So how does this work?

If you’re a Samsung customer and you’ve just bought a laptop or netbook, visit this web page to sign up.  You’ll get 12 months of Calliflower service at no charge.

If you’re a Samsung system integrator or VAR, then visit our affiliates portal, and sign up. Once you have signed up, then apply for the Samsung Canada campaign.  Within 24 hours, you’ll be approved.  Then sign up your customers using the link provided in the campaign.  After the initial 12 month free period, when your laptop customer signs up for Calliflower you’ll be eligible for commissions on those Calliflower sales – 20% to the reseller, and 5% to the rep who closed the deal.

That’s all there is to it.  Nothing to lose, eh?

A few people have written about this promotion today.  Jon Arnold gives us plaudits for “trying something different”, and the dynamic duo of Ken Camp and Sheryl Breuker described the offer as “a HUGE value”. As for us, we’re just to be pleased to be working with a great company like Samsung Canada. 

Now it’s time to charge ahead and make a few sales.

Disappointingly, Canadians making a trip to the Nexus One web page were confronted by a notice stating that the phone was not yet available in Canada.  No matter, many of us said, we’ll just buy it on eBay.

That might not be such a good idea. 

The patchwork of 3G bands emerging in North America makes the Nexus One a very poor phone for most Canadian mobile customers. Rogers, Telus and Bell operate on 850Mhz and 1900Mhz frequencies, while the Nexus One operates on 2100Mhz, 1700Mhz, and 900Mhz.  For Canadian customers of the big 3 carriers, high speed data on Nexus One will not be available.

There is a ray of hope for Canadians who want a Nexus One.  One carrier in Canada providing service on the 1700Mhz AWS band today is Wind Mobile.  The as yet unlaunched DAVE Wireless will also apparently provide 1700Mhz service. 

Frankly, the most deflating part of this launch story is that 3G hasn’t meant an intelligent rationalization of frequencies.  We remain mired in the tar-pit of frequency allocation strategies, driving up handset costs in order to support roaming and effectively locking specific devices to specific carrier networks.

Meh!

Identical networks, identical phones… it seems like an ideal opportunity to compare service providers, no?

On the surface, it looks as if Bell and Telus are getting really aggressive.  Bell’s price for the 9700 is $229, Telus’ $249, and Rogers $299. Winner, Bell!

And what about the plans?

My experience on iPhone has shown me that I’m not a super heavy mobile data user, and I’ve got a 3G stick so I don’t need to tether to my laptop. I’m looking for a modest number of minutes that can be used throughout North America, and a data plan that will give me between 500M and 1G of usage in any month.

• For $40/month Rogers offers 450 local minutes.  1G of data is an additional $30, and North American long distance is $25, bringing the total to $95, plus taxes, fees and so on.
• For $65/month Telus offers 450 local minutes plus 1G of data.  Add a North American LD plan for another $35, and the total is $100, plus taxes, fees and so on.
• For $60/month, Bell offers 600 local minutes, plus 1G of data.  The North American LD plan adds another $30, and that brings the total to $90 per month, plus taxes, fees and the like.

Heavens!  Bell offers more for less money than Telus or Rogers.  Bell wins again!

Even taking into account the $35 activation fee that Telus and Rogers would charge me to switch, over the lifetime of the contract Telus is the most expensive at $3,884, and Bell the cheapest at $3,504.

Note that this doesn’t take into account the fact that Bell has given me an extra 150 minutes of usage per month as well.  Since I rarely exceed 450 minutes per month on this device (my primary phone is the iPhone) it’s unlikely I would need that insurance policy, but it’s certainly nice to have.

When you net it out, I could save $215 over 3 years by switching from Rogers to Bell.  That’s $5.97 per month. 

Is it enough?  For most people, probably not. I might switch this one phone away from Rogers just to see how good the Bell network is, but ordinarily even I wouldn’t consider the switch for $6 per month in savings.

I’m still waiting to see what happens when the real competition starts between these behemoths.

What caused this reflection?  It has been a week since my last posting, and that has partly been due to an experience with our health care system in Canada.

Last weekend I dropped my son off at McMaster University in Hamilton.  It’s his freshman year, so he is living in residence, and he was very much looking forward to frosh week and getting to know the other young people he would be living with.  By Monday evening however, he had developed a stomach problem.  He visited the on-Campus clinic.  The doctors there thought it might be a flu, and advised him to stay in bed, which he did all day Tuesday.

By Tuesday evening he knew it was more than a simple flu bug, as his stomach problem had escalated to extreme abdominal pain, accompanied by fever. He called McMaster Emergency Services and was taken to the emergency department at the university hospital.  We got a call from him at about 7:00 telling us he was there.

I grabbed the 9:00 PM flight to Toronto, cabbed it from Toronto to Hamilton, and was there by 11:30, by which time he had had blood work, and an ultra-sound, and the diagnosis was confirmed as appendicitis. At 1:00 AM he was prepped for surgery, and by 4:00 AM his appendix had been removed and the infection cleaned up.  The surgeon, a Dr. Kellsie, informed us that the appendix had been leaking but not yet ruptured, which made the job easier.

He spent another 36 hours in the hospital, and came home with me last night.  Today he’s walking slowly, but obviously on the mend.

For my American friends who worry about Canadian style health care, and who are enduring the rhetoric around “death boards”, and “protecting our seniors”, I offer the following observations:

• This was a true emergency, and it was dealt with promptly.  It was just 8 hours from admission to diagnosis to the completion of surgery.
• The quality of the care was world class. He was attended by a team of five physicians and residents following the surgery, and housed in a semi-private room on a ward with just 12 rooms.
• The cost to my family was $0.  Not only that, it didn’t drive up insurance premiums, or have any of the other negative effects associated with privately insured health care.
• The cost of the drugs he is taking during his recovery – two antibiotics, and pain medication, was just over $50, and I can probably get my drug plan to cover it.

I’m sure that the Canadian system isn’t perfect.  While I lived in the US I had gold-standard quality health care as a Microsoft employee, and there is nothing that I am aware of in this country that matches the best of the best in the United States.  However, for those confused or made fearful by the rhetoric being used on Capitol Hill, you need not fear “Canadian style” health care.  It’s head and shoulders above what the tens of millions of un-insured in the United States receive, and the quality is as good or better than what the average insured American receives today. I can only say that because I’ve lived in both countries and experienced both health care systems.

More to the point, however, I would ask the following of my American friends. As you listen to your leaders debate this issue, ask yourselves what three days of emergency hospitalization would cost in your country.  My recollection is that it’s probably well in excess of $30,000. Next ask yourselves whether it’s fair that families be ruined over routine, but unforeseen, medical needs.

These are questions only you can answer.

As for me, I am profoundly grateful for the incredible care that the team at McMaster hospital delivered, and the speed with which it was delivered.

In any case, Mark Goldberg swiftly missiled off a piece of email to me this morning saying:

The CBC story you linked to is 2 weeks old.
I have written 5 blog posts that discredit the OECD study… according to the OECD, US rates are the worst – worse than Canada in all categories… do you really believe that?
Check out:
http://mhgoldberg.com/blog/2009/08/unravelling-oecd-flaws.html
http://mhgoldberg.com/blog/2009/08/ctia-letter-refutes-oecd.html
http://mhgoldberg.com/blog/2009/08/cost-of-free.html
http://mhgoldberg.com/blog/2009/08/canadian-wireless-data-leadership.html
http://mhgoldberg.com/blog/2009/08/oecd-study-needs-reality-check.html

Oops.

It’s actually true, in my opinion, that Canadian rates have fallen and become very competitive.  Two years ago I spent $500 to $700 per month on  mobile service with Rogers, with one phone.  Today I buy service for 4 phones and a USB data stick, all with generous 3G data plans plus 16Mb/s home internet for about the same price as I paid two years ago for a single phone.

I don’t believe the OECD study any more than Mark does.

en·tre·pre·neur
n.  A person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Blazoned across the front page of the local rag, the Ottawa Citizen, this morning’s headline read Billion-dollar business fund overlooks city tech firms.  It seems the Ontario Government yesterday announced a $263-million grant  to establish a Toronto-based studio for French video game giant Ubisoft.  The funds are coming from the $1.15-billion Next Generation of Jobs fund, announced in March 2008, which has so far exclusively invested in the Southern Ontario cities of Toronto, Waterloo, and Windsor, overlooking the more than 1,800 companies in Ottawa’s tech sector.

Never mind that Ubisoft has more than $100-million in profits annually, or that the $263-million spent creates just 800 jobs over the next decade at a cost of $330,000 per job (after all, that’s cheap compared to the auto bailout), or that Dalton McGuinty’s government will run an $18-billion dollar deficit this year.  No, what really galls is the statement in May by then economic development minister Michael Bryant that “This is government picking winners and losers, government as entrepreneur.”

There is no element of risk in spending the taxpayers money.  Taxing struggling families to fund profitable multi-national corporations is closer to the centrally run economies of the Soviet Union than entrepreneurship.

Government as entrepreneur.  It’s enough to make you weep.

More to the point, however, the focus of the Next Generation of Jobs Fund is on employment in existing established businesses.  The money has gone to players in the plastics, automotive, entertainment, and health care industries.  Big announcements, and good photo ops, but a short term and short-sighted strategy.

What’s needed is a strategy to encourage job creation through new ventures and innovation.  For example, funds in the United States and Israel are demonstrating repeatedly that small investments in promising startups, with significant mentorship (think Paul Graham, or Yossi Vardi) can produce dramatic results (think Twitter).  It’s easy to think of a number of successful Ontario entrepreneurs that might be a homegrown Graham or Vardi.  The incentive to invest would be that much greater if the Ontario government had some programs targeted at encouraging those entrepreneurs to invest their dollars in some real entrepreneurs, rather than photo-ops for the Premier.

“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change”, said Alice.
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carrol.

They look gorgeous, no doubt.  Check out this trailer from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  Click the full screen button to see the full impact.  It’s really darned impressive.

Don’t expect to see a lot of Canadian high definition content, however.   Not that there aren’t people in this country shooting high definition video, who might have a strong desire to share that video.  It’s simply a matter of bandwidth and usage caps. All broadband providers in Canada, excepting a few small outfits in Vancouver, cap usage at between 50 and 150G of transfer per month, and restrict upload speeds to under 1 megabit per second, except Shaw who have raised their upload limit to a meagre 2 megabits.  We’d be in our graves before YouTube received our videos at these speeds.

Pathetic, no? Even worse, most of the small business offerings from these providers consist of repackaged residential service, with a better service agreement and a higher price.

Does it matter if a few people can’t upload video?  Perhaps not, unless you’re a Canadian culture supporter or Heritage Minister James Moore.  But what about the other impacts of capped usage and restricted upload bandwidth – the economic and environmental impacts?  Applications like VPN, remote desktop, and VoIP are the cornerstones of telecommuting strategies.  Those applications are dependent on high speed upload as well as download.  When telecommuting is impaired, it has an economic impact to business, and an environmental impact on society.  We should all care about that!

So how about it Rogers, Bell, Telus, Shaw and Videotron?  Download speeds have increased steadily over the last decade, but we’ve had upload speeds of under 1Mbs since the dawn of broadband.  Shouldn’t we have better?

We’re probably paying more on Bell, but I don’t really know how much more.  With Bell we’re paying $25 per month to get unlimited long distance (yeah – over 40,000 minutes), and we’re paying for some additional features.  Mookie argued that hardly anybody ever uses more than 1,000 minutes per month.  1,000 minutes is nearly 17 hours of calling.  He’s probably right that we would never use more than 1,000 minutes, especially considering that I already spend $5/month with my mobile plan to get 1,000 minutes long distance on that phone.  Woe betide you if you use more than the 1,000 minutes however – Uncle Ted’s rate on overage is a steep $.12/minute.

I didn’t take him up on his offer. 

“Mookie”, I said “my home phone bill just isn’t painful enough for me to switch.  Now, if you could do something about my outrageous monthly mobile bill, or the ridiculous price I pay for substandard broadband, then we’d be in business.”  Mookie demurred, saying that he only represented the home phone service. 

The hassles associated with porting our number, the equipment installation, and the things I’ve heard about Rogers Home Phone incompatibilities with security systems were enough to dissuade me.  If Google Voice ever comes to Canada with number portability, we might reconsider.  For now, however, we’ll pay a couple bucks extra per month and stick with the Bell system.

I suspect that there are a lot of people like us out there.  When Vonage came to Canada people flocked to sign up, us included.  Bell responded some months later with the current $25 all you can eat plan, which stemmed that tide.  Rogers is going to have to do something equally dramatic in order to win market share.  How about home phone on cable with unlimited long distance across North America for $10/month, no system access fee, and features that Bell not only doesn’t have but probably can’t easily provide? $40/month, however, is just too little, too late.

What do you think?  Would you switch?  Or does Rogers have to do more to win your business?

In this sequence, two knights charge at each other.  On contact, the blue knight’s lance is shattered in his hand, and the remains of the lance are seen in the next photograph, as the knight mounted on the white horse rides past the broken lance.

In this sequence, the knight on the white horse has struck the blue knight in the helmet with this lance.  You can see the shattered handle in his hands, as well as the wood flexing as the lance glances off the helmet of the blue knight, and the shattered pieces fly away.

And in this short video shot from my iPhone using QiK, both knights are unhorsed.

The Medieval Festival continues tomorrow at Upper Canada Village.  It’s a cheap and thrilling way to spend a family afternoon. Jousts, hand to hand combat, trebuchets, and more. Highly recommended.

May 19, the Canadian Advanced Technology Association held its annual award dinner.  Held at the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, this $200/seat event was well attended.  More importantly, although I thought I knew of most of the players in the Canadian tech space, 75% of the awards went to groups that I had never heard of.

May 20, the Ottawa Network held its second Founders and Funders dinner happened downtown at the Velvet Room. This mixer is designed to put entrepreneurs and VC’s together over drinks and dinner for an evening of networking. There were a lot of new startups.  More importantly, 8 VC’s were present, and 7 of them were from outside Ottawa.  Although the local venture community has disappeared, Waterloo, Montreal and Toronto are moving in to fill the gap.

May 22, the National Angel Capital Organization is holding its Spring 2009 Co-Investment Summit in Toronto.  This fabulous event brings together individual angel investors, angel investment groups, and entrepreneurs for a day of networking and pitching.  Look for Calliflower at that event.  Our presentation will be in the afternoon.