Akihabara is a section of Tokyo, Japan, that’s often referred to simply as Electric Town. With its bright lights and bustling collection of high-tech vendors, it’s like Times Square on speed. If Canada is in the technological slow lane, Akihabara is the autobahn, where companies end up when they want to unveil any new technology and try it out on consumers.
There are good reasons why Canada should be trying to be more like Akihabara, and it’s not just to placate impatient consumers. Ken Coates is the dean of arts at the University of Waterloo and has written about technology and innovation in Japan. He argues that there are some big economic advantages to being an early adopter of tech products. To begin with, most tech companies are inclined to set up shop in a place where they can easily test new technologies. “If your major markets are outside the country, it’s really hard to stay on the cutting edge.” Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry, is based in Waterloo, Ont., but even it tends to try out new products in the United States before they’re offered here. “If you have to go launch in other countries and worry about how that works out, that can be really time-consuming and really frustrating for an organization,” he says.
Even more troublesome is the fact that countries that are slow to adapt lose out on the immeasurable spinoff benefits that technologies bring. Take, again, the iPhone. After it was launched, hundreds of U.S. companies and individuals started developing applications for it. An entire industry has emerged around this one piece of technology. And while Canadians waited for the iPhone, they also missed out on the early stages of that development. “The technology is only the starting point for innovation,” says Coates. “The future of the high-tech economy is equally on the application side.” The same thing is happening with the Kindle. “The Kindle is a terrific device,” says Geist. “It’s the sort of thing that would be great for Canadian authors and books. But the spinoff effects here, the benefits that accrue to creators, are being lost.”
Compared to the U.S., Canada is fast developing a reputation for having a market that’s unfriendly to new technology. We may be highly regarded for our mathematics and engineering and science, but not for being a place that can translate that into commercial, high-tech applications, says Coates. Our smallish size isn’t much of an excuse either—places like Finland, Israel and Singapore are regarded as cutting-edge nations. And that is a strike against Canada. “As this new economy unfolds this stuff will be 10 times as important as it is now and we’re either on top of this or we’re lagging way behind.”
Canadian publishers, meanwhile, are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Kindle. It will help give new life to Canadian books and help them reach new markets, says Diana Barry, the director of digital services with the Association of Canadian Publishers. Publishers are already racing to put their books into digital form so they’ll have plenty of content to hand over to Amazon.com if and when it brings the Kindle north of the border. There are no rights issues standing in the way of Canadian books: they’re already being sold on Sony’s e-book reader, which is available in Canada (though it lacks the wireless capabilities that have people so excited about the Kindle).
There is no easy way to repair Canada’s sinking high-tech reputation. Coates argues that Canadian consumers and electronic retail stores could stand to be more aggressive, and demand that these “only in America” products be brought here sooner. Aside from the occasional Internet rant, there’s been no push to try to speed the arrival of the Kindle. Others suggest that a more competitive communications industry would make it easier for companies to negotiate service agreements. For now, the only real alternative is patience. But that’s another commodity that’s in short supply in the world of consumer technology.
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