This past fall at the inaugural mobile innovation week in Toronto, the CWTA announced the formation of  Mobile Giving Foundation Canada which enables Canadian consumers to “text to donate” using their mobile device to registered Canadian charities.

With the recent devastation in Haiti, Canadians can use their mobile device to donate $5 or $10 by simply texting a keyword to a specific shortcode. This one-time charge will be added to your next wireless bill or subtracted from your pre-paid account.

100% of each donation will go to the donor’s chosen charity. Service is available on most carriers.

Here are 7 [updated 1/19 from 5] ways you can donate to Haiti relief efforts:

1. The Salvation Army in Canada: Text “HAITI” to 45678 ($5); Text “ASTRAL” to 45678 ($10 will be donated)
2. Plan Canada: Text “HAITI” to 30333 ($5 will be donated)
3. World Vision Canada: Text “WORLD” to 45678 ($5 will be donated)
4. Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative: Text “HAITI” to 20222 ($5 will be donated)
5. UNICEF Canada: Text “GIVE” or “DON” to 45678 to donate $5
6. The Canadian Red Cross: Text “REDCROSS” to 30333 to donate $5
7. Rogers customers only: Text “HELP” to 1291 to donate $5 to Partners in health. Rogers is also donating $250,000 in funds and goods to the relief efforts

Last night Tony Lacavera (Chairman & CEO of Globalive) fulfilled his promise from a year ago and presented an updated perspective on the mobile industry in Canada and an update on his own mobile wireless project at Mobile Monday Toronto.

A lot has changed in a year – although his story and perspective really hasn’t. Tony’s favorite slide is a graph demonstrating the regional mobile duopolies in Canada that effectively show that in nearly every region 90% of the market share is controlled by 2 carriers.  Because of this, pricing from the major carriers have largely stabilized resulting in Canadians paying the third highest cell phone bills in the world.

This is the reason why he believes Canadians need a third true alternative in order to create competition and deliver a better overall value and experience from consumers. This is the reason why he believes his mobile brand WIND will do so well. After all, WIND will offer:

• Unlimited plans
• No contracts
• No hidden fees
• No catches

Additionally, Tony has stated his platform will be open and come with wifi partnerships already in place. He’ll allow person to person mobile top ups, offer the most current blackberries (although no iphone to start) and is focusing next on mobile payments, international money transfers, mobile advertising and near field communications (NFC).

There’s just one catch – the CRTC has ruled that they cannot launch in Canada due to foreign ownership issues around control and debt.

The CRTC recently exercised its subjective discretion to reverse the finding that was previously made by both industry Canada and the Department of Justice. This means that despite all the investment and ramping up, WIND mobile is effectively still-born. You can read more about the decision here.

Tony is confident they can still find a resolution to get the CRTC’s approval and in the mean time his staff has been sent out into the community for random acts of kindness to keep them busy – such as helping at the daily food bank.

Having said all that – do we really need a third major competitor in each market?

Although Tony’s chart was updated from a year ago (which showed 2006 numbers) to reflect the market reality of 2008 – it doesn’t really show the impact the iphone has made to Rogers in other regions in the last year.  The iphone as we know transcends carrier loyalty and has impacted the competitive landscape in regions where Rogers has been traditionally more passive.  As Tony outlined, carriers have traditionally been passive in other regions where they don’t dominate in order to keep reciprocal actions out of the markets they control. The iphone changed all that.

The other major news from a year ago is that Telus and Bell launched their new HSPA high speed 3.5 G network that now competes or bests Rogers across the country in terms of 3G access and overall speeds.  Because their new network is GSM based – they too can sell the iphone.

Recent public squabbles between Rogers, Telus and Bell about claims of who is better and who is faster certainly doesn’t make it sound like we are living in a Country with no competition or where the regional duopolies are complacent.

Although I hope all the best for WIND and look forward to them eventually entering the market, the conditions have changed from a year ago and regardless if we have 2 or 3 real choices in our local market, it looks like Canadians finally have real choice and options when it comes to plans, devices, and networks.

I’m wondering (and hoping) that Tony comes back again this time next year at MoMo Toronto with his favorite graph – updated to either prove he was right all along or that Canadian’s are actually doing just fine with two real major choices in each market.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been beta testing next generation services from both Rogers and Bell for TV broadcast delivery.

With enhanced services being offered by each, consumers will now have more than price to consider when looking to stay or switch to or from their current provider.

Although Bell is known for a better HD quality experience, the knock has always been against its satellite delivery system which can lose its signal in bad weather – or the times when you most want to be indoors watching TV!  They’ve been quietly rolling out a next generation service called Bell Entertainment Service (BES) which is based on IPTV.

IPTV is an acronym for Internet Protocol TV. It’s essentially a technology that delivers video or TV broadcasts over the Internet.

Instead of receiving television or video over the broadcast waves, cable lines or through a satellite TV service, your TV is hooked directly into a broadband Internet router and receives digitals signals directly over the Internet.

For Bell’s service, this means one router now controls all the media in your home through a 27 or 30 meg stream delivering Internet and all your broadcast channels (include HDTV) over IP encoded in mpeg-4 (vs the inferior mpeg-2 standard) – so you get amazing quality streaming without ever having to worry about the weather again.  Also new for Bell is video on demand (another Rogers advantage previously), an interactive programming guide that goes out up to 14 days and a 20 meg stream for Internet access also through the fibre optic line.

BES also allows you to remotely program your IPTV PVR box from your mobile device or any other Internet devices to record  – which is ideal when that one pint after work turns into three and you find yourself suddenly in danger of missing the next episode of Madmen!

You get all this with BES now; however,what comes next is potentially even better.  By running everything through IP, Bell can enable two-way communication for interactive TV. For example, you can actually participate in a televised game show when the host asks for audience participation by helping a contestant answer a question. Real-time participation through SMS has done wonders for American Idol – imagine what IPTV can do for the next generation show…. or whatever marketers and brands will come up with to leverage this new channel.

BES will also hopefully introduce another IPTV feature in 2010  – the ability to turn on multiple angles of an event and then watch it from multiple angels simultaneously using picture in picture viewing. This would be especially attractive for sports nuts.

In order for IPTV to work, you need to be living in an area with updated fibre in your local Bell CO.  For now that means you can only order this service if you live in Mississauga, Etobicoke, and a few parts of Toronto and Scarborough.

The downside of BES? For one thing, if your system hangs you have to do a manual reboot of your router – which takes about 10 minutes to reset and could prevent you from sending commands to your box remotely.

The other current downside of BES is that you cannot do any remote viewing of your programming on another IP enabled machine – like a laptop or smartphone. This is something Rogers is offering with their new Rogers on Demand Online service… which I’ll cover in part 2.

Steve Levy, president of Canadian Market Research, Ipsos Reid, presented highlights from a survey of marketing executives at Marketing Week today in Toronto. As stated in the afternoon daily, Steve indicated that only about 12% of marketers are actually incorporating mobile into their marketing mix.

The reason… apparently infrastructure barriers. Huh?

The only barriers are marketers and brands who haven’t yet educated themselves on where / how mobile fits into the marketing mix NOW.

With over 75% of Canadians actively using mobile phones and with numbers approaching 40 billion for SMS messages sent in 2009, I don’t know how anybody could say infrastructure is barrier to leveraging mobile.

Earlier this year I blogged about Rogers breathing rarified air with the introduction of their 7.2 mbps network. Since then they have nearly trippled those speeds to 21 mbps which has also since been matched by Bell and Telus with their new 3.5G national network.  High speed (nearly broadband) wireless is now truly available to most Canadians.

Having said all that, any marketer reading this post who has yet to incorporate mobile into their marketing mix should erase this post from their memory and go back to their usual ways.

Understanding how to use mobile in the marketing mix is one of our agency differentiators. The longer inaccurate messages are propagated about the mobile opportunity the better our competitive advantage will continue to be

After taking a pass this time last year to upgrade my first generation iphone to the new 3G, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to upgrade to the 3G S – especially now that my first gen iphone could only keep a standby charge of about 3 hours.

Friday morning after an outdoor business meeting at the Hunt Club, I swung by a Rogers store in the beaches in Toronto. My theory was that a smaller shop won’t be as busy – and therefore more likely to still have one of the new devices.

I asked the sales rep if he had any left as soon as I walked in and he replied that they only had a few left and had to get one from his manager.  He then asked me a few questions – like was I a new customer or an existing one etc… A few minutes later the manager informed me that he was sold out. Hmmmm

After catching up on 83 emails, I headed to the larger Rogers store at Bloor / Royal York.  Within minutes I was in line to buy the new 3G S. The sale rep indicated that some people had spent hours on hold with Rogers to activate the phones and that she could not guarantee that the process would work.

I asked if I could buy the iphone outright (and not be tied to a contract). The sales rep said of course – it’s only $700!

I decided to go through the activation process. Twenty minutes later we were stuck – but not because of volume on the lines but because mysteriously my account did not include the iphone as an option for me to buy in my account.  The irony wasn’t lost on me.

I was instructed to call tech support to sort it out. After 30 minutes on the phone I was informed that my account would be submitted for a tech ticket and that the back office support team (who comes in twice a week) would look into it sometime this week.

Saturday morning I made my third attempt

As it turns out, my girlfriend was also eligible for an upgrade on Rogers.  We marched back to to the same Rogers location and as luck would have it, they had 2 white 16 gig iphones left.

The sales rep was amazing. Friendly, smart, and resourceful.

According to the rep, one person who was waiting for the store to open Friday morning didn’t leave the store until 2:30pm as Rogers had not scaled up enough to handle the volume of iphone requests.

Instead of making us wait on the phone to validate the contract, he took the phone from another rep (who had waited 45 minutes) and just extended that call. After confirming Sasha qualified for an upgrade, he hung up the phone and processed the new contract manually – to again save us time.

We were in & out of the store (including high fives) within 30 minutes. Arun should get employee of the month for how he handled the many variables thrown at him to get the order processed.

Once we were home I popped my SIM card into Sasha’s iphone & connected it to my laptop. Within 5 minutes the iphone was setup exactly as my old one and I was in business.

It was a great birthday present to myself.

28 hours after first popping my SIM card into the new iphone, I had to recharge it. This is a significant improvement over my first generation phone – especially when you factor in the fact that I’ve been downloading apps & test driving all the new features pretty much non-stop for the last day.

The phone overall is fast and the 100+ new features from the 3.0 software makes what was already a great device truly fantastic.

I’m loving the new video recording feature, improved camera (3 mega-pixels) and overall speed of the device. The global device search is very handy as well. I also just discovered the MMS feature – which is neatly integrated with the SMS application.

I’m really happy with the phone so far – and will post a fuller review in about a week.

A few years ago when XM Radio finally came to Canada, I was among the first to buy one of their portable units that allowed me to stream radio in my car and at the office through my speaker system. With the extended antenna cord, I even got it to work in my home surround sound system.

I thought I had died and gone to heaven – no commercials and a great music selection. Awesome.

A year later I was still loving my Satellite radio but my docking stations started to malfunction. Soon i could no longer recharge or get a signal from either one.  I went to my local Future Shop and asked to buy replacement pieces only to find out that they no longer made my model and that the new models used a different setup.

I was not willing to buy another satellite system, so I went online to do some research on Ebay and Craig’s List.  During this process I discovered last.fm – an Internet radio station that played a selection of music based on tags I provided that matched those of the community. For example, if I wanted to hear techno – i typed in techno and all tracks that were tagged as such came streaming through. Better yet – I could let the site know that I hated or loved a track. Hated meant it would never get played again while loving it meant I got other tracks that others who loved this one also loved. Neat-o.

I allowed my Satellite radio contract to expire and I never looked back… that is until this past summer when I picked up my new Ford Edge which came with Sirius radio pre-installed along with six free months of service.

For the last six months I’ve been loving my in-car Satellite radio while still being loyal to last.fm at work and at home. With my free contract expiring, I went back online to check out the rates.

The most logical package was to get one that would last the lifetime of my lease – which is nearly three more years. The cost would be nearly $500 with taxes. Ouch.

They also have a lifetime plan for only $100 more – which seems like the best deal until you look at the bigger picture. Satellite radio is an old technology that may not last more than a few more years.

Why? Internet radio is coming to your next vehicle… or the one after that. Audi has already been showing off prototypes of a cabrio that includes an Internet radio feature. The same technology that allows vehicles today to pull down google maps into your display (essentially mobile Internet) can also be used to stream music into your vehicle.

Internet radio can also be social – or two-way unlike Satellite radio. And it’s free.

Just as my Rogers mobile stick allows me to get Internet wherever I go, I can see a day coming soon where your vehicle can be your own personal wifi hot spot that not only streams Internet radio based on your profile and preferences, but also allows you to stream video to the back seat for movies, games, and other media.

For the driver, having streaming Internet also means you can get weather and traffic alerts that are real-time – and even access those live highway video cams which will look much better on your dash system than on your mobile device.

With streaming Internet you can also install other features such as video cameras that capture the environment around you – including when you get rear-ended. Think of it like having a black box for your car… so when an accident occurs the police and or ambulance and insurance companies are notified with video of what just happened.

The possibilities are nearly endless – and coming sooner than you think.

I think I’ll just extend my Satellite radio contract to the end of my lease

“Yak” has many connotations – some more positive than others.

What yak mobile will mean to Canadians this time next year when they go to market nationally (minus Quebec) has equally as many possible implications for consumers and the mobile market.

CEO Tony Lacavera of Globalive Communications Corp. (who own yak) presented an overview of their vision and market strategy this week at Mobile Monday.  Here are some highlights and what they may mean to you and to the competitive market:

• They bought enough spectrum nationally to reach 25 million Canadians – but have set a short term goal of 1.5 million customers. They are going to initially focus on their own yak long distance customers (who are mostly middle-aged women), so don’t expect them to compete with the big 3 on their own turf
• They aren’t expecting Bell, Rogers, and Telus to make it easy on them to use their cell towers as mandated by the CRTC and they expect it will take a while to create network infrastructure that can compete with the big 3 for reliability.  Look for them to make deals with other spectrum winners (like Shaw and Videotron) and MVNOs as a way to fill some infrastructure and / or service gaps
• They are going to be GSM based in the AWS spectrum.  This means you should have more choice of devices to either bring over to them or to buy then if you were on Bell or Telus
• They expect that mobile penetration in Canada will be as high as 93% in three years and they hope to have about 8% market share – or enough to survive / hang on until 2012 when the next spectrum auction is expected to occur for the powerful 700 mhz range
• They will leverage big box and other major retailers primarily for distribution. This will make it easier for consumers buy and try yak mobile before fully committing to them. This is common practice in other countries like Italy and Greece where there is heavy penetration (100%+). With pay as you go programs, it’s not uncommon for consumers to carry multiple Sim cards
• Yak’s pending arrival has already impacted other flanker brands such as fido, solo, and koodoo as they are all repositioning themselves to be more competitive and in line with other international standards (like dropping system access fees, 12 month roll over minutes etc…)

yak mobile (or whatever they end up branding themselves) may not be the giant killer many consumers are hoping for, but they are the first of 4 new entrants that promises to restore the Canadian market to competitive levels not seen since 2000-2002 before the last wave of new entrants were bought out by Rogers and Telus

Over the past year I’ve blogged on more than one occasion about the frustrations many Canadian Marketers have had around the lack of data available on how Canadians use and interact with mobile.

This week Lemay-Yates Associates Inc. (LYA)has released a 100 page report after conducting extensive research into the Canadian broadband mobile market over the last few months covering handsets offered by 17 mobile carriers, flanker brands and MVNOs/resellers, as well as their features.

LYA also surveyed Canadian consumers to assess which mobile data services they currently use and to characterize the overall penetration and current usage of Canadian consumers.

Check out this 7 minute interview that highlights many of the findings (sorry for the secondary browser link – bnn does not offer video embed – shame!):

Their mobile report also addresses questions such as:

• What is the status of brand competition in each region of Canada: from BC, top Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces
• What is the status of handsets with GPS capabilities for each service provider?
• Which carrier is the champion in supporting social networking applications?
• What is the current penetration of social networking applications such as facebook and MySpace among Canadian consumers?
• Who currently uses heavy data applications such as watching streaming TV or YouTube?
• How many iPhones could Rogers sell over the relatively short term and which carriers are more at risk of losing customers to the iPhone?
• How much do Canadians think mobile data is worth to them?
• Mobile carriers and service providers, broadcasters, third party applications developer, equipment and handset suppliers will gain new insight and a better understanding of this rapidly emerging market by purchasing this Report.

Want more details? Go to their website here.

Q: Device and software adoption for qrcodes in Canada seems slow and far between. Do you see this changing? What else can be used?

A: QR or 2d codes are slowly appearing in Canada – but usually not in the way we have seen them internationally.

For example, many airlines will have a qr code printed on boarding passes printed from home – which are then scanned at the gate. This works because you are providing the code on a medium that is available to the masses – print and the scanners are independent of your mobile device.

In order for 2d codes to take off, one of the major carriers will need to decide there is value in including a 2d code decoder on their devices as a native app.  Expecting consumers to download a decoder first before reading a code is unrealistic unless you provide a massive incentive.

If Rogers for example started including a decoder on all their devices, they could re-merchandise all their stores to include qr codes and therefore create new customer value, differentiation from their competitors while increasing consumer perception of being cool or innovative.

Imagine clicking on a qr code on a dvd rental to download a video trailer, see reviews from other Rogers customers, or to add to a movie bookmark list for future reference. The possibilities are vast – but it all starts with one of the big three making the first move.

With new regional and national carriers rolling out in Canada next year, the competitive environment is bound to get tighter – which is a great opportunity for one of them to look at qr codes as a way to differentiate from the others.

This is an excellent question posed by the panel audience earlier this week.

The short answer is – nearly 100% of mobile devices in Canada have a mobile browser.

Every new device comes with one and consumers are updating & replacing their devices faster than ever. It used to be that every 2-3 years a consumer would update their device. Now it’s about every 6-9 months. Also, thanks to Stephanie at Yiibu for this link which shows device market share by Country.

Having said that, keep in mind that the mobile web experience varies greatly from device to device. You can design and develop sites that will work just fine on every device if you follow the standards laid out by the W3c and dotmobi.

Unlike the interweb where we are often designing for the lowest common denominator, you can design for the highest common denominator for the mobile web.  We can auto-detect your device before serving content so that you can serve up a very rich experience for smartphones (i.e. bb bold, iphone) and a more basic experience for your standard clamshell device for example.

Data plans in Canada have come way down in the last year. You can get unlimited data plans for as low as $7 / month from Bell and Telus for your flip phone, and as low as $30 / month for your smartphone from Rogers.

Summary: The mobile web is a viable channel to extend your message.  Be sure to design for mobile and user context instead of trying to cram an interweb site into a smaller screen.