Everything SKO...

Video killed the Radio Star, part 2.

I think public Wi-Fi as a business model is pretty much dead in its current form. OK. So I'm not the first person to say this but having been one of the pioneers of the industry I had a lot of emotional baggage tied up in public Wi-Fi. It took me longer to see the light than most observers.

I'm not saying public Wi-Fi is dead. I think it has a fantastic future. But please! Just unlock every network and offer free access. Provide maintenance services to the location owners.

I think the business model has died because:

a). Complacency, hubris and inflexibility from the myriad group of pubic Wi-Fi operators around the world. Why didn't (wouldn't) you get together and offer access to anyone with a GSM-type roaming agreement? The fact that people have to fill out numerous online forms and get different user credentials is reason enough not to use this service.

b). The price. An average of $10 per day and as high as $40 a day in some places. Give me a break.

c). The Blackberry. What an absolutely superb device. I remember when the impact of the Blackberry over public Wi-Fi first struck me. I was in the waiting lounge at London City airport in late 2004. This is the perfect environment for public Wi-Fi. European business people in transit to and from London to the other financial centres around Europe. However, Swisscom were charging 15 *POUNDS* to get access. On top of that it was an absolute pain in the arse to sign up. I remember the day I noticed. 27 people in the lounge were on their Blackberries and two were connected to Wi-Fi. If you go back to the lounge today you will see 70% of people on their Blackberries and still, two people connected over Wi-Fi.

d). 3G. This is the final nail in the coffin. Most of the carriers are offering broadband wireless -- synchronous 256k service in reality. But that's usually enough for e-mail. For example 3 in the UK offers a fantastic deal: 10 Pounds a month (12 month contract) gets you a USB 3G dongle and about 3GB traffic a month throughout their worldwide network. Why the hell would you bother signing up to a Wi-Fi service if this is available.

We went live with a free unlocked iPhone ;-)

Wow! What a week.

We finally launched the maxroam.com site for real. We are open and doing business and yes! People are buying stuff. It's very satisfying. They might only want the unlocked iPhone with free MAXroam SIM that we are giving away to one of today's lucky buyers... whatever works.

We also got in the New York Times today.

G1G1

OK you lot... get your cheque books and credit cards out. November 12th the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) fellas will be going to market.

News here and here...

Sign up for news here...

Now that's service

Kudos to Canadian Tire.

If you don't know anything about Canada, Canadian Tire is a national institution. They've been around since September 15th, 1922 so they're a pretty "old" institution. Every time you make a purchase at one of their stores they give you your change plus some Canadian Tire Money.

A common piece of Canadian folklore is that if every Canadian who has Canadian Tire money (that would be all 30+ million of us) turned up at their stores and cashed our Canadian Tire Money we would bankrupt the company ;-)

Anyway, this isn't what I'm here to talk about. For an "old" company they certainly "get it" and are changing with the times. Here's a recent experience I had with them. One of my cars had a flat tire (tyre) so I headed off down to their new store in Vancouver on Cambie Street.

What a refreshing experience. No greasy, intimidating mechanics joint this. Really friendly staff, computerized systems, standardized and clear pricing and it gets better. They've got a waiting area you can sit in, leather seats, lovely decor, BBC World Service news on the 42" flat panel TV, free coffee and free open Wi-Fi.

And it gets even better... They couldn't do it for me right then so they took it and said they would call me. That's exactly what they did the next morning. And it gets better. Then they call me a week later to make sure everything was OK with the service they sold me.

All of this focused on one key issue. Great service that respects the customers' time.

So kudos to Canadian Tire. I'll be going back.

Hallelujah!

This is more an "inside story" than anything else so it won't be relevant to a lot of people but Halle-bloody-lujah!

Startup tools: Accomodation

I've done enough self-funded startups to know that it's really important to save money wherever you can. Many startups will get funding from VC's but you probably are scrimping and saving and maxing out your credit card to get your gig started.

So I thought I would write an occasional entry about tips that I've learned to help save money.

My first one is on accommodation. It's expensive to stay in hotels when you travel so you either sleep on a friends sofa -- if you have a friend where you are going -- or look for alternatives.

A great way to save money is to use hostels rather than hotels. If you want to give it a go try Hostel World, it's excellent. A great advantage of hostels is that they tend to be more sociable than hotels so if you find yourself alone in a new city you can usually find a few people to go for a beer with.

Another accommodation tip if you have to go down to the Bay Area on business, or to raise a little cash on Sand Hill Road, is to stay at The Cardinal in the heart of Palo Alto. It's a fantastic hotel and if you get a room with a shared bathroom (european style) you can stay for $65 per night.

Technorati Tags:
Money, Palo Alto, Accomodation

Why IPTV still has a long way to go... a very long way

First of all a correction. In my earlier post I said that cycling.tv would be covering the Tour of California live. I was wrong about that. In fact you can watch the event on the official website here.

The website is an absolutely excellent marriage of new technology with a live event. Satellite images courtesy of Yahoo!, still images posted onto Flickr plus GPS tracking of the event provided by Garmin. Having said all of this, many of these components didn't work today as they had some technical problems. I can only imagine the extremely complex logistical issues involved with putting on a live event like this. Kudos to the team for even trying.

My issue is not with this hugely ambitious undertaking but with the IPTV feed. It just isn't up to the job.

Despite Joost and YouTube and all the coverage over at GigaOm/NewYeeVee it still seems way too early to get a reliable live video feed over IP at any level of quality or consistency that is worth watching.

That is, unless, you are willing to pay for it. By limiting the number of streams the quality will be much better so the paying viewer will be happy. People who aren't paying for it won't get pissed off about poor quality.

So please, someone, anyone just ask for my money. I dare you. Charge me for a service. Tell me I can't have it for free because free isn't really that good is it? I want to pay for it... really!

Of course if you live in the US and you have cable you don't have to worry about this issue. If you have *paid* for Versus (OLN) you can watch it every evening. Sounds like a business model that just might survive a little longer.

Technorati Tags:
Cycling, Tour of California, TV

Number portability, GSM & Canada

Erstwhile reader Vanni comments that here in Canada we will have wireless number portability (WNP) by March 14, 2007 -- in most of Canada.

March 14th, 2007! Most of Canada! You have to love the CRTC.

Somewhat related to this I read a comment from Vodafone CEO, Arun Sarin on GigaOm this morning:

CDMA is like spaghetti. There are too many parts to it. Why do you need it when you have such a clean global standard as GSM? For someone who is already on CDMA it makes sense to graduate to GSM and maybe get out of CDMA eventually.

So when I put these two issues together and look at the Canadian market I have to shake my head. The CRTC and the Canadian Competition Bureau in their infinite wisdom allowed the dominant GSM operator (Rogers) to acquire the feisty and smaller GSM operator Microcell. Now, in Canada, we have a monopoly provider of GSM services. A tip-of-the-hat to Rogers for actually pulling this off.

So my point is that number portability in Canada is pointless if you need GSM services, as I do. Who am I going to port my number to? Not Telus. Not Bell. Unless either of these two CDMA operators take Arun Sarin's advice I'm stuck with Rogers.

Of course every cloud has a silver lining. Just buy Rogers stock. A monopoly operator and very low wireless penetration in the Canadian market means that this stock still has a lot of growth left in it.

Technorati Tags:
Mobile, Canada, GSM

Discovery Channel pulls out

This won't be big news to anyone who follows pro-cycling but The Discovery Channel has pulled out of its sponsorship with Lance Armstrong's team. I say Lance Armstrong's team as pro-cycing teams are actually owned by management groups which in turn sell the right to name the team to a primary sponsor. In this case Lance Armstrong owns 50% of Tailwind Sports.

So they will be looking for a new primary sponsor for the 2008 season. I was thinking, what an opportunity for a high-tech or e-commerce company with global reach or ambitions.

Here are a few I thought of, feel free to add your own:

Microsoft
Apple
Dell
eBay/Paypal/Skype
Cisco/Linksys
Google

Technorati Tags:
Cycling, Lance Armstrong, Discovery

Kiva

Like a lot of people in North America I came across kiva.org via a profile on Frontline on PBS (Frontline alone is worth a separate posting. Surely one of the world's best documentary teams).

Today I was reminded of them again as they sent out an update e-mail. The real promise of this new web is the power of peer-to-peer relationships. This is a great example of that promise. Lend money directly to entrepreneurs in developing countries and bypass the stifling bureaucracy of government controlled agencies.

Check them out and take on an entrepreneur.

Technorati Tags:
Development, Money, Environment