Month: January 2009

AWS wireless new entrant BMV Holdings received a major boost with the announcement this morning that the Ontario municipal pension fund, OMERS, has agreed to invest up to $50M in the venture.

Paul Renaud, President and CEO of OMERS Private Equity is quoted saying:

BMV and its investors made an astute purchase in Industry Canada’s wireless spectrum auction last summer and we believe the company has great potential in the Canadian wireless market. In addition, we are impressed by the leadership and experience of their management team and investment partners.

BMV says that it plans to launch “value-priced” services in select markets in Ontario and Quebec during 3Q 2009.

Alek Krstajic, BMV’s Chief Executive Officer, will be a speaker on our special AWS New Entrant panel at The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place in June in Toronto.

Technorati Tags:
BMV, OMERS, AWS

On Monday, Peter Nowak wrote a preview piece about the Consumer Electronics Show, which opens today in Las Vegas.

In the Monday article, Peter observed that last year’s show saw participation by a number of first time exhibitors, including General Motors and content producers NBC Universal and Sony Pictures.

Some of the industry observers questioned why the content companies are there:

They are awkward at this point. They think they need to be there because of multiplatform potential and it’s largely exploratory. But what can you really buy from NBC Universal except movies online?

I wrote yesterday about disintermediation, which helps to understand why content owners, developers and producers might want to establish direct consumer relationships.

Studios going directly with consumers can cut out two layers of intermediaries: broadcasters and broadcast distributors (cablecos, DBS, telcos).

In an ultra high speed world, electronic information distribution looks very different.

The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit will be looking at these kinds of issues (among many more concerns). Our theme this year is Embracing Transformation: Communications industries in flux.

A couple months ago, I wrote about Voxox, an application to tie together various messaging applications.

A number of bloggers commented over the holidays on the shift in focus of their entrepreneurial friends to social media applications, especially because of difficulty making a living on pure play VoIP.

Isn’t there still a question of monetizing social networking businesses? In this economic climate, it isn’t clear to me that multi-zillion dollar cheques will be written without an understanding of the real revenues to be achieved, not just the popularity of an application.

It is one thing to attract customers; it is another to attract revenue.

RSS feeds enable a means for third party applications to disintermediate blog readers from the original publication site; aggregation tools can thereby capture the advertising revenues from the original content creator.

Will user fatigue set in as all of us continue to receive invitations to join all the networks to which our friends (our real friends) belong.

Will social media applications that tie together disparate networks result in the same revenue challenge?

When I returned from my travels to connectivity I was catching up on reading some blogs while sitting in the airport. It was nice to see Alec Saunders‘ return to text format – I was not a fan of podcasts. I’ll add my two cents to a network discussion he began with his posting on

Alec wrote about 2008 marking the death of VoIP. I disagree. As I wrote years ago, for the most part, most VoIP was simply delivering cheap POTS: cheaper prices, and mediocre quality. I asked then:

I’d like to know when VoIP companies will be able to advertise “we’re better,” rather than just going with “we’re cheaper.”

VoIP was simply a technology change with no substantial benefits to the consumer other than price. Not an easy way to earn consumer loyalty: switch to me, I’m cheaper.

That only works until the next better deal emerges.

Alec asks if it is hard to get “hot and bothered about plumbing”. As Alec and I have discussed in the past and as he wrote yesterday, regulatory arbitrage was the main advantage being used by a number of, if not most, pure play VoIP services providers. At the end of the day, these folks were not much different from rum runners of the last century, smuggling long distance minutes across borders.

How many have been able to convert into sustainable businesses?

Unified communications, connecting voice, image, data, mixed media holds is being delivered in a number of ways to consumers. Voice and text chatting while gaming and enhanced business conferencing are but two examples of VoIP enabling real enhancements.

It isn’t the copper and PVC plumbing that gets people hot and bothered, but the really nice faucets, shower fixtures and hot tubs. That’s what we want to see.

I caught a press release from NBC Bay Area announcing a mobile traffic camera service to San Francisco area residents.

The application “gives drivers access to live video from traffic cameras operated by the California Department of Transportation” (Caltrans).

Something about the service strikes me as an idea that didn’t go through enough vetting.

Randell Iwasaki, chief deputy director for the Caltrans is quoted in the press release saying:

The more information we can get to the driver, the better. An informed driver is a safe driver.

Conceptually that may be true; in practice, I don’t think this is the safest way to inform drivers. Fundamentally, does anyone else think that drivers maybe shouldn’t be looking at videos while they are driving, even if the videos are traffic related?

Let’s keep in mind that California is a state that requires handsfree devices when driving using a mobile phone.

It seems a little strange for Caltrans to say that it is too distracting to hold a phone to talk while driving, but scanning traffic cameras on a two inch screen makes a driver safer. NBC’s website tries to cover its butt, saying “check out the traffic on your favorite routes before you leave home” but I am willing to bet that most people will use it when they are already on the road. Let’s face it, if you are still at home, you’ll use your 14″ (or bigger) computer screen and the full Caltrans camera application.

I’m starting a pool on how long before the first liability law suit gets launched.

Technorati Tags:
NBC, mobile camera