The editor for The Toronto Star’s Entertainment page must have taken the day off yesterday to have let parts of Raju Mudhar’s whine get through.

Here is the essence of the article. Pity us poor Canadians. We don’t have iPhone. No Amazon Kindle. TV streaming from ABC and CBS gets blocked. The article didn’t mention that we are also denied access to the really good Super Bowl commercials. That would have been my gripe.

Go ahead, rant, wring your hands, whine, beat your chest. But try to get the story straight.

Try to follow this quote – which is actually talking about Amazon Kindle, a device that lets Amazon download a book to you electronically – and Amazon eats the cellular data charges.

Amazon is using Sprint’s EVDO network, which is similar to the Bell and Telus networks. But compared to the U.S., Canadian cellphone data access rate costs are quite high (travellers are telling horror stories about accidentally racking up bills in the hundreds of dollars for using their iPhones in Europe) and these new content/carrier relationships will require new thinking from Canadian cell companies.

Where do I start?

Gee – I guess the Entertainment page didn’t get the press release about Bell’s $7 per month all you can eat data plan. Sure, it is device specific – but so is the Kindle. Can Canadian carriers tailor data plans? Yes.

Now, let’s move onto the non sequitur about the iPhone. What do travellers racking up bills in the hundreds of dollars in Europe have to do with Canadian cellphone data rates? Yes, those same users would likely have racked up high rates in Canada as well – but, at the end of the day, those are roaming charges from AT&T.;

I have to remember. It’s just Sunday reading. And it’s supposed to be entertainment.

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Toronto Star, iPhone, Amazon Kindle

Much has been written about the impact of the rise of the dollar on Canada’s manufacturing heartland in Ontario. However, jobs that may be the most globally mobile – software development and high tech – are equally at risk because their labour costs have also risen. Canadian companies that have traditionally sold their goods priced in US dollars are doubly impacted – lower revenues getting recognized and higher costs.

And the response of the Ontario government? In its zeal to win votes in the last election, Ontario added an across the board 0.5% increase in labour costs to all employers.

How? By giving workers an extra statutory holiday in February. An extra paid day off. Yippie, if you are an employee. Not quite as gleeful if you are the employer.

In proclaiming the day, the premier said:

There is nothing more valuable to families than time together. And yet it seems tougher than ever to find, with so many of us living such busy lives. …

I can think of no better way for our government to get to work than by rewarding Ontarians for all their hard work, and for their belief that when we work together, build together and dream together, there is nothing we cannot accomplish.

The premier boasts to some that Ontario’s economy added 165,000 jobs in the past year. Derek DeCloet’s recent column in the Globe complains that more than half of these were in the public sector.

The smart way to spend money is to ensure the entire budget gets aligned with an innovation strategy. The Ontario Corporate Chief Technology Officer is hosting a Town Hall on Monday. Among other topics will be an examination of Government 2.0: How new technologies can transform and enhance Government. I hope to have a report on the session early next week.

If governments don’t spend strategically, we might find that employers use the new holiday in February to find ways to relocate jobs (without the families) to more cost competitive jurisdictions.

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competitiveness

The Canadian High Commission in London has again built a website to help coordinate the Canadian presence at the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. The 2007 event attracted more than 50,000 people.

The folks at International Trade have released a new brochure to attract investment in Canada from wireless and multimedia companies: Canada as an investment destination for wireless and multimedia.

The report includes a few charts that demonstrate the competitiveness of Canadian labour rates for high tech workers. One of the charts compares management engineer salaries in Canada ($95K) versus Hong Kong ($97K), Denmark ($112K) and the US ($99). Of course, these were 2005 figures. Another chart compares the cost of software and multimedia talent in Waterloo, Ottawa, Montréal, Vancouver, San Diego, Dallas and New York.

What has the rise in the dollar done to Canadian competitiveness in these new economy jobs?

There are other factors as well. As Terence Corcoran recently wrote in his Invasion of the Policy Snatchers,

Maybe the objective [of the Competition Review Panel] is simply to stimulate debate to ultimately get to a “policy framework” that would tear down barriers that currently prevent Canadian entrepreneurs from competing successfully on the world market. If that’s the case, such things as high taxes, internal trade barriers, pro-union labour laws, statist health care, problems with education and training, infrastructure inadequacies and regulatory burden would be things to look at.

I’ll have some more thoughts tomorrow about the government using strategic spending as a means to drive an innovation agenda.

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competitiveness

I attended the Scotia Capital Telecom and Tech Conference yesterday and heard some interesting interviews with a variety of industry leaders – 4 of whom were speakers at The Canadian Telecom Summit last June.

Pierre Blouin, CEO of MTS Allstream, had a notable observation about bundles. In his view, telephony, TV and internet increasingly are seen by consumers as a single product. Mobile wireless is a separate, more personal product. The other 3 are more than a bundle; they are a complete household communications suite.

Speaking over the distraction of an annoying (false) fire alarm, Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, gushed about the upside potential represented by UMA (unlicensed mobile access) and FMC (fixed mobile convergence). He sees these capabilities as a threat to traditional wireline telephony but an opportunity for wireless carriers. WiFi simply won’t have the hand-off capabilities or the back-haul, so the wide area networks of the cellular carriers will be the glue to hold it all together.

The added benefit, which was also mentioned by Nadir Mohamed of Rogers, is the ability to off-load some of the data traffic from the carrier networks, easing pressure on capital resources.

The fourth Telecom Summit alumnus was Dave Caputo of Sandvine who presented some fascinating data about the internet traffic impact of Halo 3 it was released in September. Gaming traffic on ISP networks shot up five-fold, but there were virtually no new households added. So, while Microsoft enjoyed a spectacular opening day revenues, ISPs carried the significant increase in traffic without a measurable, let alone commensurate, contribution to their top line.

Pierre and Nadir are already confirmed to return as keynote speakers at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit.

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MTS Allstream, RIM, Rogers, Sandvine, Halo 3, Canadian Telecom Summit