Insight and Analysis from North of the Border

Mark Evans

• Home
• About
• Contact
• Privacy

Archive for November, 2007

Quote of the Day: Jim Prentice

The emergence of more wireless players in Canada will lead to “lower prices for consumers, more choice and better service”.
- Industry Canada Minister Jim Prentice after the federal government decided to set aside spectrum to let new competitors enter the $11-billion market.

Prediction: There will be more choice and perhaps better service but don’t hold your [...]

It’s Time to Kill this “2.0″ Thang

I received a Google Alert yesterday (see below) that finally put the proverbial nail in the “2.0″ coffin for me.
Isn’t it about time that the use of 2.0 to describe something evolving, improving, moving forward, etc. stops being used? It’s, frankly, tiresome and a sign of laziness. Can’t figure out a way to describe [...]

Will There be More Wireless Competition in Canada?

Big news from the Great White North after the federal government carved out some wireless spectrum for new players.
“Our conclusion is that a more competitive wireless market is in the best interests of Canadians,” Industry Minister Jim Prentice proclaimed yesterday at a press conference.
The initial reaction seems to be: Hallelujah, we’ll now have new national [...]

Google’s New Search Wrinkle

If you ever wonder why Google continues to dominate the search market, check out a new experiment it’s conducting that lets you adjust search results.
The idea, which has caught many people by surprised, is you can move up search results that you particularly like; and remove results you don’t like. So, if it’s a search [...]

No Money in the Blogging Long Tail? Really!

Big revelations (note: high level of facetiousness) from Read/WriteWeb: “There’s No Money In The Long Tail of the Blogosphere”.
Translation: If you have a blog with little traffic, you’ll be lucky if the AdSense Gods earn you enough for a few trips to Starbucks each month.
If you didn’t know this already, where have you been exactly? [...]

Is Water the Next Big VC Opportunity?

If you look at some of the recent comings and goings by the VC community in Silicon Valley, there’s a new investment darling in town: alternative energy.
While not to suggest the VCs will abandon the wonderful world of Web 2.0, it is a sign that alternative energy has become a lot more interesting from an [...]

Google Continues to Fascinate

We’re all obsessed with Google and find ourselves using a growing number of Google services on a regular basis.
And we’re fascinated with Google because it’s a fascinating company. A couple of things popped today:
1. Google has decide to make a huge investment in exploring alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and geothermal. In [...]

Canada: The Wireless (CDMA) Backwater

Okay, it’s bad enough that Canada’s wireless market is an oligopoly, and that prices, including data, north of the border are higher than many places around the world.
Now, Verizon is making Canadians feel even worse by announcing a new initiative that will give its customer the option to use “wireless devices, software and applications not [...]

GPS Should be a Standard Laptop Feature

My brother the musician had his apartment burglarized last week. The bad guys had probably cased the place because all that went missed was his MacBook and his girlfriend’s laptop.
My brother isn’t oozing with extra cash so it’s not like he can just lay down a cool $1400 for a new MacBook. Needless to say, [...]

What If No One Actually Visits Blogs?

Last week, I installed a Wordpress plug-in, Open Web Analytics (aka OWA), that provides a pretty good snapshot of how much traffic a blog receives and how it gets there.
OWA isn’t significantly different from Clicky, Mint, Google Analytics, etc. but, for whatever reason, it hammered home the message that the number of people visiting my [...]

• Grand Effect:
• Sarah in Tampa
• Xfep
• SheGeeks
• ParisLemon
• The Last Podcast
• WinExtra
• Webby's World
• Mark Evans Tech
• Regular Geek
• Hack Your Day