Welcome to ianbell.com

This web site is presently under construction. In the meantime, you should probably follow me on twitter: @ianb

Rogers Wireless iPhone 3G = FAIL

June 22, 2009

Have you had problems returning a damaged iPhone to Rogers Wireless?  If so, I’d like to hear about it in the comments.
It has been a year since Apple and Rogers Wireless launched the iPhone 3G in Canada.  It was that summer, in 2008, I unloaded my first-generation unlocked iPhone for a legit iPhone 3G from [...]

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Why WOULDN’T you buy an iPhone?

June 15, 2009

The big news from last week’s Apple WWDC was of course the new iPhone 3GS.  The features are obviously a significant evolution of the already successful iPhone 3G… so this is good news for Apple fanboys and shareholders.  Last week, the Nielsen blog suggested that the price of the current iPhone 3G sliding to an [...]

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iPhone Skype not in Canada due to … Trademark issues?!

May 20, 2009

Skype for the iPhone is a much-hyped and very cool app that’s not available (legally) for us Canadians despite the fact that it is free and offered by a global company.  There are of course workarounds but this is a kludge and not for the feint-of-heart.
In 2007, a story surfaced to quel rumours of an [...]

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The Fox and the Hedgehog: Which one are you?

May 19, 2009

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  – Archilochus
Which one are you?  The ancient parable of the fox and the hedgehog has come into increasing view in popular culture lately.  And while its origins are somewhat ambiguous, the allegory has been applied to entrepreneurs, scientists, philosophers, playwrights, business leaders, economists, [...]

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iPhone Skype for Canada — A workaround

March 31, 2009

Skype launched an iPhone client this week, everywhere except for Canada.  According to a Skype representative interviewed by Tom Keating, “There are some patent-licensing issues which prevent us from offering it there.”  Translation:  This is a long-term issue.  The representative further went on to state that “it’s codec related.”
I’m thinking that might be a dramatic [...]

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Twitter and the thought maelstrom

March 2, 2009

When I was a boy growing up in Burnaby, we would gather each March in the parking lot at the Crest Plaza strip mall to plot our baseball season.  Inside of the local eatery parents and league officials would conduct a draft, seeding players onto teams and organizing the schedule, while we kids loped about [...]

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The Yellow Pages: Adapt or die?

February 23, 2009

While there is much kvetching and hand-wringing of late regarding impending demise of the dead-tree business (sic) that is the newspaper industry, there is another dead-tree business that is descending quickly toward irrelevance:  The Yellow Pages.
Every year, beginning around this time, trucks shunt around cities and visit every household in North America, and indeed most [...]

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Should Canada bail out Nortel?

February 5, 2009

Om has a piece today written by Venture Capitalist Allan Leinwand asking whether Canada should bail out Nortel.  He asks:  “But is preserving the country’s technological heritage reason enough to spend millions in taxpayers dollars?”
I think that the answer to the question is contained within the question.  There is no such thing as technological heritage [...]

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Still a lot more bottom in Vancouver Real Estate

January 30, 2009

This just in:  Vancouver has been ranked fourth on the world’s list of least affordable cities.  This is well ahead of cities like Manhattan, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.  As most rational people know, the city’s thundering real estate market has been bolstered by rampant speculation and constant construction of new condominiums.. but [...]

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Best Gawker Comment Ever

January 29, 2009

There are trolls and then there are troll geniuses.  In a typically art-imitating-life-imitating-art groupthink regarding Facebook’s reflection of our deviant selves occurring over at Valleywag, Private Hangnail intervened with the most salient comment I’ve ever read on a blog:

I’m not on Facebook, but I can only imagine my status updates would be like Just found [...]

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