholeheartedly with the third bullet point at the bottom of his post, that Microsoft should:

Maximize the experience of product ownership. If owning a Windows PC is good, a Windows PC and Windows Phone should be better. Add in an Xbox and it should be an even better experience. And so on.

As I said earlier, this is what I had hoped for with a Microsoft-branded phone. And while I can certainly only speak for myself, I felt like I never really got what I was looking for with that experience. Now let’s see what Google and Android can do.

Originally, I had the idea of publishing some of the news feeds I’d created for myself using Yahoo! Pipes — and I’ve decided that since that was the original point of knowledgecog, why not just get the site working as I had originally intended it? So I put 4 feeds (business and competitive intelligence, enterprise search, knowledge management, and social networking and collaboration) on the main page, and I’ve got a few other lists of potentially useful information about KM at the bottom. It’s simple, and it’s going to stay that way.

You can click through to a longer list of feed items from the main page, and you can also subscribe to the Pipe itself using the RSS link beside the title (which will take you to the RSS version of the Pipe page). I’m going to be working on the news feeds over the next few weeks in order to refine the results as much as I can. Enjoy the new knowledgecog! And of course, any suggestions or feedback on the new site are always welcome. Just leave a comment or get in touch with me through the contact form.

My father, who’s done his fair share of public speaking over the course of his career as a manager, wrote up the 10 points I’ve detailed below. I thought these points were great and wanted to share them. So here you go:

Tip #1: Remember that no one in the audience knows as much as you do about the topic. You are the expert.

Tip #2: The audience is interested in what you have to say. Slow down and take the time to think between the points you want to emphasize. This will demonstrate your confidence and the depth of your knowledge of the subject.

Tip #3: Practice, practice, practice.

At the venue before your presentation:

Tip #4: Check out the room. Walk up to the podium and simulate the presentation in your mind before you have to give it. This can be done the night before, during a lunch break, or during the natural break prior to your presentation. (Note: The more time you have between this and the actual presentation, the better.)

Tip #5: Meet the technical people. Make sure that they know what your material consists of (PowerPoint, videos or audio). Be prepared for an IT meltdown – have some hard copies of your presentation to handout if the IT fails. Above all, don’t apologize for a failure in the technology – have a backup plan. In my opinion, this is the most common failure in presentations: not having a plan.

During your presentation:

Tip #6: Make eye contact. Look for the friendly faces of people that you know or have spoken to. This will help you use spontaneous examples to support your presentation. And remember – stay on track! Keep the examples brief, but connect with those in the audience that you know are supportive of you personally and what you are presenting. This will connect you with the majority of the audience.

Tip #7: Relax. All of the tension has occurred 2 or 3 days before the presentation. You know the material, you have done the planning, and you have friends and supporters in the audience. You have an important message for them and they want to hear it.

Tip #8: If questions arise, be polite and answer them, but don’t let questions throw you off your presentation plan. Let the questions flow, but there will be a natural break when you can bring the presentation back to your control. Audience interest and discussion is a very positive thing, but ensure that you regain control and finish your material.

Tip #9: If you don’t know the answer – be honest! “I don’t have all of the information on the point you’re making, but I will make some inquiries and get back to you with an appropriate answer.”

At the conclusion of your presentation:

Tip #10: Thank the audience for their attention and interest. If there are outstanding issues or unanswered questions, pledge to do the follow up. This is normally a time when questions are asked. When they are finished, reiterate what a pleasure it has been to present the important information to the audience.

Microsoft has desperately needed to reinvent themselves in the mobile marketplace, and it looks like this may be exactly the sort of dramatic change they needed (and hopefully indicates the direction they’re heading in).

While I’m not crazy about the inability to install apps not sanctioned by Microsoft inside their Marketplace, the visual appeal and improved user experience of this new OS may still be enough to win some folks back to the Microsoft mobile platform.

Here’s a video from Engadget showcasing the Windows Phone 7 Series and some of its features.