Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The digital video recorder was one of those game changing pieces of technology when it first debuted in 1998.  In our house, as in many, it has become a mainstay, especially through the last couple of weeks of the Olympics.  So let’s just say I was jazzed when Bell announced their remotepvr service. 

With Bell Remote PVR, you can now search listings, queue the PVR to record shows, manage the recordings you already have, and when you come home, you can watch them. And you can even do it on your iPhone using the Bell Remote PVR iPhone app.   Sounds good, no?

Well, the answer is no.  It’s just not a very good app, bearing all the hallmarks of being rushed to market with little user testing.  For example:

• The iPhone app has no “remember me” for the login.  Each time it starts you have to fumble around with logging in, and with the Bell user name and password security requirements that’s a lot of shifting and typing to get the required combination of letters and numbers in there.
• In a universe of 313 “now on” shows, the UI metaphor is a scrolling web page – complete with a next link at the bottom of each page allowing you see the entries 30 at a time.  You can search easily, but browsing to see what’s on is annoying.
• Bell TV allows you to add a secondary disk for archival purposes.  Want to hang onto a show?  Simply archive it.  And that’s good, because the only disk that you can record to is the primary disk.  What that means is that periodically you have to tell the box to archive material you want to keep.  RemotePVR let’s you see everything on the PVR, but doesn’t differentiate between archived and primary disk. You can delete a show from anywhere, but you can’t move a show from primary to archive.

These are basically nits, however. With a little polish, this jewel in the rough might become a gem.

By far the biggest let-down of this application follows.

If you were looking through a listing of previously recorded shows using your iPhone, and saw this screen, what would you think that the Watch button is intended to do?

Or how about this…  While browsing the guide, I note that Canada AM is currently on, and click on the show.  The following screen is displayed.  What would you think the Watch button would do in this circumstance?

Only one way to find out, right?  Go ahead and press it.  And this is what you get. 

No video plays, though, which is a bit strange. No matter how many times I press that play and pause button the video just doesn’t seem to show. 

So what does it do?  I’ll give you one clue… Janice just wandered into our home office and asked who was watching the TV downstairs.  It turns out that the TV is blasting out CTV’s Canada AM as I write this, and it started up when I pressed that watch button.    You can’t actually stream a show to your iPhone, but your iPhone can serve as a substitute remote while you’re watching TV.

In other words, to watch TV using Bell REMOTE PVR you have to be sitting in front of your TV. 

Oops.

Venture Capital in Canada is in a dismal state of disarray.  With activity at a 14 year low, investment companies have evaporated and funds are simply not being raised. Moreover, despite a resurgence of interest among angel investors, the institutional capital markets don’t show any sign of improving soon.  One angel I spoke with last week opined that series A investments for his companies were most likely to come from Boston or the San Jose / Palo Alto / San Francisco than Toronto.

Yesterday, US Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar introduced The Startup Visa Act which, if passed, will almost certainly accelerate that trend.  Similar legislation has also been introduced in the US house of representatives by Colorado’s Jared Polis. Supported by more than 100 US vc’s and angel investors, the legislation would grant special visas to entrepreneurs with at least $100,000 from a sponsoring US investor in an equity financing of not less than $250,000. If after two years, the business has created 5 jobs and raised an additional $1,000,000, then the entrepreneur is entitled to permanent residency.

Many countries have immigrant investor legislation, including Canada. The legislation usually requires that an immigrant entrepreneur have a minimum net worth, and agrees to set up a business in the host country.  The Kerry-Lugar legislation is the the first that I’m aware of that allows an investor in the host country to essentially sponsor the immigrant.  That’s an important and useful innovation.  Moreover, the funding requirements are tiny by US investment standards, allowing US investors to cherry-pick the best new businesses from around the world and bring them to the United States.

Will this new process result in a flight of Canadian entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley? It certainly seems likely, but only time will tell.

“I think you’re over-intellectualizing this, John*.  Being an entrepreneur isn’t a risk/reward conversation, otherwise nobody would ever do it.”  Thus spake the “sage” of Ottawa, midway through a conversation with a close friend who’s thinking about striking out on his own after a lengthy career within one of the Fortune 500.  Somehow we had started talking about return on investment as it relates to startups, compared to continuing to be a working stiff in the corporate world.

Starting a business is a gutsy, and some might say foolish, exercise.  Your business is going to take longer to get off the ground than you ever imagined (Calliflower has taken nearly seven years!). You’re going to spend way more money than you ever expected. You’re going to earn far less than you “need” to live on.  You will likely bring on investors who will have strong views on your business that you may, or may not, agree with.  You will work more hours than you have ever done before.  And worst of all, you’ll spend more time working in the business – doing the accounting, cleaning, running servers and so on – than you ever anticipated and it will frustrate the heck out of you because you can see the forest for the trees.  It’s just that all those bloody trees are in the way…

And yet there is also:

• the incredible team that you’re going to build as you build your company. 
• the joy of bringing a new product to market – the inspiration, perspiration, and perseverance that culiminates in a launch. 
• the undeniable thrill of customers – the people who part with their hard earned dollars to buy the product or service that you’ve built;  the ones who are passionate enough once they’ve tried your product to tell you and your team what’s good, bad, great, or indifferent about your baby;  and those rare individuals who go out of their way to tell the world that what you all have done is great.
• the faith that family and friends have in you, and the responsibility that you have when they entrust even a portion of their savings to you and your new business. 
• the immense opportunity to learn new things.  I guarantee you, and everyone working on the business with you, will learn faster in this “job” than you’ve ever learned before.
• the network of mentors, advisors and friendships that you will build who are all rooting for this business and every other business you may build in the future.

And maybe, just maybe, at the end of it all you’ll make money out of this incredible life experience. You tell me – what’s the ROI on that kind of experience? 

I’m not even going to try to guess.

*not his real name.

Last week I described the PSTN as simply a legacy user interface to today’s communications networks, based on the fact that most of the core network is already VoIP. The PSTN is simply the average person’s experience of an all VoIP network.    While the description of the PSTN as UI drew some comment, nobody argued that the core was anything but VoIP.

This morning I draw your attention to two more facts to back the assertion that VoIP is everywhere, even if not widely visible.

Tomorrow XConnect will announce their growth from last year – near doubling of revenue, 81 percent growth in IP traffic, a 108 percent rise in routing queries on its ENUM registry, and 64 new interconnect customers. This from a company who’s inglorious mission is simply to connect one IP carrier to another.

In mid-January, Telegeography published research showing that Skype last year carried 54 billion international voice minutes – nearly 12% of the global international voice traffic.  That’s one company, all IP.  Skype has an innovative GUI for users, but also provides local dial phone numbers in many countries, for those who would prefer the legacy user interface — the PSTN.

The revolution continues. 

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Today is my birthday.  And, while I’m not nearly as talented as Wolfgang Mozart and Lewis Carroll, it’s a birthday I hold in common with these two gentleman. 

This year I decided to try the Facebook application Causes as a way to celebrate.  Causes lets you tell your friends that you’d rather have a donation to a charity than a birthday gift.  They even provide ways for you to promote your cause, and collect the money on your friends behalf and send it to the charity you’ve chosen. 

I selected Oxfam Canada for their relief efforts in Haiti.  Oxfam already had people on the ground in Haiti, and my reasoning was simply that the money would likely be put to work faster as a result.  They’re currently supplying clean water and housing to 92,000 people in Haiti and need all the help they can get.

I could easily have selected the Red Cross or Unicef, as both of those had people in Haiti as well.  The reason for choosing Oxfam’s Canadian arm was simply that Canada’s Federal Government is matching money donated to Canadian charities for Haitian relief.  Every dollar turns into two dollars this way.

The campaign has been a bit of a disappointment.  I reckoned that if a reasonable percentage of the 2,100 friends I have on Facebook each gave just $10, then thousands could be collected for Haitian relief.  We’ve raised $250, including the $50 I seeded the campaign with.  With the government match, that adds up to $500.

I’m hoping that since today is my actual birthday, and the last day of the campaign, a few more people will come out of the woodwork.  I’d like to get to $1,000 at least.  If you’d like to make a $10 donation to help kids in Haiti, then click here.  Don’t worry if you don’t use Facebook – just click the big green donate button in the center of the screen and choose the option that says donate without Facebook. 

Do it for the kids in Haiti.  Or because I asked.  Or, failing that, because I’m sure that Lewis Carroll and Mozart both would have approved too.