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Archive for November, 2007

Canada to Sell Spectrum to Wireless Newcomers

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

From Michael Geist’s Blog (and others): Canada to Create Spectrum Set Aside in Wireless Auction

 Industry Minister Jim Prentice has just announced that the government
 will put in place measures as part of the forthcoming spectrum auction
 to encourage greater competition within the Canadian wireless market.
 Prentice acknowledged that Canadian wireless pricing is too high,
 particularly for data.

Whoa. I’ve been huffing and puffing about Canada’s ridicu-crazy data rates and the general oligopoly in the wireless industry for a couple of years, so this comes as a very welcome announcement.

It’ll be interesting what comes out of this. In particular with OpenMoko becoming usable for phone use, reasonable data rates will make a huge difference in adoption of phones like this. Google’s Android is also really interesting. What I’m wondering is if any of the newcomers that might bid on/win spectrum will use these new open phones and embrace openness as a competitive advantage against the old Bell/Rogers/Telus triumvirate. I sure hope so. I think it’s really important for these player (the Open Handset Alliance, and OpenMoko/Fic) to lobby new entrants to use their technologies in this way. Newcomers win (maybe). OHA/OpenMoko win (for sure). Consumers win (for sure). Fun times, fun times.

Posted in openmoko, Personal | 1 Comment »

UTest at Eclipse DemoCamp Toronto

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

On Thursday Pardis, Mike, and I went to Eclipse DemoCamp Toronto to present UTest. There were 4 demoes in total including us, and I think that it went really well. Of course the weather had to get bad that particular day. So it took us almost 2 hours to get there, through snow, rain, hail, ice, and fire. Uphill both ways of course. The atmosphere was really nice and everybody was friendly. And all the demoes were actually interesting and technical, no marketing. That was a big relief from the recent demoes that I’ve seen at DemoCamp, some of which were either marketing or just babbling.

Our demo went over very well. We managed to show everything that we planned to show without any major hiccups, and had some pretty intelligent questions thrown our way. So at least people weren’t sleeping.

The only thing that I didn’t like is the lack of a buzzer. At DemoCamp there’s usually a buzzer or some other way of signaling to the speaker that his or her time is over. At that time, people ask questions for a few minutes and any other talk is delayed until the pub afterwards. That’s definitely the way it should be. Unfortunately there was no buzzer on Thursday and even though most of the demoes managed to finish in 15-20 minutes (the official limit was 15), one demo lasted for over an hour. That is just wrong. I guess no one was rude enough to interrupt, but looking around it was evident that many people felt uneasy and needed to get out of there, even though no one said anything. Oh well. Lesson learned.

In fact it was so fun that we decided we should do the same presentation at the next DemoCamp. I’ve submitted our demo proposal and hopefully it gets through. Of course we’d have to scale the demo down from 15 minutes to 5, but that should be doable. So anyone who hasn’t been at DemoCamp for the past few months needs to attend 16 to see us present .