Category Archives: Technology

| Business, In the news, Technology

Inside Bill 60

Laurent Maisonnave on his iPhone

Laurent Maisonnave on his iPhone, not that he'd ever cancel his contract unilaterally

The Quebec Liberals this week announced Bill 60, proposed legislation that would strengthen (or “modernize“) consumer protections particularly where it concerns long-term service contracts like cellphones. The bill has already (and unsurprisingly) gained the support of the Union des consommateurs, and others. Cellphone providers have stayed silent for the most part, though their advocacy group says the bill is redundant because the industry is already looking to self-regulate (those who buy this please raise your hands).

The full text of the bill is online (PDF). It hasn’t been debated in the National Assembly yet, so it could very well be changed significantly before it becomes law.

Here are some of the highlights:

  • Changes to contracts must come with 60 days’ notice and the consumer has the ability to cancel the contract without penalty if the changes involve “an increase in the consumer’s obligations or a reduction in the merchant’s obligations”
  • Such changes can’t affect “an essential element of the contract” like the nature of the service offered
  • Fixed-term service contracts can’t be unilaterally cancelled by the provider
  • Consumers can’t be required to pay penalty fees beyond simple interest charges for missed payments
  • Merchants are required to fully explain existing warranties before asking customers if they would like extended warranties
  • If you buy an item second-hand that’s still under warranty, manufacturers can’t require that you prove the previous owner abided by the warranty’s conditions
  • Gift certificates and gift cards cannot have expiry dates, and must come with written explanations of how to check the balance on them. They also cannot be subject to fees
  • Contracts must come with various things in writing, including the total dollar value of “inducements” (like free cellphones)
  • Contracts cannot be automatically renewed
  • You can’t be charged for service while the device you use to access that service (assuming it was provided with the contract) is being repaired
  • Consumers can unilaterally cancel contracts and pay back the value of any inducements provided at contract signing (or 10% of the remainder of the contract, or $50, depending on the circumstance)
  • Advertisements must include the full cost of services, less taxes (though it’s hard to see how this would be enforced since cellphones, cable, Internet and other services come with different plans)
  • In case a company breaks any of these provisions, the government or a recognized consumer advocacy body can seek an injunction forcing the provider to comply
  • The bill also contains some minor provisions dealing with travel agents

A lot of these are common sense (no one should be allowed to unilaterally change a contract without the other side’s consent, and companies shouldn’t get free money out of gift cards). Others will probably be criticized because they allow loopholes that lead to abuse (for example, if I know Rogers is about to change their contract, can I get a three-year free iPhone deal and then cancel the contract a week later without paying a penalty and get a free iPhone?). Still others are open to interpretation (we could expect arguments about whether a certain change really increases the obligation of a consumer).

Others sound like they could be downright annoying, like being forced to sit down while a Best Buy employee reads out the complete text of a manufacturer’s warranty to you.

But all in all, it’s a good bill, and provides some valuable protections for consumers against abusive contracts. Law-abiding businesses should be able to point out loopholes that might be exploited against them, but let’s hope the lobbyists don’t start torpedoing parts of this bill just because it might cut down on their bottom line.

| Montreal, Web design

Mercier Bridge construction begins (and it’s on Twitter!)

Mercier Bridge

Starting next Monday, what’s been described as a “first in this country” construction project will be undertaken on the Honoré-Mercier Bridge. It involves 1,300 prefabricated concrete panels which will replace the bridge deck in a way that is designed to minimize traffic disruption.

In other words, they’re going to replace a bridge without closing it to traffic.

It’s not quite so simple (there will be night work that requires rerouting traffic), but it’s still pretty impressive.

The rusted Mercier Bridge is in dire need of replacement

The rusted Mercier Bridge is in dire need of replacement

The first stage starts on Monday, when the ramp for the 138 East (from Châteauguay) is closed and replaced. Traffic will be sent along a side road to the other approach on the 132. The other three ramps on the southern side will be replaced one by one, and then work will begin on the bridge itself.

What’s impressive about this operation to me though isn’t the construction, but the communications. A (fully bilingual) special WordPress-based website has been setup (complete with RSS feed and question-and-answer forum), and there are Flickr, YouTube and Twitter accounts to make sure everyone is aware of what’s going on and can share information easily. Unlike what you see with most marketing campaigns, these tools are used quite effectively.

This YouTube video shows the steps that will be taken over the coming weeks to replace the southern access ramps. It’s long, but it’s clear.

Kudos.

| Montreal, Opinion, Technology

Dear NESTEA®

Thank you for your email inviting me to your marketing event. Actually, to be fair, it wasn’t from you. The emails were from MS&L Worldwide, the company handling marketing for your marketing event.

And thank you for your second email three days later from another person at the same marketing company inviting me again to the same marketing event.

I guess that’s what you mean by “aggressively represent the interests of our clients”. Maybe that’s what won you your Silver Anvil Award. How else can you deliver “measurable business results for many of the world’s largest companies and most successful brands, including … General Motors“? Your 70-year-old company whose history seems to be nothing but corporate merger after corporate merger, is clearly in the best position to do this kind of marketing. Especially when you’re doing marketing of a Canadian event from your office in Ann Arbor, Mich., instead of Toronto (or, say, Montreal).

Such a big firm, I feel a bit silly doing this. But can I offer a few suggestions for future marketing campaigns?

  • Both emails begin with “Hi Steve”. Why are we on a first-name basis? We’ve never met. Is it because you don’t take bloggers seriously? Is it because you so desperately need to sound like you’re part of our demographic that formalities have been deemed undesirable?
  • You constantly refer to the brand name NESTEA® in capital letters and with that R symbol (except for that one time you accidentally used the French “MD”). Are you afraid I’m going to steal your brand or something? Or worse, decapitalize it?
  • You’re offering me an all-expenses-paid junket to Mont Tremblant to see your marketing event in exchange for talking about it “on my blog, Facebook and Twitter”. Does this count? Is there something on my blog that gave you the impression that I can be bought like that? (Did you even read my blog before sending these emails?)
  • You’ve invited “pro athletes” (actually Olympic snowboarders, does that qualify as “professional athlete”?) and Sam Roberts to your event. I think the Virgin Festival at Jean Drapeau Park has you beat on the guest list. They’ve got New Kids on the Block and Jonathan Roy!
  • You’ve linked to your Twitter account, which has only a single update pointing to your press release. It’s a wonder you only have six followers. Your corporate hash tag also doesn’t inspire yet.
  • You use the word “awesome.” You seem to be very attached to this word, judging from your forgettable Flash-based product placement video game. What 50-year-old middle manager decided that using “awesome” and “ultimate” would appeal to us?
  • Both your emails conclude with the standard corporate disclaimer boilerplate text, suggesting that I can’t divulge its contents if I’m not the intended recipient. Should I email back to confirm that I’m the intended recipient? Maybe it was meant for some other Steve?
  • You link to your Facebook page. Actually, you don’t. You link to it from your Twitter account and tell me to search for it in your email instead of just including a link. I took a peek, and noticed that there are lots of questions from the public on that page (click on “Just Fans” on the Wall), and none of them have answers. Your Facebook event page also leaves lots of questions unanswered (though you do repeat many times that it’s free).
  • Your event doesn’t have a website. Or at least none that I could find.

I had contemplated taking you up on your invitation of free food (I’m not crazy about skiing or snowboarding) and discovering just how such giant marketing events work, how spending so much money could “impact behavioral changes” enough to justify the expense. Unfortunately, I’m working on Saturday so I can’t make it.

Besides, this is more fun. And I can keep my dignity. And I don’t really care for iced tea.

Sincerely,

“Steve”

p.s. Building a snow hill in summer? That’s crazy. I should blog about that.

| Technology, TV

CRTC Roundup: Hands off our InterTubes

The big news is the CRTC’s decision to extend its hands-off policy regarding regulation of content on the Internet. The decision, which is explained in some detail point-by-point, was praised by Internet providers and condemned by actors and writers unions (PDF), both for entirely self-serving financial reasons.

One thing the commission did decide to implement was a provision regulating “undue preference”, which is when a media company uses its power in one industry to help affiliated companies in another. For example, if Rogers were to arrange for Rogers Cable to carry Rogers SportsNet but dump TSN, or if Videotron were to give sweet deals to TVA and LCN, that would be considered undue preference.

The CRTC is looking for rules that would extend this to the new media environment, citing the walled gardens of wireless carriers as Exhibit A that the industry isn’t very good at self-regulating.

Michael Geist has more analysis.

Martial law: Weather Network in control

The CRTC has agreed to a scheme whereby Pelmorex, the company that owns the Weather Network and MétéoMédia, would become national emergency alert aggregators, providing emergency broadcast information to local broadcasters. This scratches an itch pointed out by Public Safety Canada, and satisfies the CRTC’s wish for an industry-based solution.

But, of course, there’s a catch. In exchange for providing this service, the CRTC agrees to require all digital cable and direct-to-home satellite providers to require mandatory carriage of the Weather Network and MétéoMédia for all subscribers, who will get charged the $0.23 per subscriber per month fee. Currently, the networks profit from mandatory carriage only on basic analog cable.

As more Canadians move to digital forms of television delivery, Pelmorex has been anxious to get the CRTC to force its channels (and fee) on subscribers. This is its second attempt at securing such an order. The first didn’t have the emergency alert component but did propose a modest decrease in per-subscriber fee in exchange. In both cases, Pelmorex talks of the danger to its business model if television subscribers are given the option to choose not to carry the networks.

The decision (which features some absurdities like nothing that the stations have “100% Canadian content” and make “a significant contribution to the development of Canadian expresson”) was not unanimous. Commissioner Len Katz was highly critical that a company that has a profit margin of about 25% could be in such serious danger.

The mandate is effective Sept. 1, 2010 and expires on Aug. 31, 2015, by which point Pelmorex will need to come to the CRTC to seek another order.

Welcome Current.tv Canada

The CRTC has approved an application from a company mostly owned by a company owned by the CBC to create a Canadian version of Al Gore’s Current TV. Like its U.S. counterpart, the network would broadcast short-form user-generated content.

The CRTC took issue with the fact that Current TV has a 20% interest, and forced the CBC-controlled company to make amendments to ensure the U.S. interest couldn’t assert any control over day-to-day operations.

The channel is a Category 2 digital specialty channel, which is what most new specialty channels are. That means it’s discretionary and won’t be on analog cable.

APTN wants Olympics exceptions

The Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network, which is part of the mega consortium of private broadcasters that will show the Olympics in Vancouver next winter, has asked the CRTC for some leeway on its obligations for the two-week event. Specifically, it wants to be relieved of its French-language, aboriginal-language and “priority programming” (i.e. drama) requirements for those two weeks.

The latter makes sense if they’re devoting those weeks to sports. Clearly they will be Canadian productions. But the language requests don’t make much sense, especially because CTV has argued that APTN would help in bringing French-language Olympics coverage to francophones outside Quebec.

TVA Sports, TVA Junior

Quebecor is looking to expand its cable channels with new uncreatively-named networks for sports and youth programming. The former would take advantage of recent loosening of policy restricting competition in sports networks, as well as provide an eventual outlet should Quebecor’s bid for the Canadiens be successful.

One pipe, one policy?

CRTC chairman Konrad von Finkenstein did some public thinking, wondering if a single policy encompassing both broadcasting and telecommunications isn’t the future of the commission. Of course, he says, that’s up to Parliament to decide.

Take your time

The following approved specialty channels have been given extensions to launch them:

Most of these channels were approved around 2006 and still haven’t launched yet. After a couple of extensions the CRTC forces you to start over from scratch. Expect most of these channels to expire before they ever see the light of day.

| In the news, Media, Technology, TV

The webtélé explosion

La Presse on Saturday had a special feaure on “la webtélé”, or online video series. It also includes a piece from Hugo Dumas on a Vrak.tv series, one from Chantal Guy about how women are taking charge online (hello there, Jessica)

The piece from Nathaëlle Morrissette talks about the business model for online video, which outside of Têtes à claques doesn’t really exist. Even though it’s cheaper than television, online video series in Quebec are supported either by arts grant, television broadcaster/telecom company/internet provider or by the creator’s back pocket (usually a combination of these).

I’ve always been impressed with the state of Quebec cultural productions, especially when compared with English Canada. I wonder how much of that success is due to the heavy subsidies from provincial and federal governments, and how much is due to the fact that Quebecers crave music, television and movies in their own language and from their own culture.

Still, I wonder how much a population of six million can really support. The failure of TQS I think was due partially to this oversaturation of media. If hundreds of producers start making their own web TV series, they’re contributing to the fragmentation of what little advertising and other revenue they can hope to collect. Not all of them can get cushy deals with Radio-Canada or Télé-Québec.

But you won’t know if you don’t try, right? If they’re willing to bankroll these operations as a labour of love, who am I to tell them no?

| Media, On the Net, Technology

Ownership mothership

CBC media ownership network map

CBC media ownership network map

The CBC has played with cool new technology from IBM to create a network map of media ownership in Canada as part of a special section dealing with the future of television.

While it does look cool, it’s not particularly useful for understanding media ownership. For one, large corporations are represented by tiny dots, and the network looks a lot more incestuous than it should because of things like CPAC (which is financed by all Canadian cable and satellite providers) and other joint ownership situations.

That data behind it, however, are publicly available and can be used to create other visualizations. Making the size of the dots proportional to gross yearly revenue might make it more interesting.

| Media, On the Net, Technology

Weather Network Twitter alerts need fine-tuning

The Weather Network has launched Twitter feeds to alert people to important weather information. It makes perfect sense, except there’s one feed per province. Quebec’s feed has alerts from Gatineau to Rivière du Loup. But I don’t care about the weather in these places. I care about the weather in Montreal.

The Weather Network should split these feeds (especially Quebec, Ontario and B.C.) into more, smaller regional versions.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

The medium is not the message

Third Tuesday, a bimonthly meetup of PR people talking about social media, got a visit this month from Jean-François Codère. Codère was a journalist for the Journal de Montréal and now RueFrontenac.com, and his speech was mostly a response to one in January from blogger Michelle Blanc, who was preaching to the choir about how the traditional media don’t get the Internet. He’d written a blog post criticizing Blanc’s presentation, and was invited to take his message to the masses.

Codère’s presentation was treated with a lot of skepticism from bloggers, who accused him of using stereotypes and not knowing what he’s talking about. As Codère pointed out afterward, most of the people Tweeting about him not checking his facts misspelled his name.

Petty insults aside, Blanc and Codère are both guilty of generalizations and unsound arguments in their social media vs. traditional journalism debate, because they’re both acting under the impression that there’s a difference between a newspaper and a blog other than the fact that one is on paper and the other is on a computer screen.

Codère is mostly correct in his generalizations about blogs and user-generated news sites: they’re mostly opinion, they produce very little original journalism, they don’t verify most of what they put up, and they’re not particularly trustworthy.

But that’s most, not all.

Blanc and other new media advocates (most of whom are self-appointed “social media marketing experts” – UPDATE: Note that I don’t include Blanc among them) cherry-pick the few cases where social or new media got to a story before AP or the New York Times. The Hudson plane crash, for example (something I’ve already debunked). Even if the examples given have logical holes in them, there’s nothing inherent about the medium to show that news can’t be scooped by new media. I’ve had a couple of scoops here in my couple of years of existence.

The problem (and one of the reasons I’m not crazy about Twitter yet) is that the signal-to-noise ratio of what’s online is incredibly low. Unless the news happens to Ashton Kutcher, the vast majority of people aren’t going to hear about it directly – they’ll hear it through friends, aggregation sites or the news.

Codère’s comments prompted some knee-jerk reactions from the crowd who built up the straw-man argument that he says all journalists are perfect. He of course said nothing of the sort, because they aren’t. There are tons of lazy journalists out there, and the various cuts to news media going on as the industry explodes are just making that worse. Many journalists are going on Twitter and creating blogs and are learning the bad habits of their social media counterparts, posting information without verification being the most common one.

The big difference between professional journalists and citizen journalists is that professional journalists are paid to do what they do. That means they’ll have the time to research an issue, and their motivation is to build credibility and a career. Citizen journalists (and here I’m not talking about bloggers) are mere witnesses to events. They can tell you that a plane went down in the Hudson, or that people are running out of Dawson College. But they can’t tell you why.

Codère’s error is that he assumes the dynamics of news online won’t change, except that eventually newspapers will use the Internet and not paper as their primary method of delivery. I think we’ll see the same thing happen online that we’ve seen in television – generalists will be replaced by specialists, and people won’t be getting all their news from one place anymore. Bloggers will develop niches that drive enough traffic to create a revenue stream that allows them to do that job full-time. At that point they become professional journalists.

The debate is all a question of semantics. What’s the difference between a blogger and an online journalist? How does someone who expresses himself via blogs differ from someone who does so via Twitter or Facebook? I’d argue that the difference is as trivial as the one between a TV reporter and a newspaper reporter.

As the Internet matures, the importance of medium will diminish, and all we’ll be left with are the generalizations, which by then I think will be quite dated.

| Media, Web design

Globeandmail.com redesigned, broken

The new Globe and Mail website

The new Globe and Mail website

In case you haven’t noticed already, the Globe and Mail redesigned its website this week.

The site is excessively slow right now, which I assume is only temporary, but still quite embarrassing.

As if to underscore how little has actually changed, the video introduction by Edward Greenspon (which I can’t embed here but looks like it was shot in a basement in the 80s) talks a lot about how great the website has been doing but very little about what’s actually changing, beyond the “new nav bar” (exciting!)

The old globeandmail.com

The old globeandmail.com

Among the changes from the old site:

  • URLs lose their /servlet/story/RTGAM…/BNStory/home nonsense, replaced by search-engine-friendly URLs like this one that are based on the headline. This change will probably make the most difference for traffic reaching the site.
  • After going overboard on the grey in their last layout, it’s much less prominent here in favour of black and red (making it look a bit Maclean’s-ish).
  • Speaking of colours, each major section is colour-coordinated, including a rather garish purple for Globe Life.
  • Gone is Trebuchet MS, replaced by serifed Georgia for headlines.
  • The story pages are much cleaner and less cluttered, but for some reason photos are limited to 360 pixels wide.
  • No more page showing articles that were in that day’s print edition, supposedly because they’re all found in their respective sections now and don’t need their own page.

But the most pretentious change is the name: It’s being rebranded from “globeandmail.com” to “The Globe and Mail”, because, Greenspon says, “it is the Globe and Mail and everything is integrated”. I can see the point (even if every newspaper says that and subsequently ignores it by spending 90% of its effort on the print edition’s front page), except Greenspon keeps referring to it as “globeandmail.com” and the video ends with the old brand.

Overall, I think it’s a positive change, if a bit over-hyped.

| Montreal, Public transit, Web design

The STM’s new brand

stm.info

stm.info

For those who haven’t noticed yet, the STM has redesigned its website to bring it into the 21st century. The previous version, while functional, wasn’t very pretty and looked quite dated.

The new version fixes that, with all the current design clichés:

  • Rounded corners
  • Gradients
  • The colours blue and grey
  • Flash-based Cycling series of main images
  • JavaScript-based collapsible menus
  • Helvetica and/or Arial, mostly in all caps

Fortunately, the design change is cosmetic. Most of the content is the same and even the URLs don’t change, so links aren’t broken.

The redesign fits in with the STM’s “Society in motion” brand, with a yellow and blue chevron forming a green one (it’s not clear what this represents exactly), and an increased emphasis on the environmental benefits of using public transit. The INFO STM page in Metro has also been redesigned with this new design.

They also launched Version 4 of Tous Azimuts, the trip planning application that uses the STM’s database of bus, train and metro departures. The new version is faster, easier to use and shows a map of trips, in addition to allowing smart searches of departure and arrival locations. If that’s not good enough for you, the STM also gives people the choice of using Google Transit, which has had access to departure schedules since October.

| Montreal, Web design

Some people should not be designing websites

I have a feeling I’m going to break someone’s heart with this post, but it’s true. There are professional web designers, and there are people whose pages belong on Geocities in the 90s.

The website for (long-shot) mayoralty candidate Louise O’Sullivan belongs in the latter camp:

partimontrealvillemarie.ca

partimontrealvillemarie.ca

Let us count the ways:

  • <title>Test2</title>
  • Candidate’s photo in 256-colour GIF
  • Photo of the city stolen from Google Image Search
  • Drop shadows on everything
  • Scrolling marquee
  • Coloured boxes inside other coloured boxes inside even more coloured boxes
  • Text is all in bold
  • Date written via JavaScript
  • No links in main text

I’m sure you can add more in the comments. Feel free.

Sadder still, there are other atrocities where this came from, people who presumably spent hundreds of dollars for these sites. Perhaps the “© 1999” at the bottom might have something to do with it.

| Radio, Technology

CBC’s Search Engine moves to TVO

Jesse Brown, the host of CBC Radio’s Search Engine, found out that his show was among the ones the Mother Corp. decided it would cancel blame the Conservative government for forcing it to cancel.

Search Engine, a show about the Internet, its culture and its laws (à la Geist) was created as a weekly show on CBC Radio One in September 2007, and lasted a year before getting cancelled for the first time. But a geek campaign by the Cory Doctorow Army got CBC to change its mind and bring Search Engine back, retooled (read: simpler and cheaper) as a podcast-only project for its second season. There it gained a cult-like status as a must-subscribe for Canadian podcast geeks.

But this sad story has another happy ending. Search Engine, which is described as CBC’s most popular podcast (though I couldn’t find numbers to back this up) got picked up by TVOntario, where it gets a home near Steve Paikin and … we assume there’s other stuff at TVO. The show will be produced biweekly until the fall, when it returns to a weekly schedule.

NOW Toronto has some back story. Torontoist also interviews Brown.

| Technology

Rogers follows the leaders

Hey, remember last year when Bell and Telus said they were going to start charging for incoming text messages (in addition to outgoing text messages), and Rogers countered that they had “no plans” to do the same, especially because that move encouraged people to switch to Rogers?

Apparently plans take less than a year. Rogers now says it’s going to go ahead and start charging for incoming text messages.

Uncoincidentally, this news comes on the same day Rogers announces that it’s going to integrate with Twitter, allowing the microblogging service to send updates to users’ phones.

Of course, like Bell and Telus, Rogers says this won’t change anything for most customers who have text messaging included in their plans, and they assure us that charges will be cancelled on spam messages (customers just have to fill out Form 18459-B in quadruplicate and have it signed by a notary, waiting 6-8 months for a credit on their bill).

Isn’t it great that our telecom universe is a three-player oligopoly where each company sets policies to mimic the others, for good or bad?

Insert brand here

Oh, and a side note to that Twitter thing: Rogers released separate press releases for Rogers Wireless and Fido saying just about the same thing. A quote from Twitter changes only the name of the brand:

Rogers:

“We’re thrilled to be working with Canada’s largest wireless provider,” said Kevin Thau, Twitter’s Director of Mobile Business Development. “Twitter is a real-time messaging service for sharing and discovering what’s happening – right now. By partnering with Rogers Wireless, customers using Twitter can now view, post and reply to messages, ensuring the application stays affordable and true to its real-time nature.”

Fido:

“We’re thrilled to be working with Fido,” said Kevin Thau, Twitter’s Director of Mobile Business Development. “Twitter is a real-time messaging service for sharing and discovering what’s happening – right now. By partnering with Fido, customers using Twitter can now view, post and reply to messages within their text messaging plans, ensuring the application stays affordable and true to its real-time nature.”

I’m not up on press-release ethics, but I can only conclude two things here: Either the release is lying to us, or Rogers made Kevin Thau say the exact same text twice, changing only the name of the brand.

| Montreal, Technology

Concordia unblocks Facebook

Concordia University announced today that it will, effective Monday, unblock access to Facebook from its wired network.

Concordia blocked access to Facebook in September – but intentionally left it open on its wireless network, in residences and in its libraries – out of concerns for “spam, viruses and leaks of confidential information related to use of the social networking site.”

This line of reasoning was criticized – even mocked – by Internet experts like Michael Geist, who argued none of these things are specific to Facebook.

It also led to coverage in the media: CBC, Gazette, McGill Daily and others.

So what changed? Officially, it was reopened because of improved security:

After the recent improvement of certain security checks and procedures at Concordia, including the installation of a new firewall, the university made the decision to officially reinstate Facebook.

Again, it’s unclear how a “new firewall” will protect Concordia against whatever ills it attributed to Facebook. It used phishing as a prime example, and it’s unclear how a firewall will stop those kinds of activities.

But realistically, the growth of Facebook has meant the loss of productivity from its use (my guess for the real reason behind its original blocking) is outweighed by its value as a communications tool – between students and professors, between the university and its alumni, between sports teams and their fans.

Concordia reminds its network users to use best practices for safeguarding personal information and passwords.