Why the mobile industry is like real estate

Let’s take a moment today to focus on mobile.  It’s a medium that we all use every day to the point that we don’t really even think about it anymore.  And in spite of its pervasiveness and its massive global reach, the mobile phone is really the weapon in your technology arsenal that’s the most intimate – I know people who sleep with their phones and wake up to them chiming! Yes, Twitter is getting all the buzz these days, but you’re kidding yourself if you think it’s ever going to have even a fraction of the impact of the...

Our wired world has a long way to go – putting “big” numbers in perspective

Last night I attended Refresh Events 7th installment at the MaRS Discovery District in downtown Toronto.  Stemming from keynote Thomas Purves‘ presentation on augmented reality, a spirited group discussion broke out to end the evening.  Topics included everything from global and local socioeconomics, to the proliferation of Java mobile apps in South Africa, to whether or not internet access could become a basic human right, to a future where people may have their phones “inside them” (insert joke here – last night’s best involved...

It’s not Gossip, Girl – it’s the future of hyper-niche citizen journalism

I have a confession to make. I love cheesy TV dramas. The unenlightened among you might call them “chick” shows, but as a regular viewer of many such programs, I can assure you that they do have entertainment value for the discerning gentleman – just sometimes it’s a little harder to spot. In spite of this confession, up until this week I had managed to avoid a program that all the ladies seem to be talking about these days. A little show called, Gossip Girl. The show was actually named for a pop-culture term that I always thought I...

Cross-platform communication and why the Bell Fund doesn’t ‘suck’

This article appeared in the February 17, 2009 edition of the Interactive Ontario Newsletter. As many of you I’m sure know, the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund had one of their scramble-to-get-it-all-in-a-binder deadlines on February 2. While this deadline was one like any other, Canadian television writer, Denis McGrath, took the occasion as an opportunity to pen a decidedly hyperbolic blog post on the subject. In the entry, titled “Sucky Canadian Broadcast Websites” , McGrath lambasts the Fund and interactive producers for failing to properly...

Could the loss of a startup signal the dawn of the next generation?

I lost a friend the other day. Actually, I lost a few dozen. Pownce, a social networking and blogging site that only came out of Beta in January of this year was bought out by Six Apart and is closing its virtual doors for good on December 15. And all that was sent to break the news to me was the following message: We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts. And that was that. I have to admit that I was not at all an avid Pownce user but to borrow a line from...

Taking viral for a loop

If you haven’t read the article on DIY social network site, Ning, and its “tech hottie” co-founder Gina Bianchini in the May 2008 edition of Fast Company, don’t. It’s an advantage to the rest of us who have aspirations of becoming Web 2.0 millionaires. Bianchini and techgod business partner Mark Andreessen (Netscape and Opsware founder, Digg investor) have taken a mathematical model and turned it into a predictably expansive jackpot. Of course, at first glance, it’s not hard to overlook the brilliance of what they’ve...

Will the Web 2.0 brands benefitting from the investment of venture capitalists really find enough audience to generate ROI, or just excite the blogosphere before ultimately failing to find a broad enough user base to justify the investment?

Flock, a “Social Web Browser” is hotly anticipated in tech circles, but blogosphere approval doesn’t always lead to adoption by the larger audience VC must attract in order to be justified. Tweet this! Or... Facebook...

Can the music industry learn to think “small-picture”?

Remember the music industry? Remember right around the introduction of CD’s when the thing was flying high, raking in money hand over fist with no end in sight? You know, the music industry BEFORE the internet….. yeah. Well now that industry is openly struggling and still doesn’t seem to fully get the paradigm shift that’s happening under their feet. They’re like a family who built a house on the San Andreas fault and in spite of a chasm having opened up in their living room over the past 15 years, they’re choosing to ignore it and just cover it up with their...

The iPhone, the Blackberry and the slippery slope…

In a world where us techy folk like me enjoy sitting around and talking about how mobile is the future, and feeling encouraged by still-bleak but trumped up statistics like “42% of consumers use their mobile phones for something other than phone calls last month”, one thing we can hang on to is the outrageous success of the RIM Blackberry and the moderate success but outrageous cool-factor of the Apple iPhone. These are both heart warming tales, one of functionality, the other of usability, that point to a truly wireless future. But sadly, both are...

Throw another blog on the fire – Microsoft, Yahoo!, and the real potential of this deal

Okay so every blogger in the world is writing this post this morning, but how can I NOT write about this??? Microsoft is going to buy Yahoo! – ??!?!?! While I’ve already seen blogs and even facebook statuses and twitters debating why this is happening, the reality is Microsoft needed to find a way to make Google sweat, and all it might take them is a cool 44 billion. But I’m a firm believer this acquisition could give them the potential to do so much more… While media consolidation is interesting (my eyes are still peeled to see how well CTV...