Mobile games locked in Mortal Kombat

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 2:27 PM - 0 Comments

(Warner Bros./AP Photo)

The PlayStation Vita, which launches on Feb. 22, has been getting a lot of press over the past few weeks, for a number of reasons. On the one hand, with gaming hardware continually getting more powerful, manufacturers are slowing down the rate at which they release next-generation machines. Home consoles such as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are now into their seventh and sixth years, respectively, which is considerably longer than the previous generation (the original Xbox, for example, had a four-year run before the Xbox 360 arrived).

Sony’s next-generation handheld is also getting a lot of attention because it is being released into a vastly different world than its predecessors. Over the past few years, smartphones and tablets have arisen to become mobile gaming powerhouses, leading observers to speculate on whether the death of portable systems such as the Vita is nigh. I spoke with Jack Tretton, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, on the topic last week and he, of course, doesn’t see it that way. Continue…

Vikileaks: a bad way to make a good point

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 5:15 PM - 0 Comments

“Vic wants to know about you. Let’s get to know about Vic”

Thus begins the Vikileaks Twitter account, a mean-spirited, vindictive, and very effective effort to humiliate and discredit Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. The account claims to draw its material from publicly available court documents from Toews’s divorce. In less than 100 tweets (so far),  its anonymous author assassinates Toews’ character in ways personal and professional. I learned more about Toews than I cared to.

I won’t pass along the dirt. I don’t have to. It’s out there for anyone to read—and a lot of people are reading. As I write, the account has been active for about 48 hours, and it already has over 7,000 followers. Even if the account is shut down, its revelations will live online forever. And it probably won’t be shut down. Publishing court records is perfectly legal. Continue…

The Why We Broke Up Project

By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Maira Kalman/HarperCollins Publishers

Burned by a bad romance? Scarred from a messy relationship? Need to unload after a Kardashian, Klum or Kutcher-type split? Instead of drowning your sorrows, author Daniel Handler asks that you post them online.

The man formerly known as Lemony Snicket has created a Tumblr page, the Why We Broke Up Project, which invites visitors to post romantic sob stories for digital publication. Handler’s request for submissions is simple: willing participants are asked to share the reason why they broke up with their respective exes. Blog tags such as “I can’t believe how disgusting you were” and “I can’t believe there was someone else” help over-sharers categorize their entries.

“For practical and therapeutic purposes, I’m glad the site is up,” says the 41-year-old San Francisco-born author, who has personally responded to entries that move him. “For selfish reasons, too.” That’s because it was created to promote his latest book, Why We Broke Up, an illustrated young adult novel. “When I tell people about the book’s premise—that it is about a dramatic teenage love affair that ends badly—it usually prompts them to launch into their own troubled story of a former boyfriend or girlfriend.”

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Can Facebook be worth $100-billion?

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:35 AM - 0 Comments

Facebook’s upcoming IPO has tongues wagging on Wall Street amid expectations the social networking site could fetch up to a US$100-billion valuation, and make founder Mark Zuckerberg and many of his employees very rich in the process. That includes a homeless graffiti artist who painted the walls of Facebook’s original Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters and took his payment in stock (now worth as much as $200 million). But, while there’s no questioning Facebook’s popularity, with nearly 850 million users and counting, several potential investors are still scratching their heads over the company’s business.

A close look at Facebook’s filings with U.S. securities regulators last week revealed a company that’s very much a work in progress. Though Facebook is profitable with enviable margins—it earned US$1 billion on revenues of $3.7 billion last year—there’s still a lot of revenue growth that needs to happen to justify a US$100-billion valuation. Google Inc., for instance, had a price-to-sales ratio of 8.7 when it went public in 2004, according to financial website MarketWatch. Facebook’s is closer to 26.

Investors clearly have huge expectations for Facebook’s future given its ballooning subscriber base, the growing number of hours users spend on the site each day, and the fact that few people ever delete their profiles for fear of being cut off from their vast network of “friends.” The belief is that advertisers will find it all an intoxicating elixir. “With close to a billion users, this is the Web story of the decade,” says Carmi Levy, an independent tech analyst and writer.

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Biting into Apple

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Wang Yishu/ChinaFotoPress

“All companies have secrets,” goes an epigram in Adam Lashinsky’s new book. “The difference is that at Apple everything is a secret.” Lashinsky’s Inside Apple shines an X-ray on the bizarre culture of rivalry and silence that Steve Jobs built at the tech giant’s famous campus in Cupertino, Calif. The price of working for Apple in America, it turns out, is security harangues, legal threats, and paranoia—along with extensive explanations of exactly why you, as an Apple employee, ought to be paranoid. Without obsessive secrecy, Apple’s new-product rollouts wouldn’t have the dramatic quality that keeps the cultists mesmerized.

Under Jobs, Apple was traditionally just as secretive about its manufacturing arrangements abroad. Which is what made the company’s Jan. 13 press release so portentous. Its opening words: “The following is an alphabetical listing of Apple production suppliers.” Nothing special for a publicly traded company, you might say, but the list, from AAC Technologies Holdings Inc. to Zeniya Aluminum Engineering Ltd., had long been sought by Apple-watching activists and critics without success.

“For Apple, this is huge, the equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down,” says Leander Kahney, a tech journalist who edits the Cult of Mac news website. “It goes against all the company’s instincts. There’s a lot of trade-secret stuff the company has released here.”

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Apple’s China factory conditions need perspective

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Staff members work on the production line at the Foxconn complex in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. (Kin Cheung/AP Photo)

The New York Times tried to stir things up over the weekend with a lengthy investigation into the working conditions at Apple’s manufacturing plants in China. The story detailed all the gruesome details at supplier companies such as Foxconn: unsafe working environments, unfair overtime, overcrowding in dormitories, violations of employments codes and so on.

It’s a damning story, intended to appeal to peoples’ consciences when it comes to the electronics they buy. It is, after all, hard to feel warm and fuzzy about your new iPad when you think of the human cost that went into making it.

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Twitter is censoring–but don’t rush to judge

By Jesse Brown - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 3:36 PM - 0 Comments

Since announcing its uneasy compromise with censorship last week, Twitter has unsurprisingly taken a lot of heat–much of it on Twitter. The company blog raised flags immediately with its mealy-mouthed characterization of oppressive, censorious nations as places that merely have “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” One of these nations, Thailand, has a particularly different idea about these contours–it thinks that if you disrespect their King, you should be imprisoned for up to 20 years (in the Internet age, this disrespect includes “liking” disrespectful Facebook content). This week, Thailand was the first country to high-five Twitter on their swell new policy. Can a gift-basket from Syria be far off?

The fact that Twitter is willing to cut a deal with the oppressive monarchs and tyrants of the world is unsettling at best, and an online protest movement has quickly mobilized. Hashtags like #TwitterCensored and #BoycottTwitter proliferated over the weekend, and groups including Reporters Without Borders condemned Twitter’s decision. But I’m not sure that they’re right.

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Insurance, the bump on our way to robot cars

By Peter Nowak - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Having had the sublime pleasure of riding in a robot car a few years ago (and writing about it again recently), it was with great interest that I read the cover story in the latest issue of Wired. The article is all about robot cars – how not just Google, but all auto makers are close to making self-driving vehicles a reality.

The story, which doesn’t appear to be online yet, covered a good number of fascinating angles, from the technology being used to the potential changes we’ll face when robot cars fully arrive. One intriguing possibility is that the entire notion of car ownership may change. If we can simply order up a car on our smartphone that then drives itself to our front door, what need would we have to actually own one?

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The touch-screen classroom

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Courtesy of Michelle Lui

At Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ont., students are banned from using their cellphones in the hallways. In Eric Moccio’s classroom, it’s a different story. Moccio, who teaches music and media arts, employs his students’ phones as a teaching tool: he recently had them vote via text message on the topic of an upcoming video project. Moccio projected a live chart to the front of the class, which “readjusted to show numbers as votes came in, American Idol-style,” he says. Another time, he ran a scavenger hunt, texting clues to students as they searched through the school. (That day, he got special permission from administration, and each student carried a signed note of permission to use their phone.) Today’s smartphones can do much more than just make calls; “they’re computers,” Moccio says, and with so many students carrying powerful devices in their pockets these days, “we’d be fools not to use them.”

Despite the technology-rich environment that surrounds kids outside school walls, most classrooms are lagging. Administrators worry that the use of phones, iPods and tablets could cause distractions, promote the rise of cyberbullying and other bad behaviour, and maybe erode literacy skills, fretting that students might start including textisms like “CUL8R” in their essays. While some school boards have resorted to bans on some technologies, not all educators agree that’s a good idea. In September, the Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest, reversed a rule that personal devices should be turned off and out of sight within its schools, after trustees recognized that smartphones and other devices might actually enhance student learning. Now, teachers like Moccio are experimenting with new ways to use not only smartphones but tablet computers and interactive whiteboards. Indeed, proponents say that, at its best, technology can change virtually any place into a classroom—or transform a classroom into somewhere as remote and different as a Borneo rainforest.

Perhaps no school board has embraced the smartphone’s potential like the one in St. Mary’s City, Ohio, which offers a glimpse of how lessons might be taught in the future: through what’s called “mobile learning.” There, the board buys smartphones and distributes them to kids in Grades 3 to 5. (Calling and texting are disabled, and the Internet is filtered.) These phones come equipped with specialized software, including an animation program and PiCoMap, a brainstorming tool, and each one has a slide-out keyboard.

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Bill C-11: copyright, the movie

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 2:49 PM - 0 Comments

Correction: in an earlier version of this post, I bungled the numbers of every copyright bill mentioned, each time they were mentioned. You realize that I’ve been covering this stuff for years, right? I regret the error, and will try to get more sleep tonight.

A ragtag group of plucky idealists stand up to bullying corporations who seek private profit at the expense of public freedom. The protesters’ message spreads, their numbers swell, and the people stand united. They demand action from politicians whose allegiances have strayed, and they speak truth to power in creative and inspiring ways. Their voices combined cannot be ignored. The people prevail.

It’s awfully cheesy—a Hollywood remake of a much darker foreign film. In the original Canadian version, the people got screwed.

That’s how SOPA is different from Bill C-11. When the anti-SOPA protests were heating up a few weeks back, I’ll admit it, I was bored. I’d seen this movie before, and I knew how it was going to end. I was wrong. SOPA is dead, while Bill C-11 is set to pass.

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There’s no easy way out for RIM

By Jesse Brown - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 1:23 PM - 0 Comments

Trendsetter/Flickr

Now is the time for all the armchair CEOs to tell Thorsten Heins how to do his job.

RIM must focus on software and kiss developers’ asses. RIM must focus on hardware and create a SuperPhone. RIM must make a better tablet. RIM must ditch tablets entirely. RIM must stop trying to look cool and focus on business clients. RIM must get cool and target hip young clients. Opinions are like smartphones–every pundit has one.

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RIM’s future isn’t with BlackBerry

By Peter Nowak - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Research In Motion finally pulled the trigger Sunday night, with the BlackBerry maker announcing that co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie were stepping down. Chief operating officer Thorsten Heins is the new CEO while board member Barbara Stymiest takes over as chair.

As the saying goes, it’s too little too late. Continue…

The Liberals jump on the cellphone airwaves bandwagon

By Peter Nowak - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 2:21 PM - 0 Comments

Esther Gibbons/Flickr

Ah, political opportunism–so easy to see, so disappointing to witness.

No sooner did Open Media start a petition for better wireless competition than the Liberals jumped in. The activist group’s latest effort, called Stop the Cellphone Squeeze, is urging the federal government to set aside spectrum licenses in an upcoming auction for new wireless companies. In plain English, they want big players Bell, Rogers and Telus barred from bidding on a certain portion of the airwaves that are necessary for cellphones to work.

As of this past weekend, the petition had amassed more than 35,000 signatures. Invisible Industry Minister Christian Paradis has said the rules for the auction will be unveiled “soon.”

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The day the Net stood still

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

Yesterday’s SOPA protest changed everything or nothing, depending on who you ask.

Wikipedia went dark, as did Reddit and many smaller sites.  Google stayed live, but presented U.S. visitors with the above–a chilling break from the usual whimsical “Google Doodle.”  Hundreds of millions of people who knew little about SOPA, learned of it.  Lawmakers got the message, and many withdrew their support for the ham-fisted and technologically illiterate anti-piracy law. The bill itself may not be completely dead, but it’s pretty damn close.  Beyond the direct issue at hand, many regarded the event as a watershed in American politics.  SOPA-critic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said:

“This is an important moment in the Capitol. Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”

On the other hand, maybe nothing changed at all. The Obama administration had already publicly trashed SOPA, and the bill’s chances were shaky at best. The disappearance of Wikipedia for a day led to many jokes about factually incorrect homework assignments, but we all somehow got by. And sure, millions of people signed petitions or changed their Twitter picture, but such “slacktivism” is easily dismissed–what’s a disgruntled mouse click worth, anyhow?

It can be worth plenty–plenty of money, and plenty of votes.  The SOPA backlash was nothing less than America’s digital spring. The Internet flexed its muscle, and Washington flinched.  The people now know what a little slacktivism can do, and so do their representatives.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

How porn parodies avoid copyright restrictions

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 marked an intriguing confluence of events. No, it’s not some sort of Mayan end-of-the-world situation, but it is the day on which Wikipedia, Google and a number of other big websites posted the Stop Online Piracy Act. It was also the day on which the Adult Entertainment Expo kicked off in Las Vegas.

How on Earth are the two related? Bear with me.

I’ve written before about how SOPA has the potential to kick off the equivalent of an Internet Cold War. If enacted, the legislation would give U.S. authorities power to block certain websites. The target would be file-sharing enablers such as the Pirate Bay, but could also encompass other undesirable websites, which historically has meant porn. But that’s not the tree I’m barking up today.

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Police: No ‘good examples’ of why we need Lawful Access

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 10:28 AM - 0 Comments

www.stopspying.ca

For the past 12 years, Canada’s cops have been pushing for new laws that would allow them to skip the pesky formality of having to get a warrant before spying on us on the Internet. (For some background on these Lawful Access laws, check out these posts.)

Critics of Lawful Access, such as our federal Privacy Commissioner and every provincial Privacy Commissioner, argue that police have yet to provide sufficient evidence that court oversight has actually slowed them down or stopped them from fighting crime.  And now, Canadian police themselves are saying the same thing.

The online rights group OpenMedia.ca has obtained and released a message it says was recently sent by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) to law enforcement colleagues urgently requesting that they provide “actual examples” of cases where the need to get warrants before accessing private information from Internet Service Providers “hindered an investigation or threatened public safety.” The message goes on to admit that though a similar request had been made two years ago, it failed to produce “a sufficient quantity of good examples.”

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The Netflix thriller

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Mike Cassese/Reuters

After a steep plunge, its stock is suddenly hot again. Can it keep luring the subscribers it needs to survive?

Silicon Valley is famous for spawning overnight success stories—Twitter, Google and Facebook—and infamous for making losers out of former winners just as quickly, as anyone involved with MySpace will attest. But Netflix’s recent roller coaster ride has been a particularly wild one.

The popular Internet video streaming company, based in Los Gatos, Calif., enjoyed a nearly nine per cent jump in its stock to just over US$80 this week after it reported that its 20 million subscribers watched nearly two billion hours worth of movies and TV shows on its service during the most recent quarter. That’s roughly 33 hours of video watching per subscriber each month—more than four times the amount watched by users of Google’s online video behemoth YouTube, according to the website paidContent.org.

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Why the CES still matters

By Peter Nowak - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 2:58 PM - 0 Comments

Power Panel discussion at the 2012 International CES in Las Vegas. (Jack Dempsey/AP Photo)

With the Consumer Electronics Show wrapping up for another year, it’s time to reflect back on the mega techno circus and try to decipher what all the hubbub was about. Before the show began, the Associated Press wrote that CES has a poor track record. In assessing how recent shows had done, the story concluded that the annual event was becoming a big dud factory. After all, netbooks, 3D television and a swarm of tablets introduced over the past few years mostly didn’t make it to market or made a resounding thud if they did.

From one perspective, this is true–CES does produce its share of technologies that fail to catch on. However, for the most part, the AP story missed the point. For one, it glossed over some obvious facts, such as that 3D has basically become a standard feature of flat-panel TVs. I remember doing radio interviews at the 2010 CES show, where such sets were first unveiled, and saying exactly that this would happen–3D would eventually become just another TV viewing option, like gaming or vivid mode.

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What’s a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic good for?

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 3:39 PM - 0 Comments

MakerBot Industries

Correction:  the 3D printer described below (Makerbot’s newest model, unveiled at CES) is the Replicator, not the Thing-O-Matic (pictured above), as I goofed up and identify it as in this post. The Replicator costs $1749, not $1099. Here’s a link, and sorry about that.

Earlier this week I called this $100 OLPC tablet the most exciting gadget at the CES show in Vegas (which I am experiencing virtually). Some disagree, and suggest that I should have singled out this MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, an affordable 3D printer ($1099) that spits out bigger objects than the last 3D printer you all bought (right?)–and in two colors to boot.

I’m unconvinced. 3D printing makes certain geeks quiver with glee, but so far it’s left me kind of cold. The cheap little plastic choking hazards that result from the process look like they come from CrackerJack boxes, and rarely seem worth the time it takes to print them or the money that goes into the building plastic. Math-fractal jewellery made from 3D printed molds looks god-awful ugly to me, and the trippy dream of printing a 3D printer WITH A 3D PRINTER always struck me as the combined mental wankery of stoners + nerds.

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Robot cars: fond memories from CES ’08

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 3:15 PM - 0 Comments

I’m knee deep in the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas so over the next few days I’ll be posting some retrospective–and futurespective (if that’s a word)–thoughts on the show’s past and future. With any luck, I’ll post some interesting stuff from this year’s show as well.

Today, I thought I’d start with my most memorable CES experience, which was riding in a robot car at the 2008 show. The car, a GM SUV designed by Carnegie Mellon engineers, was tricked out with GPS, ladar (also known as laser radar and LIDAR) and a host of other sensors, all of which allowed it to drive itself. The Boss, as the vehicle was known, won the 2007 DARPA urban challenge, an open race held by the Pentagon’s mad science division in an effort to spur development of robotic vehicles.

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The end of the wait for the elevator

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jessica darmanin

Professor Myron Hlynka’s office is on the ninth floor of a 10-storey building at the University of Windsor. Many nights, just as he’s in the elevator to go home, Hlynka realizes he’s forgotten something on his desk. Rushing back for the item is never quick: the elevators take what feels like an eternity to arrive, or they stop at nearly every floor along the way. So Hlynka has devised a system to compensate for the elevators’ sluggishness: “What I do is I push the ninth floor and the 10th floor buttons, and when I get off the elevator I push the down button. Then I run to my office,” he says. “Of course, after the elevator stops with me, it goes up even if nobody’s there, it opens the door, it shuts the door, it comes down a floor, it opens the door, and hopefully, by that time I’m there with whatever I’ve forgotten.” Hlynka’s system sounds complicated, but its aim is simple: “I try to cheat!” He suspects he’s not alone. “Everybody tries to cheat in some way.”

Elevators are a universal frustration, at least the slow, cramped and rickety ones, which are all too common. “Wait times and reliability are among the two topics that generate the most complaints” about elevators, says Andrew Wells, an engineer and general manager of KJA Consultants, which helps buildings across Canada implement “vertical transportation systems.” So while the other occupants of Hlynka’s building might not know about his strategy, they will surely empathize with his impatience, and perhaps envy his gumption. He is, after all, a probability researcher with a focus on “queue theory,” or the science of waiting. Most people, Hlynka says, “are always running a little behind. It’s like, if we could just get a bit of extra time—if that elevator would just come faster,” then daily life would be a lot easier, if not better.

Now it appears that the wait for elevators that don’t make us wait may finally be over: a growing number of companies are offering a design innovation that is as simple as it is genius. The floor buttons, typically housed inside the elevator, are increasingly being placed on the outside of the elevator instead of the usual up and down buttons. Known as “destination-oriented dispatching,” this system “gives the elevator all the information that it could possibly [need] in describing who’s moving where,” explains Wells. That one tweak equals major efficiency, with the elevator computer now capable of assigning each person to a certain elevator depending on their desired final stop. Individuals who are going to the same floor are grouped together in one elevator rather than clogging up several elevators, each making duplicate stops. “It’s fascinating,” says Hlynka. “It’s almost like preprocessing.”

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Meet the $100 tablet

By Jesse Brown - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 6:52 PM - 0 Comments

I may be stuck in drab Toronto, enviously reading the tweets of other tech journos lucky enough to be in Vegas covering the massive CES expo. But I can still tell you what the most exciting new gadget on display there is: this X0-3 tablet unveiled by the non-profit One Laptop Per Child organization.

Sold exclusively to educational organizations in developing nations, the X0-3 is designed for use in unforgiving environments.  It can run off a battery, a solar panel or a hand crank. It has a rugged, flexible screen that switches between backlit color and reflective black and white eInk, so you can use it indoors or under the bright sun. It runs Android or Sugar, OLPC’s own kid-friendly open source OS. And it will cost under $100 for a basic model. Continue…

3D R.I.P.

By Jesse Brown - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 2:15 PM - 0 Comments

The first (and last) thing that needs to be said about 3D movies themselves is that they aren’t.

Three-dimensional, that is. A layer of schmutz floating around a few feet in front of your nose while a movie plays behind it is not a reasonable simulation of our tactile physical universe. We can sit around arguing about the increasing quality of this floating schmutz in the digital age, but schmutz it remains–distracting bits of pollen hovering around our theaters. For a moment it amazes us, and then we struggle (consciously or not) to ignore it so we can focus on the story.

And the story is at the crux of this. 3D advocates point to early resistance to sound and color in the movies as proof that they are on the right track. But sound and color became crucial elements in cinematic storytelling. We’ve yet to see a 3D film where the floating schmutz is integral to the plot, and which could not be understood if you took the goofy glasses off. 3D is a gimmick, and has been since the days of the drive-in.

Poor Hollywood. The industry’s hopes and dreams were pinned to 3D. It was supposed to be a piracy-resistant bit of spectacle that would levitate teenagers out of their basements, away from their Playstations and smartphones and into movie theatres, where they would gladly pay a hefty surcharge on an already hefty ticket price for an “in-your-face” experience. 3D was also supposed to perpetuate the endless consumer gadget cycle, compelling overcompensating dads to ditch last year’s 52 inch HD LCDs for giant 3DTV flatscreens that let them bring the schmutz home. This in turn would propel the next wave of physical media sales, wherein we all would dump our DVD (or Bluray) collections at yard sales, replacing each classic flick with a new edition, digitally upschmutzed to 3D. George Lucas was moist with anticipation!

In short, 3D was the last best hope for business as usual in both the entertainment and consumer electronic industries. A couple of years ago at CES, the massive electronics trade show in Vegas, 3DTVs were everywhere. A couple of years ago, Avatar made Hollywood salivate. But as CES 2012 gears up, the reality is sinking in: Consumers don’t really want 3D at home, and Avatar was a one-off. Sports fans are lukewarm on floating balls, and people feel ridiculous wearing those goofy glasses in well-lit living rooms where they can be seen by their friends and families. Even gamers who bought Nintendo 3Ds are tiring of the optical illusion and turning 3D off.

There are still a few (hundred million) bucks more to be squeezed out of 3D before consumers grow completely sick of the experience, so we will surely see a slew of schmutzy pictures in the months and years to come. And of course, there will be an Avatar 2.

But this thing is on the wane, and Hollywood may soon have to resort to actually producing movies people want to see on account of their content.

Or they could just bring back Smell-O-Vision.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

A dystopian future for Canada’s Internet

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

jonny2love/Flickr

On Tuesday, independent Canadian ISP Teksavvy announced its new service plans, effectively dropping the other shoe in the long-running usage-based internet billing debate. While on the surface there are some things to like, at the core the new plans–and regulatory system they’re based on–paint a disturbing picture of the future of Canada’s Internet.

The CRTC set things in motion in November with its government-ordered revisit of the issue and came up with something called capacity-based billing, a sort of diet UBB. In essence, instead of large network owners charging indie ISPs for every byte their customers download, the new system requires the smaller companies to buy chunks of capacity based on how much they think they’re going to need on a monthly basis.

As Jesse Brown noted on this site earlier this week, while some commentators praised the decision, others–including Teksavvy–said the regulator screwed things up again. While the system itself was okay, the fees that a few big network owners are allowed to charge through it were way too high, the company said, which will inevitably result in price increases for customers.

All eyes have since been on Teksavvy, one of the largest and most vocal of the UBB opponents, to see what it would do. In the end, the company’s new plans and the accompanying explanation are something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, most existing plans are going up by $3 to $4, which fits the predictions by some observers that the CRTC’s ruling would push up rates by 10 to 15 per cent. The issue, as Teksavvy puts it, is that while its fixed costs actually went down somewhat thanks to the decision, the variable ones can potentially go up significantly. The company’s pricing notice reads:

If left to stand, these prices will ensure that residential Internet service prices will increase dramatically as consumer usage at peak times increases… in the face of the recent decision, we have to modestly adjust our rates.

On this front, if Teksavvy is to be believed and the rate increases are essentially going to further compensate network providers, the impact of capacity-based is the same as the intended effect of usage-based billing: Prices for consumers are going up.

On the plus side, Teksavvy is now officially offering higher speeds–up to 24 megabits per second–with usage limits that are generally much more generous than those of the incumbents at significantly lower prices. As many people pointed out on Twitter, even with the price increases, the company’s plans are still way better than what can be found elsewhere.

But there are plenty of downsides as well. For one, Teksavvy has introduced the concept of non-peak usage–meaning that customers can download all they want in the wee hours of the night without it counting against their caps. Some observers call this “innovative,” but it may well be the first step down a slippery slope. It heralds a future where internet usage is further compartmentalized–if it starts with file-sharing overnight, how long till someone makes it more expensive to watch online video in the evening, or call on Skype during the afternoon? Not only can this approach become confusing, it can also become expensive and limiting.

The only countries I know of that have adopted such non-peak usage concepts are Australia and New Zealand, both of which are in the process of building multi-billion-dollar next-generation fibre networks because their telco monopolies have failed to provide decent infrastructure on their own. The two countries, along with Iceland and Canada, are also the only ones where unlimited usage plans are uncommon if not completely absent. As I’ve pointed out before, one those countries (cough, Canada, cough) is unlike all the others. As far as anyone can tell, in fact, Canada is not an isolated island that must buy capacity on cables that run under the ocean.

Is the idea of compartmentalized internet service–where Canadians can only watch Netflix or other online video in the early hours of the morning for fear of exceeding their caps– an absurdist notion? It is indeed. It portends a dystopian scenario, which may or may not come true, but would be just as absurd as imposing a capacity-based billing scheme in response to congestion problems that large network owners have yet to prove exist.

It’s also thoroughly absurd to suggest that limiting how Canadians use the Internet–rather than expanding their use of it–is in any way “innovative.”

Unlimited Internet lives on–for the geeks

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

JasonWalton/Flickr

Last November the CRTC killed Usage Based Billing, the pricing scheme imposed by Canada’s telecom giants on small independent Internet providers that threatened the existence of unlimited (and high limit) download plans. When the news came, the 500,000+ Canadians who had protested against UBB celebrated their victory over big business. That lasted for about a minute.

Almost instantly, indie ISP’s pooped on their own party. Sure, UBB was dead, but what was it to be replaced with? A “capacity” based pricing scheme that seems fair in principle, but which breaks down when you get to the actual numbers–tariffs set by the same big ISPs without any transparency. These rates varied wildly between providers, suggesting that the big players would still find a way to gouge the little guys out of existence, while keeping unmetered internet out of reach for Canadians. Teksavvy, one of the biggest little guys, called the CRTC’s new plan an “unfortunate step back for Canadian consumers.”

In fact, when I interviewed George Burger, TekSavvy’s formidable representative, he all but suggested that the new pricing scheme would kill OTT (Over The Top Television) altogether.  It was too soon to provide numbers, but the implication was that indie ISP customers were about to see their bills skyrocket.

That may have been an overly grim projection. Today, Teksavvy announced its new rates, adjusted to reflect the CRTC’s new pricing scheme. Most customers will pay $3 to 4 dollars a month more for unlimited plans or plans capped at 300 gigs a month (Teksavvy’s most popular plans).

It’s a sizeable bump, but nowhere close to the gouging that would have occurred under UBB. If “cord-cutting” indie ISP customers who get their TV and phone through the internet suddenly saw their rates double or triple, they may have gone running back to the big boys for landlines and cable boxes. But three or four bucks a month seems like a reasonable fee for a one-pipe solution to your every telecom need. What’s more, Teksavvy is turning their own meter off each night during off-peak hours. No matter what plan you’re on, you can download to your heart’s content while your neighbours sleep.

In other words, the unmetered Internet is alive and well in Canada for those who want it. Teksavvy’s bigger problem is that not enough Canadians seem to want it. Or, if they want it, they don’t know where to get it. All of the indie ISPs combined still only hold about five per cent of the market in Canada.

Perhaps Teksavvy (and the other small players) should have done a better job of using UBB’s defeat to make themselves known to the greater public and woo those 500,000+ protesters (and anybody else) over to their services. The media won’t likely pay the same amount of attention to small ISPs again. They could have used their victory to pitch their wares to the overwhelming majority of Canadians who are using more bandwidth than ever.

After all, unlimited access is not just for us BitTorrenting “bandwidth hogs” anymore. As mainstream services like Netflix get bigger, more and more non-geek Canadians are being hit with big overage fees. The only thing holding many of them back from switching to an unlimited plan is a lack of awareness that these plans exist. That, or a general sense that indie ISPs are only for the technologically savvy.

I wonder where they get that idea from?