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Just before Christmas, Parliament passed Canada’s new anti-spam and anti-spyware law, commonly referred to as FISA, or the “Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act” (Industry Canada release here). The law will be bought into force later this year to give Canadians time to prepare. Broadly, the law prohibits the sending of commercial messages without recipient consent, and prohibits the installation of computer program’s without consent. It’s quite a complex piece of legislation and carries stiff penalties – you should consider its applicability to your practices and make the necessary adjustments before it comes into force.

Much has been written about the new law – some of my favourite pieces by my friend David Canton here and here, by Simon Fodden here, and by some of the larger law firms – McCarthy’s here and Davies here, for example. Please contact us if you have questions.

Finish reading this post on Hyndman | Law.

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When I travel I normally take a lot of pictures. I’m by no means a “photographer” – I just like to take snapshots for memory’s sake. And like many people, I’ve been taking more and more of my pictures with my phone – an iPhone 4. So much so, that on this trip to Argentina I decided to take nothing else, and see what happened.

The results have really surprised me. First, the image quality on the rear facing camera is terrific. One doesn’t have a lot of image control, obviously, and shooting in jpg means there’s a lot of post-processing that one simply can’t do. But for snapshots, the best camera is the one you’re carrying, and this is a great one to carry.

Second, the video capability is terrific, and opens a whole range of opportunities. First, if you have access to cheap data, being able to record and quickly upload / publish video is a game changer (it’s important to remember that this is something that expensive data plans makes very, very difficult). Giving family, friends – or any audience – the opportunity to plug into what you’re doing via video, whether live streamed or recorded – truly changes your relationship with them when you’re on the road. Distance evaporates. Intimacy is everywhere. It’s a powerful new paradigm.

Third – the front facing camera is an awesome tool for recording memories – whether of pictures of friends – or video of myself, for example, with notes on how a friend prepared his asado. The addition of video to Skype’s mobile apps makes this very, very powerful (again, if you have access to affordable data).

Recent examples of how I’m using this? Watching a friend prepare asado and another prepare paella – and being able to document it for others. Documenting the design of a parilla. Shooting street theatre in Mendoza and getting it to family at home in seconds. Telling people about one of my favourite things – food on the road (here and here) – and getting their recommendations in return. And of course, just staying connected.

I’m still experimenting with how to use this and thinking about how it plays into travel and other activities. If you have thoughts I could use while I’m on the road, feel free to comment.

Update – here are a couple more examples using the front-facing camera: keeping a video journal of special moments, and taking quick self-portraits.

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If you’ve been following my twitter or flickr feeds you know that I’ve been in Argentina for a few days. It’s my first trip since I bought an unlocked iPhone 4 and I was curious to see how easy it would be for a non-native person to understand the local system, and how expensive mobile data rates would be. Answers: pretty easy, and super cheap (compared to Canadian prices – more on that below).

The Locked Phone

If you travel a lot, you’re familiar with the absurd pricing of mobile data when you buy your foreign data from your Canadian wireless company. You’re almost always forced to do this, of course, because your phone is generally locked to your provider’s SIM. I’ve never understood this – when you commit to a provider’s data plan to get the provider’s phone subsidy, you hand over payment info and sign a contract obligating you to pay a particular monthly charge. That payment obligation continues even if you swap out your old SIM for a new provider’s. Why then is the SIM lock necessary?

(By way of example, Rogers has recently announced that once your contract is up, you can get out of your SIM lock. But of course, they make you pay for your freedom – pay to be released from a SIM lock that they shouldn’t be entitled to force on you in the first place.)

One of the more nefarious aspects of the SIM lock is that it ties you to your telco’s frequently extortionate pricing for roaming data. Here’s a simple example: here in Argentina, I pay Movistar 10 argentinian pesos – about $2.50 – for 1 GB of data that I have 48 hours to use. If I don’t use it all, I lose it and I have to pay another 10 pesos for another 1 GB of data over another 48 hours. So I could buy a month’s worth for 150 pesos, or about $35. That’s 1 GB every 2 days, or about 15 GB a month – for $35. That’s a lot of data – I can essentially do anything I want to for the month, without worrying about usage, for about $2.33 per GB. Now, that price is a temporary promotion – when I first arrived my 10 pesos bought me 1GB for *24* hours. But when I bought it, I was given 50% more data just because I was awesome. So, there is competitive pricing at work, and promotions abound.

What would that cost me if I bought it from my provider, Rogers, as part of a roaming package? The details are here. Taking the mid-priced $100 pack, that’s $4 per MB – not GB, but MB – with 25MB included for the month – or as I learned in a recent trip to NY, about a day and a half of moderate iPhone travel usage (mail, twitter, some photos uploaded, some Google Maps use). I’m not sure what Rogers think people do with their mobile devices when they travel, if that’s the allotment they think is reasonable. (My suspicion is that they know very well what people do – this is why we so often hear horror stories about people returning from trips to hair raising mobile bills.)

So, to sum up, Movistar offers me $35 for 15GB for a month, and Rogers offers to resell me that at $100 for 25MB. Movistar’s GB rate is $2.33 (say, $5 a GB assuming worst case and no promotions) and Rogers resells that to me at an astronomical (in a sane world, we would call that usurious and anti-competitive) $4,000 per GB. That’s one heck of a margin. And that’s one reason why your SIM is locked – to force you to buy that data from Rogers at that price, rather than allow you to buy it from a local provider at a lower price.

Free Your Phone, Free Your Mind (and Your Wallet)

If your phone is unlocked, and you happen to find yourself in Argentina, you can walk into any Movistar, Claro or Personal outlet and buy a prepaid SIM for about 20 pesos, or $4. Micro-SIMs haven’t really penetrated here yet, so if you have an iPhone 4 or other micro-SIM device you’ll need to bring a SIM cutter or cut it yourself. There is a ton of info online about how to do that.

(Note that SIMs in Argentina cover voice within the particular province. If you take the SIM outside of the province, your voice rates will be higher, so consider getting a separate SIM card whenever you go to a new province. I never use voice on my mobile, and the data rates are the same wherever you go here, so I haven’t bothered.)

You’ll now need to go one to one of the bazillion kiosks around Argentina that allow you to recharge your prepaid SIM, and buy some credits. The kiosks have signs telling you that they provide this service. The signs usually have the logo of one or more of the providers. You’ll need to provide the cel number of the new SIM, your provider name, and the $ you want to buy. If your Spanish is like mine, babies faint whenever I open my mouth, but some combination of pointing and grunting will pretty quickly get you what you need. They then enter this info into their system, and your SIM is instantly credited. (You’ll see text messages on your phone telling you this – do not mistake these messages for warnings that your shoes need to be mowed – they almost certainly do not.)

The next step is to order your data. To do this on Movistar I texted “datos” to 2345. Within a second or two I received a Spanish message that my request was pending, and moments later confirmation that I had 1 GB of data to use within 48 hours. Check the Movistar (for example) site or the usual forums for up-to-the-minute info on any other promotions, or if your Spanish is good, call their support (Movistar is *611) and ask. (On a couple of occasions, this was unsuccessful until about 10 minutes after I’d purchased the credits).

(Note that if you keep using the internet after your 48 hours (or whatever it is in your case) is up, your remaining credits are used very quickly – so make sure that you order more data, if you need it, before that happens.)

Once you have the SIM cut and installed, and your data ordered install the new APN info so your phone can get internet access with the new SIM.

And that’s it. Happy surfing!

Quick update: I’ve been dazzled by how popular open wifi is in Argentina, even in small towns. Bars, restaurants, malls – lots of places, and often unexpected places, offer free, abundant wifi. Funny, because in Canada, where our data rates are wildly expensive, free open wifi is not nearly as easy to find.

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I’m completely infatuated with this fierce, inspired, brilliant video about the ‘net produced by Rogers. I think it’s remarkable.

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A great overview by Jason Fried of workflow problems in the modern workplace, and how the web helps to fix them. His new book, Rework, elaborates on these and related ideas and is a great read.

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I see a lot of people who are at the very early stages of planning a new business. As a result, I’ve developed an informal standard ‘laundry list’ of cautions to pass along to these clients in the first call I have with them.

Many people are surprised to learn that there are legal steps they should be taking toward their new business before they start building it. But there are, and they’re important, and dealing with these issues can be difficult and expensive if they’re left until some later time. (In a recent example, problems in this area cost a new client months of time in the market and a lot of money in legal fees for a litigator).

Summary

In brief, before you start you need to ensure that (i) any intellectual property and confidential information you create for your new business will be your own; (ii) you comply with any obligations you have in agreements with your current employer or with clients.

Finish reading this post on Hyndman | Law.

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We’ve just announced mesh10 (details here and tickets here) and over the next few weeks more information will appear on the site about our keynotes, panels and workshops. This year we’d like to include a panel in our Society stream that focuses on how the always-on, real-time Web is changing the way we learn, think, grow and relate to one another other – essentially, the impact it’s having on the very fabric of society.

And so we’re looking for introductions to interesting people who think about these issues, and are now reaching out to people in our community who might have great ideas about moderators and panelists for such a panel, or thoughts about aspects of this topic that ought to be discussed. Perhaps you know of a neuroscientist who’s doing interesting research on how brain pathways are remapped under intensive internet usage. Or perhaps you know of someone who’s studying the way children learn when they have the web as a research tool.

Whatever your ideas are we’re interested! We’re looking for smart, dedicated and provocative big-thinkers and interesting perspectives on this larger topic to help us make the most out of this opportunity. We do have one request though – please help us to manage the inflow of suggestions by making serious suggestions only.

You can enter your suggestions here or below. Thanks for helping out!

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I’m getting a lot of requests these days for information on and help with shareholder agreements, so I thought a post explaining what they are and how they work would be helpful.

Background

But before I start, I’d like to introduce you to two guys I suspect wish they’d had a shareholder agreement in place when they created their company: Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, two of the three early shareholders of Craigslist. As I understand the case, the third shareholder decided to leave the company, and sold his shares to eBay. As far as I can tell, there was no shareholder agreement in place at the time, and so there was no transfer restriction on his shares, and presumably Craig and Jim had no right of first refusal to buy those shares before they were sold to eBay (I have no idea whether they would have bought them, but I assume so). Google “eBay Craigslist lawsuit” to see the (very expensive) results. Good times. For the lawyers. For Craig and Jim, not so much, I’m guessing.

(Incidentally, Jim keynoted mesh07 and was one of our favourite keynotes ever, and a very gracious guest.)

(Finish reading this post on Hyndman | Law).

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