Rogers has come out with new branding for its discount brand, retaining the dog imagery, but putting the focus on Fido’s home. Together with the new graphics, the new Fido branding will carry taglines: ‘giving low prices a good home’ and ‘les bons prix font les bons amis’ in French.

Together with the new brand, the new Fido launched a suite of new price plans and an ‘owner’s guarantee’: providing customers with services to control their monthly wireless bills and no surprises. These include low prices, usage alerts (at 75% and 100% of their monthly allotments), easy switching between price plans, and the option to have no term contract.

Customers can choose from a suite of Fido’s new ‘all-in’ price plans, starting from $15 per month, including plans with unlimited text messages that start at $25 per month. And yes, ‘all-in’ really means that it includes system access fees, 911 fees and all that jazz.

The old Fido was urban-centric with a younger demographic. That market is seen as heavily penetrated. The new Fido is looking to increase Canada’s wireless penetration – what Rogers is referring to as the future demographic – with entry level price points that are attractive to people who have never had a cell phone before.

Fido’s new approach seems to also sets its sights on Rogers’ pre-paid competitors, including Virgin and PC brands that use the Bell network. Not a bad strategy since Rogers has the lowest percentage of prepaid customers of the 3 big wireless carriers in Canada.

We suspect that phones with entry level plans, such as those offered by the new Fido, are going to make their way onto a lot of holiday shopping lists.

CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein delivered an address on Monday to the annual convention of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB).

Populist drivel found in the comments section of various news media websites points to the irrelevance of regulators; how they just don’t understand the new era of an internet-enabled world. Such views are flawed and overly simplistic.

The address from the Chair made note of the impact of new media and the CRTC’s upcoming new media hearings:

New Media puts the users in control. They can watch what they want, when they want––in whatever form is most convenient. New Media offers exciting new ways of delivering news, information, entertainment, drama, music––and advertising.

These are innovations of great potential. They also carry major implications for the broadcasting industry that we will have to examine.

New Media operates outside the regulated routes of access to the communications system, so it is free of regulatory requirements, restrictions and licensing. Yet it unquestionably delivers broadcasting content. We will be addressing the role of New Media in the Canadian broadcasting universe during our public hearing in February.

The address contains insights into the philosophy and 3 principles that guided the CRTC in approaching its recent major policy framework reviews: simplification, coherence and calibration.

These principles can be expected to be applied in upcoming proceedings as well.

As if to launch the Christmas sales season, Bell Mobility has launched new rate plans that let users roll-over unused minutes from one month to the next.

Canadians have been watching ads from US carriers that offer such plans and Bell is the first major service provider to bring a variant of this offer to Canada. Bell will let you carry over unused local airtime voice minutes for one additional month, not indefinitely.

According to Bell Mobility President Wade Oosterman:

With Rollover Minutes, you no longer have to use ’em or lose ’em. If you undertalk one month, you can overtalk the next.

The plans are available until December 31 to Bell Mobility clients who sign a three-year contract. Customers can choose between rate plans that are broken into three categories: Rollover Minutes, Rollover Minutes & Email, and Rollover Minutes, Email & Internet.

Last year, the popular offer from most service providers was unlimited email and web browsing. What is in Santa’s bag for Christmas 2008?

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On Friday, Bell Mobility and Solo announced a feature that allows parents to block access to certain websites from their kids mobile devices. The content access control lets parents limit access to Internet sites that might be inappropriate for their children.

According to Adel Bazerghi, Senior Vice President of Products for Bell Mobility:

As use of the Internet on mobile phones grows, fuelled by the popularity of smartphones and the fast access speeds delivered by 3G networks, our clients have asked for tools to help them manage access. Bell Parental Control offers them content filtering capability on mobile phones for the first time in Canada.

The feature costs $5 per month.

It would be interesting to see if Bell or other service providers would support parents downloading 3rd party software to perform a similar function on the handsets.

I wonder about adding other parental controls to limit kids calling to a set list of numbers, perhaps even setting up limited call lists during peak hours. What about parental controls on the number of times users can incur premium text message charges – protecting against surprise charges for TV voting shows? Or bundling location tracking capabilities?

Deliver a complete phone-use management tool and you might have something that more parents will be happier to buy.

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On Wednesday afternoon, I received a call from a gentleman in the western United States who was doing some due diligence into a business deal. He had been contacted by someone using a variant of my company’s name, who informed him that he was in line to inherit $7.5M.

The scam artist claimed to be a lawyer, acting as an agent for a client of National Bank in Brampton and he forwarded a letter from an account manager at the bank named Dr Smith Allen.

The phone numbers don’t match the real numbers for the bank. The law firm doesn’t exist, the lawyer doesn’t show up in the registry at the Law Society of Upper Canada and the lawyer used two similar but different street addresses; I guess it is tough to keep the storyline straight when you are making it up as you go.

Usually, these types of letters are traced to Nigeria or other far off lands. Maybe it is a sign of the slipping economy that our call centres are being re-purposed to target seniors in the US.

This message is a public service announcement to help people doing a web search for “Goldberg”, “National Bank”, “Canada”. It is a scam. And I’m not involved.

I filed a report with Phone Busters using their toll free line (+1.888.495.8501). Cathy is on the case.

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