AdHack is giving away a pair of the Panasonic RP-SC500 noise-canceling headphones to the best “iPhone ad that Rogers should have used to launch and promote the iPhone in Canada”. This one by Dave Gibson caught my eye tonight.

• AdHack - Vancouver
• dthree Inc. - Mississauga
• Octopz - Toronto
• Overlay.TV - Ottawa
• PlanetEye - Toronto
• Ramius Corporation - Ottawa
• SceneCaster - Richmond Hill
• Standout Jobs - Montreal
• Tomoye Corporation - Gatineau
• Tungle - Montreal

This IDC study profiles 10 relatively small Canadian-based companies offering Web 2.0 solutions that IDC believes are worthy of highlighting to the broader industry and have the potential to make an impact in the information and communication technology (ICT) market.

This study provides a review of each company’s technology and go-to-market strategy and a customer example. It concludes with some of the overarching trends IDC is seeing in this market, the strategies and characteristics these 10 companies share, and essential guidance and analysis. This study also provides valuable input for ICT vendors large and small, investors, government, and service providers to identify success factors employed by emerging Canadian vendors with Web 2.0 solutions.

The 30-page report was written by IDC Canadian ICT Innovation analyst Krista Collins and it’s available for $3,500. Ouch. Anybody have a copy?

Cybera

Summit Sessions:

Green IT / Clean Tech - It’s not that easy being green. In this session, we’ll look at the push for IT to go green. How can you ‘green up’ your IT operations? What are the cost benefits? Why is this important to your business?

Grassroots Innovation - DemoCampBanff - Where does innovation start? Demo Camp for one. These groups thrive on their ad-hoc organization and “no rules” rules. Talk about a fertile landscape for innovative ideas! Join us for a special Banff edition of Demo Camp.

Cloud Computing and Other Trends to Watch - The innovation landscape is constantly changing. In this session, we’ll focus on the top trends guiding this transition and what impacts these changes have on your business as well as your research and development activities.

Cyber-Venture Opportunities - Showing you the money. In this session, we’ll examine the business behind cyberinfrastructure – the venture capital and commercialization opportunities, as well as the new Alberta Action Plan: Bringing Technology to Market.

Disruptive Technologies - Blessing or bane? In this session, we’ll look at how disruptive technologies are changing the landscape, raising the bar and pushing the bounds of all that was possible in business and research.

Keynote Speakers:

• Bill Appelbe -Chief Executive Officer, Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
• Paul Strong - Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay
• Nora Young - Producer and Host of Spark, CBC Radio

Who Should Attend?

• IT managers and executives
• Business strategy senior management
• Industry Researchers
• Small business and startups
• Technology advisors, CIOs, project managers, government ministry staff, graduate students
• Research community

This Summit will cater to anyone affiliated with the private sector, research organizations or academia that’s interested in cyberinfrastructure. It will also cater to those who have questions like, “How can I do my work more efficiently?” “How can I improve my business’s bottom line?” and “How can technology help me expand the possibilities of what I can achieve?” The Summit should also appeal to people looking to tap into Alberta’s innovative, forward-thinking community.

For more information and to register, visit the Cybera Summit 08 website.

With these new entrants, each province should get at least two new choices for wireless service. Of course, I remember a time when there were 2 or 3 other wireless companies to choose from, before mergers and acquisitions led to the current cerberus of RoBellus (variations considered: Tellogers, Bellogus). Hopefully we don’t find ourselves back in a wireless oligopoly in ten or twenty years.

$4.25 billion is a nice chunk of revenue for the Canadian government, handy to pay for things like an indefinite occupation of a country that posed no real threat, and it seems they are wasting no time to do it again. Via Reuters, Industry Minister Jim Prentice has said that an auction of 700 MHz airwaves will happen in “about 18 months”. The US recently auctioned their 700 MHz spectrum and raised $19.592 billion.

A spectrum auction isn’t the kind of thing that gets a lot of mainstream media attention, as the idea of selling airwaves seems strange, if not impossible, and some might argue immoral. For some thoughts on this subject, I present an excerpt from an essay “The Property Status of Airwaves”, by author and philosopher Ayn Rand, published April 1964.

Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property - by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.

This is particularly true of broadcasting frequencies or waves, because they are produced by human action and do not exist without it. What exists in nature is only the potential and the medium through which those waves must travel. (That medium is not air; in legal discussions it is often referred to by the mythical term of “ether” - to indicate some element in space, at present unidentified.) Without the broadcasting station which generates the waves, that “ether” - on our present level of knowledge — is of no practical use or value to anyone.

 

Essay continues after the jump.

Just as two trains cannot travel on the same section of track at the same time, so two broadcasts cannot use the same frequency at the same time in the same area without “jamming” each other. There is no difference in principle between the ownership of land and the ownership of airways. The only issue is the task of defining the application of property rights to this particular sphere.

She goes on to rail against what the US government was doing at the time; granted licenses to who they approved of based on their judgement of what was “in the public interest”. Rand was a stanch defender of free market capitalism, recognizing the need to license the airwaves, but believed that the process should be by free market auction instead of government handpicking.

There is only one solution to this problem, and it has to start at the base; nothing less will do. The airways should be turned over to private ownership. The only way to do it now is to sell radio and television frequencies to the highest bidders (by an objectively defined, open, impartial process) — and thus put an end to the gruesome fiction of “public property.”…

…it took hundreds of centuries before primitive, nomadic tribes of savages reached the concept of private property — specifically, land property, which marked the beginning of civilization. It is a tragic irony that in the presence of a new realm opened by a gigantic achievement of science, our political and intellectual leaders reverted to the mentality of primitive nomads and, unable to conceive of property rights, declared the new realm to be a tribal hunting ground.

The breach between man’s scientific achievements and his ideological development is growing wider every day. It is time to realize that men cannot keep this up much longer if they continue to retrogress to ideological savagery with every step of scientific progress.

Half a century later, Rand’s concept has become reality. While Canada is far from being a textbook model of a free market, let’s hope it’s promise of competition becomes reality as well.

• Located in or around the specified city or area.
• Less than five years old
• Not a public company
• Is a tech company (either hardware, software, web application/service, or mobile)

We have been a little flexible with this criteria as the age of a company can be subject to interpretation depending on acquisitions, sell-outs, complete overhauls of a business model, etc. For instance, Techvibes the site/brand is six years old, but Techvibes Media Inc. is just over a year old. Even Wikipedia agrees that there is no definitive definition of “startup company”, and age isn’t really a valid measure. So, in the interest of more inclusive lists, we’re going to remove the “less than 5 years” requirement.

Going forward, we are looking to fold the start-up indexes into the functionality of the Techvibes company directory. Not only will this save me time producing them, but will allow for dynamic lists of varying criteria, supplying stats junkies with a greater fix. 

If you have been holding back on suggesting your company because it was older, now is the time to suggest it for inclusion into future lists. Please include where you are located.

We’re looking for something fun & simple that will get readers of this popular annual publication to visit Techvibes.com. We’re particularily interested in this issue as it comes out on August 26th which will be two short weeks after we launch the new & improved Techvibes site. If you’re interested in making $150 and getting some great exposure though the Techvibes blog, be sure to check out the requirements and submit your design by Thursday, July 24th at 11:59pm.

While this behaviour isn’t illegal, and certainly allowable under their Terms of Service, it is shady and creates unexpected results for folks that are used to getting a plain error message. This behaviour is not unique to Rogers, as various US ISPs have dabbled in similar “functionality”. The technique was brought to the forefront in 2003 when VeriSign, who isn’t an ISP but operates 2 of the 13 DNS root servers, began redirecting misspellings to their own page. This didn’t last very long before public outcry and ICANN’s wrist slapping put an end to it. 

Blamcast invites Rogers customers and domain owners alike to give Rogers a call and let them know how you feel about this bonus service: 1-888-764-3771. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Shaw for having provided me with eight years of reliable, fast, no-bullshit Internet service, and only nagging me once about pushing bandwidth limits.

So if your company needs between $50K and $500K in financing to tackle the marketplace, you’re invited to apply. The application deadline is Friday, August 22nd - keep in mind that the earlier your application is submitted, the more likely you may obtain free assistance from ISCM’s Investment Network mentors. If your compnay is selected, you’ll have 10 minutes to present to qualified investors and financial professionals.

Thanks to their controversial and frequently banned Super Bowl television ads, Canadians are very familar with GoDaddy.com and the company already have a strong and loyal customer base North of the border for .COM domains. Low-cost Canadian registrars should start to worry. 

GoDaddy.com will kick off its entry into the Canadian market by sponsoring the TSN television broadcast of the NASCAR Napa Auto Parts 200 on August 2nd in Montreal. Canadian driver Ron Fellows will race the #5 GoDaddy.com Chevrolet.

GoDaddy’s Toronto office currently has one employee, Adam Dicker, and Canadian customer support will be handled through their US call centres. Those who follow the domain industry will recognize Dicker’s name - he was recently called out for bidding against customers in GoDaddy.com domain auctions. I can’t imagine CIRA will put up with that behaviour for long.

It’s good to see some rumors that we might start seeing real competition in Canada’s wireless industry… in a few years. It was a little over a year ago that considerations of a Telus-Bell merger were floating headlines. This move does make the current Canadian spectrum auction more interesting, though it’s still dominated by the “big three” (or the one cartel, depending on your cynicism). Fun Fact: Rogers believes that the radio waves, vibrating through your head right now, are worth in upwards of $997M.

In the meantime, I have to find a tux for the wedding; Rogers and I are getting married for three years, didn’t you hear?

Last month Terapeak was tracking the iPhone market and this month they’re tracking the 2008 Presidential Election candidates by number of items sold on eBay. Not a big surprise that Barack Obama is more ‘marketable’ right now but there is still plenty of time for John McCain to rack up some serious bumper sticker sales.

AideRSS’ product offering uptil now was focused on filtering the posts in a RSS feed based on popularity - how many comments, diggs, etc a post got. In the past, users could go on their site (www.aiderss.com) and filter their RSS feeds or install an extension for Google Reader and some other feed readers to sort the posts by their “PostRank”. That was quite interesting itself, but now they have opened up PostRank beyond RSS feeds, and for regular blog posts, news articles, bookmarks, etc. Any kind of online content!

This is where it gets really interesting and opens up a much bigger market opportunity for them. This is something which the likes of Google will eventually have to co-opt or compete against. The main challenge for AideRSS in the short term though is going to be driving the adoption of PostRank across the web and convincing the rank and file web publishers to adopt it. Besides this new PostRank service, AideRSS also announced the official launch of their Google Reader extension and updated APIs.

In my opinion, this is THE Canadian web startup to watch out for.

LoyaltyMatch offers an alternative to traditional travel reward programs by letting travelers convert unused points and miles into merchandise that they can then sell online for cash or swap for other items, services and activities. Here’s a bit of what the New York Times has to say:

Another site that is letting travelers set their own trading terms is LoyaltyMatch.com, which started in February. It’s the brainchild of Brad Ball, a technology executive who had accumulated piles of miles after several years of heavy business travel. Like so many other fliers in the same situation, Mr. Ball was having trouble using them for something he really wanted. Though he had enough miles for a number of award tickets, he said, “As you spend more time on planes, the last thing you want to do when you have some down time is get back on.”

Sellers register and enter their loyalty programs and account totals, which LoyaltyMatch uses to automatically list the items those miles and points can buy. For example, my test account (with a measly 16,309 American Airlines miles and 15,000 American Express points) immediately triggered four Exchange Alerts from other users willing to pay cash or trade miles or points for the merchandise that LoyaltyMatch said my miles and points could buy.

Buyers simply browse the site for items they want and submit a cash or trade offer. The site then matches you up with potential sellers, who can choose to accept your offer and use their points or miles to buy that popcorn maker for you and have it mailed to your door. You in turn, pay the seller through PayPal or order the item you agreed to trade from your loyalty program. For its services, LoyaltyMatch charges $1.99 a transaction.

Hat tip to Scott Lake of StartupOttawa for the link.

Originally inspired by Marcelo Calbucci’s Seattle Startup Index, I’ve been producing Techvibes’ Start-up Indexes for half a year now. First started as an offhand post idea, the Indexes were well received, appealing to every geek’s inner motivation to appear on high score lists. Starting with just two, Vancouver and Toronto, we responded to demand and suggestions and last month posting Indexes for nine cities/regions. A Canada-wide index had been requested a number of times, so coinciding with today, the one hundred and forty-first anniversary of confederation of the Dominion of Canada, I’m pleased to post our first Canada Start-up Index.

The criteria for companies to appear on the list:

• Located in Canada
• Less than five years old
• Not a public company
• Is a tech company; either hardware, software, web app/service, or mobile

The Index is intended as a jovial comparison of Canadian companies. Comprehensive traffic data is difficult to obtain, and neither Alexa or Compete’s numbers are perfect; we average them to smooth out bias. Further, web traffic isn’t necessarily a relevant measure of success, nor is it even an indication of having a practical business model. I’m sure many Seattle web companies experience feelings of inadequacy in ranking below the Seattle Index’s #3 site, I Can Haz Cheezburger.

If you know of a company that would qualify for the list, please post a comment and we’ll see to including it in the next edition (and relevant local editions).

Enjoy, don’t make lose sleep or make financial decisions over it, and Joyeuse Fête du Canada!