According to the Globe and Mail, at a meeting of G7 Security Ministers, Canada’s Marco Mendocino said disinformation is ‘one of the most pervasive threats to all our democracies right now’ and more needs to be done to raise awareness and equip Canadians to navigate its dangers.

“He said he supported educating high-school students on how to spot disinformation, as well as fraudulent e-mails and texts and online scams, alongside consumer education.”

Recall, last February, I wrote “Testing Democratic Freedoms”, and asked “Shouldn’t more effort be focused on teaching critical thinking, teaching school kids how to process information online, including checking and verifying ‘news’ and ‘facts’ being shared on social media?”

I referred to an approach that is being used in Finland, and said “Investing in digital literacy in kindergarten and primary schools means playing the long game. But, aren’t critical thinking, and digital literacy, among the most needed skills to better prepare the country for life in the digital information age?”

The Globe article says that Canada plans to host a G7 Summit on the subject next year.

He invited ministers from Britain, the United States, France, Japan, Germany and Italy to come to Canada with “the brightest minds from our countries to figure out how we can get ahead of the curve.”

Canada should look beyond G7 members and include Finland to learn from their experience.

As Twitter begins to restore accounts that had been suspended for sharing misinformation, there is an even greater urgency.

“Vox Populi, Vox Dei”. The voice of the people is the voice of God.

That is how Elon Musk justified his decision to offer “amnesty” to previously suspended Twitter accounts. The new Twitter CEO had posted a poll the day earlier over whether the platform should restore affected accounts.

“Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?”

Seventy two per cent of the responses said “yes”.

It was, of course, a non-scientific poll and with all of the layoffs and staff departures at Twitter, it is hard to imagine how the platform can keep up with user reports of violations of the company’s terms of service in any case.

I have said many times before that I tend toward the views expressed so eloquently in Aaron Sorkin’s “The American President”:

Still, if a social media platform – any social media platform – has terms of service, then it needs to be prepared to enforce them. And it needs to be prepared to respect the legal framework in the countries in which it operates. What happens when a platform doesn’t even try to enforce its own code of conduct?

I’m not convinced Musk’s latest move will help recover some of the billions of dollars of value that evaporated since Musk acquired Twitter.

As an aside, am I the only one thinking of 007 villain Hugo Drax when I read about Elon Musk’s exploits?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the last webinar of the year from the International Telecommunications Society, “Comparing International Approaches To Spectrum Policy” that took place last week (video reply is available here).

In the chat room, one of the attendees referred to a relatively recent GSMA report, “The impact of spectrum prices on consumers”, published in September 2019 [pdf, 2MB]. That report included these recommendations:

1. Maximising revenues from spectrum awards should no longer be a measure of success;
2. Auctions can deliver inefficient outcomes when poorly designed;
3. Artificially limiting the supply of spectrum, including through set-asides, risks slowing services and inflating prices;
4. Spectrum should be released to the market as soon as there is a business case for operators to use it;
5. Policymakers should work with stakeholders to enable timely, fair and effective spectrum licensing to the benefit of society

The webinar provided some valuable academic perspectives on various approaches to spectrum policy, examining factors that can impact consumer outcomes, such as prices, service quality and coverage.

There was an observation from Helaina Gaspard of University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy that I found to be especially interesting: “Canada wants to improve connectivity but there is no policy mechanism, formal or informal, that assesses whether spectrum policy is delivering against the government’s overall objective for ubiquitous coverage”.

Indeed, shouldn’t we ensure that the outcomes of spectrum policy delivers against the theoretical objectives that form the basis of those policies? Whether it is set-asides, the choice of spectrum tiers or other conditions selected as part of the policy framework for each spectrum band, how do we measure success?

Many frequent followers know that I travel to Israel relatively frequently, and I have written about the entrepreneurial spirit that seems to permeate throughout the country, helping it build an innovation-based economy.

In 2016, I observed, “The book [Startup Nation], by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, examines how Israel – a country with about 25% of Canada’s population, in a constant state of war since its founding in 1948, with no natural resources – produces more start-up companies than larger nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada and the UK.”

That came to mind as I was scanning PitchBook’s recently published annual university rankings, that “compare schools by tallying up the number of alumni entrepreneurs who have founded venture capital-backed companies.”

The overwhelming majority of schools are from the United States, with Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT and Pennsylvania taking the top 5 spots. Cornell, Michigan, Texas and Yale take positions 6, 8, 9 and 10, but Tel Aviv University stands in position 7. Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is in 15th position, with these two Israeli schools standing among an otherwise all-American top 20.

Canada’s University of Waterloo is ranked 21. Other Canadian universities in the top 100 are: McGill (26), Toronto (27), UBC (44), Queen’s (55), Western (91), York (98), and Concordia (100).

Other Israeli schools in the PitchBook 100: Hebrew University of Jerusalem (31), Reichmann University (38), Ben Gurion (45), and Bar Ilan (71).

What can Canadian schools learn from Israeli counterparts?

I was recently introduced to a new software application for communications services providers that uses machine learning to identify clusters of customers in need of special attention, in order to reduce churn and increase revenue.

Let me step back for a minute to provide some background.

I met Frederic Beauvais in the late 90’s when he was a young lawyer at Stikeman’s in Montreal. We did some work together and became friends. I remember asking him if Stikeman’s handled residential real estate, and he said, “Of course we do. How many thousand homes are you building.” He found a law clerk to help us buy our house. Whenever he called the house and reached my wife, he would lay on a thick French accent, although he otherwise speaks English to me and business associates with more of a mid-western diction. I always thought that wasn’t playing fair.

A few years later, Frederic moved from law into the world of investments, with a special focus on the telecom sector, and ended up being based in Paris.

For the past year and a half, he has focused his energy on Lifetime Analytics, developing an an end-to-end solution for marketing, product, sales and customer experience teams with telecom operators to address churn, upselling and cross-selling improvement opportunities. Its goal is to support the design of focused marketing, commercial and care action plans for selected customer groups that are at risk for churn, or that present an up-selling or cross-selling potential.

Churn is a key metric for telecommunications services providers – what proportion of the customer base disconnect each month. It is a way to measure customer satisfaction and happy customers translate into significant savings in costs of acquisition. As described in a recent article (“Beyond churn scoring“), Lifetime Analytics have “elaborated an innovative approach to understand churn factors and generate a continuously improving churn learning model in the telecommunications industry.”

The commonly used approach to analyze churn in the telecom industry relies on estimating the probability for each customer to churn, which is materialized in a scoring methodology that is then used as a guide for the elaboration of action plans. This scoring approach is typically based on automated learning from past churners, using a “classification” approach to distinguish churners and non-churners.

Lifetime Analytics discovered that a “cluster” approach was a better way to identify customers requiring commercial or care actions, enabling the design of targeted action plans and micro-campaigns, replacing more traditional scoring approaches that are often less actionable.

Lifetime Analytics is structured around 3 main features:

1. Lifetime Analytics automatically identifies clusters of customers that are at risk of churning or that present an up/cross-selling potential based on homogeneous factors. These clusters and resulting churn and up/cross-selling factors are consistently measured over time, and obviously evolve as customer situations and market conditions constantly change.
2. Lifetime Analytics enables teams to design and run targeted commercial/care actions on each cluster, and even subset of customers within each cluster for more granularity. The application also recommends actions with an integrated business case simulator allowing to fine-tune actions on any customer micro-segment.
3. Lifetime Analytics tracks and monitors the impact of these actions on the churn and ARPU dynamics both at the cluster and company levels. The application’s customer cohort monitoring provides a granular monitoring of implemented action impacts, allowing to identify continuous improvements and optimization opportunities.

Frederic tells me, “We believe one important point to convince telecom service providers to try our Lifetime Analytics application is that it can be easily implemented by telecom operators with a simple technical set-up, and without the need to launch an IT or integration project.” The application is based on a flexible open-data model, nourished on a regular basis with a set of pre-defined BSS and OSS data items, which can be enriched based on the needs and resources of each client.

I suspect there should be interest in this application from service providers of all sizes, and from telecom consultancy practices.

Let me know if I can help make an introduction.