1. Digitcom Recognized as Avaya “Partner in Customer Excellence”

This month we here at Digitcom were proud to receive the prestigious distinction as an Avaya “Partner in Customer Excellence,” a newly created designation that identifies and rewards channel partners who achieve significantly higher scores in their customer satisfaction surveys.

The designation “Partner in Customer Excellence” itself comes as part of a set of initiatives designed to not only acknowledge those who exceed the customer satisfaction standard but to help all channel partners know where they stand in comparison with others and how they can improve. In the end, both Avaya and its various channel partners benefit when all parties are focused on customer satisfaction, a commitment that we pride ourselves on here at Digitcom. 

2. RIM’s Balsillie, Lazaridis Finally Resign – Too Little, Too Late?

Digitcom awards and distinctions aside for a moment, the really big news in the tech and telecom world this month was the announcement that long time RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis finally resigned in an effort to pave the way for new leadership and perhaps a renewed (or would that just be “new”) focus on innovation. Following the announcement, Thorsten Heins, a former Siemens AG executive who joined the Waterloo giant in late 2007, was appointed the new RIM CEO.

Despite the change in leadership, however, investors remain unconvinced as shares in the company plunged nine percent immediately following the announcement and a further 3.2 percent in the days following.

3. Apple Customers want new iPhones (Not Better Working Conditions)

The day after Apple posted massive profits in its latest fiscal report, the working conditions along the Cupertino technology giant’s supply lines, particularly those found in the Foxconn factories littered across China, have once again come under scrutiny in a NY Times exposé; not because something new has happened, but because nothing old has changed.

With employees facing inhumane conditions, including unsafe work environments, exorbitantly long work hours, and even physical punishment, the question becomes who’s to blame for this ongoing crisis, and it looks like it may very well be us, the North American Apple loving public.

4. Complaints over Throttling Are Up

According to reports from the CRTC, complaints over throttling are up in Canada. The telecom regulator says that there have been 52 complaints filed since last fall compared to 51 complaints filed in the period between October 2009 and September of last year. The newest numbers outnumber complaints filed by users over the two year period following the CRTC’s release of traffic management rules. Last fall, the regulator released a “reminder” to ISPs about the rules released in 2009.

This story comes as part of a longstanding saga of throttling here in Canada, with many carriers (Rogers in particular) continuously testing the CRTC’s guidelines with supposedly inadvertent instances of illegal network shaping.

5. End Of An Era: Avaya Channel Boss Jeremy Butt Calls It A Day!

Establishing an effective channel partner program is easier said than done, especially for companies which operate in keenly contested market segments such as Unified Communications. While he is no Steve Jobs, it’s fair to say that Jeremy Butt had the same effect on Avaya Channel sales that the former had on Apple’s revolutionary product design.

After four years on the job as global channel chief in which he embraced a more channel-friendly model and actively promoted efforts to crack down the grey market activity, Jeremy Butt will be leaving Avaya at the end of March.

6. iPads in the Classroom: A Sound Investment or Bottomless Money Pit?

As expected Apple unveiled its latest technological advancement geared specifically to the education sector this month, digital textbooks. Part of its newly revamped online book service, dubbed “iBooks 2” Apple’s upgrades will allow textbook manufacturers to create fully interactive titles for the iPad in an effort to bring education to life.

But while Apple is lauding its new digital textbooks as the future of education, many are questioning whether such technology is needed and whether it’s affordable. In fact, there seems to be a growing dissident voice in the education community crying out not for iPads and other technology, but simply for funds to keep teachers.

With complaints over Internet throttling up and with the CRTC saying that it has evidence of Rogers’ throttling, the telecommunications giant says that it will stop the practice in 2012.

The move comes on the heels of Bell’s decision to end throttling effective March of this year.

Rogers revealed its decision to end throttling in a letter to the CRTC on Friday. At the same time, it also refuted the CRTC’s claims that it was guilty of “unauthorized throttling” with respect to video games.

“The testing which the Commission has done was artificial in that it was designed to send a file which would be subject to traffic shaping,” Rogers senior vice president of regulatory affairs Ken Engelhart wrote. “Your traffic was not representative of the way our online gaming customers or other customers use the Internet. The result of your testing is not surprising: it showed that the system operates as it was configured to do.”

Engelhart’s mention of the testing being “not surprising” seems to contradict Rogers’ initial response to the CRTC’s findings: “We’re actually very surprised by this. We do our own testing constantly and this is not anything that our testing results have shown,” said company spokeswoman Patricia Trott at the time.

Okay…

Rogers says that the CRTC’s evidence points to “a bit of traffic that never gets classified.” A problem can arise if some of that unclassified traffic is directed to a port on the user’s computer that would normally be used for P2P file sharing. The traffic gets throttled by Rogers’ apparatus because it can’t be identified. Rogers says that this happens to only about 0.005 percent of “real world traffic.”

Some were less than convinced of the company’s explanation. “Rogers failed to provide the CRTC with technical data as to which games and applications they have tested themselves,” said Canadian Gamers Organization founder Jason Koblovsky. “Without the technical data from their tests on online games, the Canadian Gamers Organization worries that Rogers’ response may be an attempt to mislead the CRTC and the public. We continue to call on Rogers to make these numbers public.”

Rogers countered swiftly, stating that it wasn’t “up to anything” sinister. “I can assure you the only thing we are up to is investing a lot of money, time and effort to try and give our customers the best possible Internet service we can,” said Engelhart.

In any event, Rogers appears to be meeting the CRTC’s demands from last month. The company either had to rebut the evidence or present a compliance plan by February 3. Rogers says it will use a phased-in approach to stop throttling, commencing officially at the start of next month.

“New technologies and ongoing investments in network capacity will allow Rogers to begin phasing out that policy starting in March 2012,” wrote Engelhart. “These changes will be introduced to half of Rogers existing Internet customers by June 2012 and to its remaining customers by December 2012.”

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Written by: Jordan Richardson. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

There are thousands of things that each of us desire on a daily basis, some of which we give in to, some of which we fight to resist. There are some desires that are hardwired into our innermost being, the need for food, for shelter, for safety; while others we impose upon ourselves, the desire for a cigarette, a drink, or that much needed cup of coffee for example. But in this modern technological age, researchers have found yet one more desire that is becoming increasingly more difficult to say no to… social networking.

In a study conducted by a team of researchers from University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business designed to measure levels of desire, it was discovered that the average digitally connected person finds it more difficult to resist tweeting than the lure of cigarettes, alcohol or other persistent desires.

The study even found that people give in to the siren song of social networking far more readily than they do to several instincts actually needed for the continued propagation of the species, namely sleep and sex. Does anyone else find it problematic for the furtherance of our species that people would rather digitally connect with another human being rather than actually connect?

The study, led by chief researcher Wilhelm Hofmann, was designed to document people’s desire control ‘in the wild,’ that is outside of a controlled laboratory setup, in an effort to see just what sorts of desires people were facing, giving in to, and trying to resist. While gauging several different types of desires, the focus of the study was, of course, the lure of social networking, and if you didn’t think people were becoming addicted to Twitter and Facebook, well the proof is about to start rolling in.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Hofmann in an interview with the UK Guardian. Sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting “pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations”.

The study also concludes that while the desires for sex and sleep were found to be stronger, people’s ability to resist them was concomitantly stronger, meaning that in comparison with the desire to Tweet the average respondent still gave in to the desire to social network than the desire to sleep or sleep around.

But are the findings of this study really that surprising? When compared to sex or sleep the desire to social network seems relatively innocuous, a low-risk, low-commitment sort of activity that can be done in seconds. On the other hand, a commitment to sleep or have sex carries with it significantly more weight (and hopefully a slightly longer time commitment) and thus requires more thought and more resistance to giving in to urges.

In the end the thing I find the most problematic about this study is just how subtly  invasive social networking can be, an activity so banal and mundane in our digital existence that we barely even give it a passing thought. Like almost anything else in our lives, excessive dedication to social networking lowers our resistance to it, meaning we give in to our desire to Tweet the trivial events of our lives more readily the next time and slowly become dependent on, addicted to, the need to social network.

Now the real question is, will you Tweet this?

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Written by: Matt Klassen. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Year 2011 was a mixed bag of sorts for ShoreTel. Though it started off well, its market blitzkrieg hit a speed bump as the disaster in Japan threatened to cut supply lines. Things started to turn around towards the latter half of the year as the IP-based phone service bagged lucrative partnership deals with Tech Data Canada and HP.

And the company couldn’t have made a better start to the New Year – generating record revenues in its second quarter for fiscal 2012, and surprising analysts by reporting earnings that beat their expectations by 400 percent. To top it off, ShoreTel last week confirmed that it will acquire M5 Networks, a New York-based hosted UC vendor, in a deal worth about $146 million.

First, a quick look at ShoreTel’s Q2 results. The company’s revenue grew 22 percent year-over-year to $58 million, and up 8 percent from the previous quarter. Net income was $1.4 million or 3 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $1 million, or 2 cents per share a year ago. Despite the company posting a surprise non-GAAP profit, it was downgraded by equities research analysts at Craig Hallum from a “buy” rating to a “hold” rating.

“ShoreTel’s market share within both worldwide and the United States have grown significantly year-over-year,” chief executive Peter Blackmore said. “We expect to build these market share gains and continue to close the gap between our current number three position and the number two player in the U.S. We also added a record of nearly 1300 new customers in the quarter, a sequential increase of 24 percent over quarter one.“

M5 Networks, headquartered in New York City, has been operating in the Unified Communication segment since year 2000. The company is considered a leader in the UC cloud market with more than 2,000 customers. M5’s flagship offerings include the M5 Scribe Voice Mail to Email Translation service, as well as fax, business application integration and a softphone offering. Last April, M5 acquired a call center vendor Callfinity and integrated its solution into the M5 hosted platform.

As for the ShoreTel’s M5 acquisition, the latter’s shareholders will receive approximately $84 million in cash and 9.5 million shares of ShoreTel stock. The move is expected to boost ShoreTel’s cloud capabilities thereby enabling it to offer both cloud-based and on-premise solutions. Post acquisition, M5 Networks will become a ShoreTel business unit led by its current CEO Dan Hoffman, who will become president and general manager of the new business unit. Though the engineering groups from each company will remain separate, they will cooperate and coordinate in order to leverage the innovation and best practices of both groups so that both product road maps will benefit from the combined capabilities.

“The acquisition of M5 positions ShoreTel as a leader in the fast-growing cloud UC market and delivers a suite of hosted telephony solutions that is unmatched in the marketplace,” said Blackmore. “This acquisition is a critical step in our evolution and enables the company to capitalize on trends in cloud computing and advance our enterprise communications strategy.”

Gartner predicts that the UC cloud segment could grow 36 percent, to $2.2 billion, by 2015. With M5 Networks in the bag, ShoreTel will further strengthen its position as a formidable player in the hosted UC segment.

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Written by: Gaurav Kheterpal. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.comby:RSS,Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Since its own IPO way back in 2004, Google has employed the informal motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” as the basis for much of its decision making. The company’s underlying philosophy has been that you don’t need to exploit users for profits and that its better to invest in improving the world over the long term even if it means sometimes forfeiting short term gains.

By creating a Don’t Be Evil culture, the search engine giant established a baseline for honesty and integrity in its decision-making meant to dissociate itself from any form of cheating or exploitation. The philosophy is said to imbue everything from Google’s search engine algorithms to the company’s privacy settings on it Google+ social network and one embodied by the company through offering many of its unique services (Google Earth, Maps, and Street View for instance) at no cost to users. 

But with a recent decision in a lawsuit in France it looks like its becoming more difficult to be not evil, as Google was found guilty of anti-competitive practices for offering its Google Maps platform for free.

Earlier this week in a Paris court Google France and its parent company Google were found guilty of anti-competitive practices for offering its mapping service for free to businesses across the country and were ordered to pay the plaintiff, Bottin Cartographes, 500,000 Euros (about $660,000). In addition, the court also required Google to pay a fine of 15,000 Euros for this practice.

It’s a huge victory for Bottin Cartographes, a mapping company that has seen its profits dwindle over the years as it’s struggled to compete with the search engine giant who offers the same services absolutely free.

“We proved the illegality of (Google’s) strategy to remove its competitors,” Jean-David Scemmama, attorney for Bottin Cartographes, said in a statement. “The court recognized the unfair and abusive character of the methods used, and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed. This is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application.”

This decision comes after years of Bottin Cartographes arguing that by offering its mapping services for free the search engine giant was taking control of the mapping industry and stifling competition, as companies like Bottin Cartographes simply can’t afford to offer their services at no cost.

That being said, despite the fact that Google can find 500,000 Euros in the couch in the employee break room, the search engine giant isn’t about to accept this decision and word is an appeal is already in the works.

For me this entire situation raises the interesting question of the legality of ‘free’ in a capitalist society. Truthfully, in a society founded on profits and competition on the face of it there seems nothing more contradictory than offering something that has no direct profit stream connected to it (because you better believe Google makes money of its Maps program, just not from users). Of course for all those of us who exist as the rank-and-file of capitalism, a little more ‘free’ is always welcome.

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Written by: Matt Klassen. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Last December, Telus predicted a “Big 2012” for investors and raised its dividend by 10 percent, bumping it up to $2.55 a share. While growth in the smartphone sector is expected to drive revenue, the wireless giant knows diversification is the name of the game. To that effect, the carrier last year partnered with U.S. based digital signage provider Stratacache to provide digital signage services across Canada.

On the same note, Telus yesterday announced that it has acquired Wolf Medical Systems, a company that provides online health records sharing for doctors. The move will create ‘Telus Physician Solutions’ – a new line of business targeted as strengthening the carrier’s position in the country’s healthcare sector.

Wolf Medical Systems has electronically processed more than 11 million patient visit records since 2010. The company offers hosted, cloud-based technology which will provide “anytime anywhere” access to patient information over the carrier’s wireless and wireline networks. The EMR industry is transforming with patients and doctors starting to use smartphones and tablets to view/ process electronic medical records. Telus says doctors using Wolf EMR see more than 26,000 patients a day and review 166,000 lab results

As part of the acquisition, Wolf Medical founder Brendan Byrne will be heading the new business entity – ‘Telus Physician Solutions’.

“Electronic medical records are an essential building block to an efficient healthcare system in Canada,” explained Paul Lepage, senior vice-president, TELUS Health Solutions. “While EMRs have been proven to increase efficiency and performance at both the clinical and regional healthcare system levels, Canada’s EMR penetration rate of about 32 per cent lags behind other OECD countries. By committing to the EMR market with a best-in-class solution, combined with the connectivity that our wireless and wireline broadband networks enable, we are positioned to help increase this adoption rate which will in turn improve work processes, efficiencies in service delivery, and patient health outcomes.”

Telus has been operating in the EMR segment since 2008 when it acquired Emergis, a popular Montreal-based company specializing in electronic health records. Since Telus Health was born, the carrier has pumped in close to $800-million over three years in healthcare-related technology. The acquisition of Wolf Medical will further strengthen Telus Health’s position as a formidable player in the EMR segment.

Given the cut-throat competition in the wireless segment, it’s not unusual to see wireless carriers move out of their comfort zones and explore alternate business lines. Last year, Rogers tried it’s hand at several unconventional business lines such as machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless connectivity, banking, home monitoring service and vanity number services.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Written by: Gaurav Kheterpal. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.comby:RSS,Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

As we touched on yesterday, Facebook filed for its initial public offering on Wednesday. The $5 billion IPO filing gives us a unique opportunity to see inside the social networking giant and to examine the numbers behind Mark Zuckerberg’s former dorm room project. More than adding context to Facebook’s market power, the numbers also serve to illuminate just how powerful social media is.

Along with the IPO, Zuckerberg released a letter that outlined Facebook’s origins and mission to “make the world more open and connected.”

“Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness,” wrote Zuckerberg.

Whether or not Zuckerberg’s dream began as a way to make a lot of money, it looks like that’s exactly what’s happened. The numbers behind Facebook as revealed in SEC filings today are quite compelling.

The company opened its doors in 2004, of course, and now boasts 845 million active users in a network of more than 100 million connections. 483 million people use Facebook daily. The average user, says comScore, spends roughly seven hours a month on Facebook. There are some 100 billion “friendships,” 250 million photos are uploaded each day and 2.7 billion “likes” and comments are made each day.

Facebook made $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011 compared to 2010 revenue of $1.9 billion. Profit for 2011 was $1 billion. Out of the $3.71 billion revenue from 2011, $3.15 billion of it was from advertising – up 68 percent from 2010’s advertising revenue numbers of $1.87 billion. There was a 42 percent increase in advertisements delivered in 2011 and an 18 percent increase in the overall price of the advertisements.

Zynga represents about 12 percent of Facebook’s business. For every dollar that Zynga makes for gaming products, Facebook makes roughly 30 cents.

There are risks for investors, of course, including innovation from Twitter, Google and other social networking sites. With today’s notoriously fickle Internet user serving as the lifeblood of Facebook, even the slightest change in the wind could represent an exodus of users and subsequent loss in advertising economy.

Through it all, Zuckerberg says Facebook’s message is the same as it ever was: “People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.”

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Written by: Jordan Richardson. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

I’m torn. On the one hand I like my iPhone (I mean I really like it), while on the other hand I can’t ever imagine any of the staff here at Digitcom enduring the working conditions that those along Apple’s supply chain face on a daily basis. So what’s the answer? How do we fix this ethical problem?

Yesterday business mogul Donald Trump weighed in on the issue, challenging new Apple CEO Tim Cook to relocate Apple’s supply chain to America, calling for Apple to pioneer the move towards in-sourcing, that is, bringing American companies’ supply chains abroad back to U.S. soil. But in today’s global economic market is pulling production out of these countries really the answer?

Where Trump is clearly interested in companies like Apple bringing their supply chains to America as a way of boosting a flagging economy, I continue to frame the entire situation in human terms, in a way that helps the Chinese Foxconn workers and helps us here at home, and perhaps its within that framework that a possible solution can be found.

It was a little over a decade ago when the corporate trend of the day was outsourcing, the relocation of many aspects of one’s business, including manufacturing, supply lines, and customer service to other countries where employment standards were lower and employment expenditures could thus be reduced.

The result of such outsourcing was that many companies indeed were able to reduce employment costs and thus increase revenues, although for customers it often meant that a phone call to the customer service department of the company down the street meant a call rerouted to somewhere in rural Asia…but I digress.

For years now the North American consumer has been living in blissful ignorance of the human story behind outsourcing, happy to purchase cheaper gadgets and technology and happy to not have to think about any of the ethical issues associated with how those devices are made. But as enhanced communication brings our global community that much closer together it’s becoming impossible to ignore the impact that our consumer habits have on the rest of the world.

With all that said, though, the question remains, is outsourcing really the problem? There’s no question that companies traditionally outsource because labour is cheaper overseas, with countries like China and India taking hard stances against unionized labour, allowing wages to stay low. So to a degree there’s no denying that the drive to save a buck has created this situation.

In my mind, however, there could be even more damage done if companies like Apple pulled their manufacturing operations out of countries like China entirely, a move that would undoubtedly result in mass layoffs, ending in other human tragedies as well.

Truthfully (and I’m not sure how politically correct this will sound) I think the answer is that we need to start bringing some of our North American employment standards to these other countries, and its here, I think, that Apple could truly be a pioneer. As was stated yesterday, all Apple would realistically need to do would be to demand workers along its supply line be treated better and it would be done. As the NY Times report stated last week, “Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

Is it all as simple as that? Probably not, but we have to start somewhere.

2011 was another good year for Shopify as the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world secured $15 Million in Series B funding. The company grew to 80 employees and speculations were rife that the company will need to make acquisitions to grow its business to the next level.

Yesterday, Shopify announced that it has acquired Ottawa mobile application developer Select Start Studios Inc. (aka S3) for an undisclosed amount. This “easy buy” is expected to help Shopify improve the accessibility of its products and enable customers to buy Shopify products using smartphones and tablets.

Though S3 is a tiny company with only 16 employees, it’s a well-known name in mobile app development circles in Ottawa. S3’s claim to fame includes iPhone apps for global accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, phone listing provider Yellow Pages, telecommunications firm Avaya and others. Though the company’s headcount grew marginally last year, its revenues grew 600% during that time. Post acquisition, S3 will no longer exist as a separate legal entity, thereby boosting Shopify’s employee count to 100.

On the other hand, Shopify is widely regarded as one of the most exciting ecommerce startups wordwide. The company offers a do-it-yourself online shopping platform which powers more than 20,000 active online stores across 80 different international markets. The company’s partners include big names such as GE, Rovio Mobile and Evernote. Shopify has witnessed an encouraging increase in mobile transactions and with S3 in the bag, Ottawa’s fastest-growing company looks well poised for m-Commerce growth.

“After seeing a massive increase in mobile transactions at Shopify, we believe there is great demand and opportunity for mcommerce,” said Lutke. “The S3 acquisition brings in top talent that will rapidly deliver on our mobile strategy, and produce several new mobile product offerings this year. These guys are at the top of their game and know this stuff better than anyone. We’ve been saying for a while that Ottawa is a fantastic place for starting technology companies. This just confirms it.”

Tobi Lutke, Shopify’s co-founder and CEO believes that online shopping is the future. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that the company has purchased the mcommerce.com domain as well. Shopify plans to hire another 40 people by the end of year 2012.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but it is believed that the deal involved a mix of cash and stock.

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Written by: Gaurav Kheterpal. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.comby:RSS,Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

The Samsung Galaxy Note

With the steady proliferation of mobile technology the next thing customers are going to need is not another phone or tablet, but some sort of Batman-esque utility belt to hold all this stuff. The fact is many on the bleeding edge of technological innovation are discovering they have a problem, too many devices and not enough hands.

In today’s mobile market it seems there’s a device for everything, with tablets proficient in certain tasks and smartphones in others, with every tech company quickly looking for ways to unify these devices into one seamless user experience. But Samsung is taking this drive towards integration one step further (or perhaps one step backwards), ignoring advanced Cloud technology in favour of a simpler, more straightforward solution, a tablet/smartphone hybrid.

The Samsung Galaxy Note is set to hit shelves on February 19^th, touted as a new type of smartphone that blends the convenience of a smartphone with the functionality of a tablet. But such a hybrid device is really nothing new, and I would guess that even those looking to simplify their digital existence would still rather have one useable smartphone and one useable tablet, instead of one partially functional hybrid.

It was a little almost five months ago when the world got its first look at Samsung’s hybrid Galaxy Note device at the IFA tech conference in Berlin. The company touted its cutting edge hybrid device as a brand new class of smartphone set to fill that void between the conventional—and not to mention portable—smartphone and the versatile and functional tablet computing platform…if such a void really exists.

At the time the company stated, “The Galaxy Note is a new category of product, developed through Samsung’s deep consumer understanding and insight…It combines core on-the-go benefits of various mobile devices while maintaining smartphone portability to create a whole new user experience.”

I had to laugh when I first read Samsung’s effusive self-glorification (or perhaps self-delusion) when it spoke about the Galaxy Note as “a new category of product,” and of the company’s own “deep consumer understanding and insight,” given the fact that we’ve seen exactly this sort of hybrid device before with the Dell Streak and given the fact that consumers, in general, hated it.

According to Samsung, the Galaxy Note is targeted specifically at those looking to condense their proliferating device portfolio into a single product. Beyond that, I’m sure that the Galaxy Note will find its niche market, especially among certain professional and artistic crowds who will find value in the ability to scribble notes, drawings, or thoughts onto the phone with the included stylus, but I would guess that such a market still won’t be enough to keep the Note around for very long.

The issue with hybrid devices has historically been that they’re a Jack-of-all-trades but a King of none, functioning as a mediocre tablet and a mediocre smartphone. As I’ve said before, the problem with hybrid devices is generally that they combine the major weaknesses of the genres they are trying to marry, meaning that a device like the Note is too small to be a tablet, way too big to a smartphone; lacking the power or functionality of a tablet and, since it obscures half your face while you talk on it, I would say lacking the convenience of a mobile phone as well.

I’ll be interested to see if the Samsung Galaxy Note is able to overcome these weaknesses and actually succeed where others have failed when its released on February 19th–$300 on a two year contract with AT&T.

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Written by: Matt Klassen. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Facebook is expected to file for its initial public option (IPO) this week. Reports suggest that the social networking giant’s IPO will be worth between $5 billion and $10 billion, putting the company value somewhere in the neighbourhood of $75 billion to $100 billion.

If the numbers turn out to be accurate, this will be the largest IPO in Internet history and one of the top ten IPOs in the history of the United States.

When Facebook does file for its IPO, it means that the company’s proverbial bottom line will finally be out in the open. This should start a compelling discussion about the actual worth, in dollars as opposed to pokes, of the social networking company and, by extension, social media in general. Facebook’s IPO will set precedent with respect to other social networking IPOs.

Investors have been less than convinced of the worth of Facebook thus far, however, and there has been no clear message to suggest how Mark Zuckerberg’s baby makes money. The profitability of the business model, one that has generally resisted giving third parties free reign on advertising, is considered to be somewhat suspect in light of the fact that turning over the marketing tool to other advertisers could presumably double revenue.

That doesn’t mean Facebook hasn’t made money, mind you, as their current approach is considered to be quite successful. Research firm eMarketer estimated that Facebook made around $4.3 billion in revenue last year, with 90 percent of that coming from its current ad mechanism.

The IPO has to have advertiser’s salivating at the prospect of getting their mitts on what Facebook has: information. “The social networking king is an advertiser’s dream, accessing the intimate social behaviour of one in every 10 people in the world,” says Kathleen Smith, principal of IPO investment adviser Renaissance Capital.

Facebook now has to walk the fine line between letting advertisers in and keeping fickle social networking users happy. With its current targeted ad tool generating negative feedback, one has to wonder how a more intrusive approach will go over. The market will be watching, after all, and clicking that “like” button just took on a lot more meaning.

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Written by: Jordan Richardson. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Less than a week after a poignant NY Times exposé lambasted Apple for its substandard moderation and oversight of ongoing labour and worker safety issues in its Chinese supplied facilities– in which an unnamed Apple executive proclaimed that, “Right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China”–one group is calling out for an “ethical” iPhone, one made under fair labour practices.

Ethical watchdog group SumOfUs posted an online petition late last week, demanding that Apple resolve the inhumane working conditions and practices overseas and challenging the tech giant to create the “first ethical iPhone.”

In a recently leaked internal email, Apple CEO Tim Cook took issue with the reports that Apple was turning a blind eye to the veritable human tragedy being played out along the company’s supply chain, stating that “any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us.” As the petition states, if Cook is indeed as offended as he claims to be, the time is now to do something about it.

Apple has a long and somewhat controversial history with ethical issues, with the late Steve Jobs often pushing his whitewashed moral agenda on the tech consumer public in a strong-armed take-it-or-leave-it fashion. There was the longstanding debate over users ability to access and view adult material on their Apple devices, the recent controversy over homophobic mobile applications, and an apparent “glitch” in the company’s Siri voice assistant that prevented it from directing users to abortion clinics.

In most cases Apple took the route it considered to be the least controversial, hoping to avoid any sort of unified public outcry that might actually rouse the tech consuming public from its Apple-crazed hypnosis.

While it remains to be seen what Apple will do in response to this current situation, the difference here is that the working conditions of workers along Apple’s supply line is a matter of money, considerable money I would wager, and Apple has never been known to cough up one red cent if it can help it.

That said, SumOfUs is confident that such an overhaul to its supply line is realistic, as all Apple has to do is demand improvements from its supplies and they’ll be implemented. In fact, SumOfUs executive director Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman has taken things one step further, challenging Apple CEO Tim Cook to stand by his words and prove whether he really is as offended by these allegations as he says he is.

Instead of blaming the media for covering this story, Stinebrickner-Kauffman argues, Cook needs to recognize that this is the supply chain he setup as the company’s former COO and “he needs to start taking responsibility, not blaming the messenger.”

The real question, though, is whether the general public actually wants an “ethical” iPhone, as while that weighty prefix may deliver improved working conditions for Chinese factory workers it’ll likely bring increased costs to the consumer here in North America as well. While I’m sure people signing the petition are willing to pay more for their gadgets, the lamentable fact is that there’s a long consumer history of money savings trumping ethical concerns and I fear it will do so once again here.

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Written by: Matt Klassen. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

There’s no doubt that year 2011 belonged to Android – Google’s mobile operating system was a clear winner in the volume game as HTC took the top spot in the US smartphone market and Samsung set its eyes on Nokia. In November, Gartner confirmed that Android now accounts for almost 50% market share of worldwide smartphone shipments.

Valentine’s Day is around the corner and with so many Android devices being sold, don’t be surprised if your next date is an Android user as well. However, what do smartphones have to do with one’s dating habits? Apparently a lot – a recent survey from Match.com suggests Android leads the “dating and mating” game as Canadian singles that use Android phones are more likely to have sex on a first date. Period, err, I mean no period.

So, the next time you want to get laid on a date, try finding someone who uses an Android phone

The survey indicates that most Canadian singles believe e-mail and texting helped improve their dating habits. It reveals that Canadian Android users are most loose (aka The Seducers) and are likely to have sex on a first date with 62 per cent admitting they took the plunge. Android users also lead the roost on having one-night stands and in actively visiting dating websites. No wonder Steve Jobs said – If you want porn, get an Android.

The survey terms iPhone users as office romantics who prefer to date someone in their workplace. Moreover, iPhone users are generally pretty quick to move forward with relationships – they just need one day to reach out, while Android or BlackBerry users will wait until after 2-3 dates. Almost a quarter of iPhone users surveyed admitted having a workplace romance within the last five years.

The survey labels BlackBerry users as “Drunk Dialers” who prefer to drink alcohol on a first date with 72 per cent admitting to boozy night outs. Therefore, it’s no surprise that RIM executives sometimes get so drunk that they need to be handcuffed and restrained. Interestingly, BlackBerry users are prone to love at first sight with 67 per cent despite being the slowest to adopt online dating.

“Thanks to social networking and online dating, our love lives and our digital lives have never been more intertwined,” Match.com said in release about its survey.

And if you’re beginning to wonder can your smartphone get you laid – the survey also indicates being distracted by your mobile is the number one first date deal breaker

So, are you a seducer (Android), an office romantic (iPhone) or a drunk dialer (BlackBerry)? The survey doesn’t include Windows Phone users so I presume these users are busy playing with their new devices and don’t have the time to date. To be honest, I think that survey results were funny more than anything else. What’s your opinion?

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Written by: Gaurav Kheterpal. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.comby:RSS,Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Research In Motion is getting set to turn the page and advance into its new future with a brand new “Be Bold” campaign.

The “Be Bold” campaign officially launched on New Year’s Eve but is now getting primed for an advertising blitz that will hit the usual targets, including through television spots.

The target audience for the campaign is American users, a critical group that RIM is hoping to reclaim after countless market stumbles in the United States. Thorsten Heins, the new president and CEO, has made it clear that the BlackBerry franchise needs to regain ground in the critical market.

Heins, in a company-wide memo, stated that the “Be Bold” campaign will play “an important role for all of us” as RIM goes through 2012.

Among the many changes the “Be Bold” campaign is being used to symbolize, one is the required culture change. The company has been facing stiff competition from the likes of Apple and  Android, so the atmosphere of RIM has been dismal – to say the last. Changing the profile of the company requires an infusion of positivity, something that’s hard to come by with plummeting market value and diminishing market share.

Still, Heins and the “Be Bold” campaign are game to try.

“Moving into this year, we’ll continue to anchor new advertising, digital and social media messaging on this compelling theme of Be Bold,” Heins wrote in the memo. “In fact, next week we will launch a TV campaign that features real-life BlackBerry users sharing their stories of action.”

Part of the “Be Bold” campaign will come in the form of four cartoon characters: GoGo Girl (The Achiever), Justin Steele (The Advocate), Trudy Foreal (The Authentic), and Max Stone (The Adventurer).

The characters have already been meshed with the company’s social media strategy to bring something new to the brand, but one has to imagine that the hope here really is for effective products. With BlackBerry 10 devices in the water and other changes to the OS in the works, RIM is getting yet another kick at changing its fortunes. Let’s hope they can make this one stick.

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Written by: Jordan Richardson. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

While family voice and text bundles have long been mainstays of the American wireless world the concept of including data in that sort of family plan is relatively new, with many wireless carriers brainstorming ways of how they could offer data savings to families while still making money on one of the most lucrative aspects of the mobile market.

To that end, a report from tech site Engadget speculates that Verizon may be on the verge of offering such a data bundle, allowing families to share data across multiple subscribers on a single account. While there’s no official timeline for when Verizon will likely roll-out this new family data bundle, the company CFO acknowledged that Verizon is looking at ways at implementing a shared data plan, so long as its, “win-win for customers and for us.”

Always suspicious when I hear a large corporation talking about win-win situations regarding one it’s most lucrative profit streams though, I have to wonder just how much value families will get out of a unified data bundle and what plans Verizon may have to use such a bundle to continue to gouge its customers.

The tech site Engadget reported yesterday that it has access to new Verizon employee training material that indicates the arrival of a new version of the company’s data plans, with many speculating that this is indeed the advent of the family data bundle. Of course Engadget has no notion of when Verizon will introduce the new billing options, but its becoming abundantly clear that such a plan is in the works.

As I mentioned, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said on the company’s earning call last week that the company is looking at various ways on how to create and implement a smartphone family data plan. “We need to make sure it’s a win-win for customers and for us,” he said. “So we will continue to work on that. But it’s important to note that we are a premium priced service in the market. And we will continue with that strategy, and we’ll continue to win.”

Not one known for helping out its customers with an over-abundance of savings, I do have to wonder how Verizon will turn a family data bundle into a win for itself—as I’m sure it truly cares little for helping its customers win anything—and the one aspect that immediately comes to my mind is data overages.

While I’m sure that any sort of family data bundle will look attractive and affordable on the surface, I’d be willing to bet that Verizon will structure them in such a way where the data usage allotment will only be a small increase over that offered to single subscribers, with the hopes of course that multiple users will be almost be forced to go over their data limit and subsequently have to pay hefty overage fees.

My ever-present skepticism aside, there are a few ways such a family bundle will actually help customers. First, for those that are stingy with their data use, there will of course be some savings available (or else it wouldn’t really be a bundle at all) for families with multiple smartphones on the go. Second, such a plan would conceivably allow single users with multiple devices to lump them together on the same data plan as well, saving them money and eliminating the need to sign up for and manage multiple accounts.

But once again, given the fact that wireless carriers are always thinking up ways to make more money off data (and thus not save you anything) my guess would be that any savings, if there really are any at all, won’t be significant, with the true value of the new plan simply being the convenience of a single (and not to mention hefty) bill.

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Written by: Matt Klassen. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.