Wednesday - Part 2 - Canadian Telecom Dinner

Following the Microsoft Canada analyst day downtown, I had to drive up to Caledon, a small town north of Toronto. It's really nice up there, but getting there during rush hour was brutal - almost 2 hours for what should be a 45 minute trip. Of course with Telepresence, this would not be a problem....

Anyhow, yesterday was the annual golf tourney and silent auction put on by Henry Dortmans of Angus Dortmans Associates. Henry is a real mainstay in the Canadian telecom community, and aside from his consulting, does things like this tourney/auction, as well as the Enterprise Networks conference.

I was only able to attend the dinner, which was a lot of fun. Lots of vendors and carriers there, and outside of conferences, these types of social settings are pretty rare for all these people to be in the same room together. Here a few photos, courtesy of my Nokia N93.










A nice plug for the Canadian Telecom Hall of Fame.






Technorati tags: Henry Dortmans, Jon Arnold, Angus Dortmans Associates

Wednesday - Part 1 - Microsoft Canada Analyst Day

Had a pretty full day yesterday, and I've got 2 posts about it, plus a backlog of posts coming after that.

I was at an analyst day with Microsoft Canada yesterday, along with a handful of other analysts on their radar. It was a very informative session, and they took us through a series of presentations outlining their roadmaps, especially around "Telco 2.0".

Not much new there for me, but it was good to spend this amount of undivided time talking/listening/thinking/learning about all the pieces of the IP communications puzzle that Microsoft is addressing as well as trying to pull together. Lots of focus on Unified Communications, IPTV, mobility, and Microsoft's reach across all the screens we use everyday - computer, TV and mobile phones. Was also fun talking about the "other guys", and how Microsoft competes against them - Google, Cisco, IBM, Apple, etc.

Nothing radical to report, but on the lighter side, I thought I'd share the one hiccup to our day. Of course, this has happened to all of us, but we had a hangup getting the projector to work for one of the presentations. It took quite some time to get this glitch solved, and I thought it was pretty funny having a room full of industry analysts and Microsoft folks, and nobody really having a clue what to do.

How many analysts does it take to fix a technical problem? I'm sure if I called my son Max, he'd have been down there in a flash and fixed it in no time.....





Microsoft insisted this was a hardware problem.... :-)





Fixed! On with the show....




Technorati tags: Microsoft Canada, Jon Arnold, Telco 2.0

Canadian New Media Awards - Highlights

Last night I attended the 7th Annual CNMA event, which is basically Oscar Night for Canada's new media sector. It was my first time there, and on the whole it was quite well done. No VoIP here - that's for sure, but if you're into interactive media, social networking, gaming, distance learning, etc., this is where you want to be for the latest and greatest coming from Canada.

First things, first - I need to wave the flag for Canada to say how much is going on up here, especially in the gaming space. A quick review of the CNMA website and some of the media coverage tells that story pretty well.

I'll also steer you to a short backgrounder on the Canadian new media sector, put together by Deloitte, one of the major sponsors of the CNMA. I've done a number of posts about Deloitte, and their initiatives to support Canada's tech sector, and I hope to do another podcast with them soon to talk more about CNMA, and how finalists are selected.

In terms of last night's winners, the most notable was the Company of the Year, which went to Toronto-based MyThum Interactive, which has done a number of industry firsts in wireless apps such as SMS, mobile commerce and event ticketing using bar codes scanned from a mobile phone. You can review the full list of winners and finalists here.

It's a busy week for the Toronto tech community, and CNMA is part of a broader set of events under the Toronto Technology Week umbrella that kicked off yesterday. Also taking place this week is Mesh, which had a very successful debut last year, and looks to be just as good this time around.

To close out, I'll leave you with some photos from last night, courtesy of my Nokia N93....






Adam Fromon, CNMA Executive Producer and President of Delvinia Interactive - delivering the Special Recognition Award




Gary Gluckman, Deloitte's Canadian Media and Entertainment Leader - delivering the Company of the Year Award




CNMA was held at the Carlu, a vintage Art Deco venue




Technorati tags: CNMA, Jon Arnold, Delvinia, Deloitte, Toronto Tech Week

Nokia N800 Blogger Program and BlogTV

There's a lot of "blog" in the title of today's post, and for good reason.

Earlier this week, I posted about my first videocast on BlogTV.ca. This was the launch of a weekly video series called Teen Tech Reviews that I'm doing with my son Max. Our first review was for the Nokia N800, and while the production values are pretty low, I think Max did a great job explaining what this gadget means to a 14 year old.

Canada is a small country, and BlogTV.ca is still basically a social networking experiment, so it's hardly a household name. However, people are watching our review, and it's now become a "Featured Broadcast" on the site. Whoo hoo. Once we sort out our production challenges, things will only get better.

The second blog element to this post is the Nokia blogger relations program that has been developed by Andy Abramson. I've posted about this program several times, and simply wanted to cite here that our video review has been posted to the N800 blog site. Hopefully this will make for some good cross-pollenization between these two "blogging" entities.

Finally, I just wanted to come back to BlogTV for a moment, as I see that Jeff Pulver had a post yesterday about BlogTV, drawing attention to its Israeli roots, and the fact that BlogTV.ca was launched in Canada several months before its recent launch in the U.S. So, anyone out there wondering what all the fuss is about should read Jeff's post, and spend more time here for the Canadian experience.


Technorati tags: BlogTV.ca, Jon Arnold, Nokia N800, Andy Abramson, Jeff Pulver

Telepresence Podcast with Teliris and BT Quarterly

I recently was asked to be a contributor to Business Trends Quarterly, which is a great read on the current thinking from the industry analyst community. For their Q1 issue, I contributed an article, and for the upcoming Q2 issue, we did a feature on telepresence.

This was a two-part feature, consisting of a written Q&A between me and Marc Trachtenberg, CEO and Co-founder of Teliris. It will be published in the Q2 edition, but you can read it here now.

In addition, we did a pretty lengthy podcast about the telepresence market today, and I'll post it once it's ready for release. If you're following the telepresence space, I think you'll find this worth listening to. And until then, I hope you enjoy the written version, and if you like what you see, I'd urge you to subscribe to BTQ.


Technorati tags: Business Trends Quarterly, Jon Arnold, J Arnold & Associates, Teliris, Telepresence

Canadian IP Thought Leaders Series - Stephane Marceau - Mobivox and Mobile Skype

This week, my guest was Stephane Marceau, who was returning for a second time on my podcast series. Stephane is the CEO of Montreal-based Mobivox - formally known as Voxlib. Mobivox is a pretty interesting company that enables Skype on any mobile phone - so, no downloads are needed. They also have a strong voice recognition component, so you can use Mobivox hands-free to see who's available on Skype, and then to initiate a call to any endpoint that's in your Skype directory.

That's enough about Mobivox. Aside from this, Stephane and I talked about the bigger picture market around mobile VoIP, and why Skype is such an attractive audience for applications such theirs. Stephane talked further about how mobile phones are the preferred mode now for how many people communicate, and all the ways that VoIP and presence can make for a better user experience. In particular, he cited the convenience of continuing a mobile conversation on a landline connection without having to drop the call and dial back in. Another example was initiating a group call with multiple parties while on a mobile call - something you can't do with regular wireless service.

You can download the podcast here, as well as read more about Stephane.








Technorati tags: Mobivox, Jon Arnold, VoIP podcasts, Stephane Marceau, mobile Skype

We're Doin' TV Now - Teen Tech Reviews Debut

Some things take longer than others, and this is one of them. For a while now, I've been wanting to get a video-based series of tech reviews going with Max, my 14 year old uber geek son. He's written product reviews for me, has his own blog now, has a PC-building business and website, and now we're doing the video thing. We've titled the series Teen Tech Reviews.

The idea is to share how teenagers use and experience technology and gadgets in their own words. I'm a big believer in giving them a voice, and this is one way to do it.

There are lots of ways to do video posts, and for this series, I'm using BlogTV.ca. Why? Well, first, they're based here in Toronto, and I've been following them since attending their launch back in February. Their service has some unique elements that I think are neat, and are not offered this way yet in the U.S. To find out more about BlogTV.ca, please refer to an earlier post as well as a podcast.

Yesterday, Max and I put our first video review together, and the topic was the Nokia N800. It's a web-friendly tablet device that does a whole lot of really cool things. Bloggers like Ken Camp and Alec Saunders have provided terrific reviews on their blogs, but I wanted to do one with Max, and I'll bet he's the only teenager out there doing a review of this device. He's also in the process of doing a written review on his blog, and I'll pass that along when it's ready.

So, here's the review, which you can find on the Techno Gadgets channel on BlogTV.ca. If you have time, you should have a look around their site. As you'll see, it's an interesting mix of "TV" and video blogging. It's TV in the sense that the posts are broadcast live, so you have to do your stuff in one take - which we did no problem. The broadcast is archived, so it's also there for people to watch at a later date, and I hope you'll do that! The review runs about 8 minutes, and if you can't open the clip below, here's the direct link. The volume is on the low side, but if you access it directly from the site, it plays louder. We've got a few kinks to work out here, and future segments should only get better.









Technorati tags: BlogTV.ca, Jon Arnold, tech reviews, Nokia N800