ian andrew bell

Last week I penned a column for GigaOm which has been picked up by BusinessWeek.  Here’s an excerpt:

“VoIP is dead,” Skype General Manager of Voice and Video Jonathan Christensen declared at an industry conference a few weeks ago. He spoke figuratively, of course, but he may well have been right. While Voice-Over-Internet Protocol proponents had long promised a decade of creative destruction, they themselves appear to have become the victims.

File this item under the “triumph of compromise and the death of innovation” category, dear readers. Here is a car I would be delighted to buy, unveiled in January 2007 — The Chevy Volt concept car:

It’s a car so popular that it was requested for the upcoming Transformers movie by the director. Graceful, aggressive styling made it clear that, where Priuses and their ilk have become the equivalent of a worsted hemp-wool sweaters, this would not be your mom’s Hybrid.
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As some of you know, I have experienced some recent [ahem] frustration while trying to build a technology business in Vancouver.

I experienced some catharsis last night reading Kevin Curry’s (is he a real person?) comments on the Vancouver startup scene over at TechVibes. You should really follow the link and participate in the discussion @ TechVibes, but I have pasted my thoughts and response below as well, for posterity:

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Even after the stores opened and the customers have packed home with their lawn chairs, the disaster that has been the iPhone’s launch in Canada continues to ring (pardon the pun) in the ears of consumers. I took a spin around Vancouver on my motorcycle (sorry, going too fast for photos) this morning at 7:30 and counted 250-300 people at the Broadway & Arbutus Rogers store, some TV trucks, and some balloons but otherwise not much fanfare. The smaller stores had maybe a dozen or so people hanging around at best.

I was concerned that the media were going to get taken on a ride by Rogers with this launch. Fortunately, the CBC is reporting that desperately few of the customers who were encouraged by Rogers to go to Rogers flagship stores in 6 Canadian cities have walked home with the prize, while still others are getting denied the purchase because some Rogers outlets are showing preference to new customers (and thus, highly-spiffed new activations) over existing ones. The CBC has thus far been on the money on this issue I hope this REAL story is echoed in other media over the course of the day.

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Apparently trying to steal the thunder of customer ire from Rogers Wireless’ ill-considered iPhone launch, Bell and Telus are trying to slip out the back door with an announcement that they’re going to be charging users extra for text messaging. To be specific, that charge is $0.15 for each incoming message you receive, whether you wanted to receive it or not.

SMS costs in Canada are already disproportionately high versus the unrealistically high costs for SMS across the entire wireless industry. This article suggests that SMS costs are, in the aggregate, 4x higher than getting data from the Hubble space telescope. Global SMS revenues are larger than the Hollywood movie, music and video game industries combined.

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In a week, when Apple FanBoys are lined up outside the Rogers and Fido stores to purchase their iPhones and get locked into Rogers’ draconian service plan for the next three years, yours truly wil be cooling his heels waiting for a shipment from the UK to arrive at his door. In this package, likely a week after the launch, will be contained a couple of 3G iPhones from a friend in London.

This is a critical opportunity for you to vote against Rogers with the only ballot that counts: your wallet. You too will be able to purchase unlocked 3G iPhones from him on eBay about a week later.

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Despite the fact that I often find myself on the opposing end of the table on most of what Microsoft does, I was really hoping to be able to agree with Ballmer on his assertions regarding Microsoft’s rejuvenated focus on search as quoted in today’s Financial Times article. I was hoping that, on the heels of their disastrously failed hostile takeover effort of Yahoo! that MSFT had a plan for Search that extended beyond paying people to use its engine, which has led to some amusing arbitrage opportunities reminiscent of late bubble-era scams.

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My friend Daniel Gibbons is shopping for a CMS for his new project. He’s posted interesting and in my view fairly accurate comments regarding Drupal and Wordpress. I’m quite the fan of WordPress, have spent a little bit of time with Matt and the Automattic crew and think quite highly of them.. and of course I use it for a bunch of sites, both corporate and personal.

Still, a couple of years ago I recommended that we deploy a Drupal site for EQO, where I was the VP Marketing. As seems to be common with a lot of Drupal projects, there was much forking of code and a great deal of customization required to make the thing feel like a true web interface. As a result it’s been a challenge for EQO to keep their site up-to-date with the latest versions and to reconverge with the growing Drupal codebase.

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I keep forgetting to blog about this, or perhaps it’s because I’m ashamed of my wardrobe and bad hair day, but FindFindr did a far-ranging video interview with me on a rooftop in Gastown. I did my best to be interesting. They did their best in the editing room later. Enjoy!

… and the web application hosting business cowers in fear. Now, my friends, people are discovering what Google’s REAL differentiated IP is..

Application scaling is a real problem for the managed hosting business unless some software company comes up with a platform/solution that lets them leverage their existing computing infrastructure. This is allegorical to, and is probably as big an opportunity as, SAN and NAS a few years ago … big incumbents like EMC and Network Appliance with totally vertical solutions (Google and Amazon in this case) competing with guys using software and off-the-shelf hardware (the hosting companies licensing the wares of some as-yet-non-existent software company).

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