by Charles Plant | Aug 30, 2011 | Innovation
I gave myself a birthday present of a new Kobo as I have gotten tired of carrying all sorts of books around. My first reaction was quite negative as I turned it on and found that the page was only showing around 50 words. If you read 500 words a minute, a device that only shows 50 words means that your reading will be slowed down to a crawl as you flip the page every 6 seconds. Now I have been accused of being rigid in my thinking so reminding myself of that, I vowed to give it a further try.
Once I found it was possible to change fonts and layout, things began to improve and once I had finished my first book I was hooked. Not so much on the layout, form factor, techno mumble jumble or anything else but by the ease of getting the next book. Finishing a normal book means that you likely won’t start another for a while until you replenish your stock at a store some time later. The great thing about Kobo is that it takes only a couple of minutes to get another book. At 11 at night when you are looking for something to read, you can easily download something and be reading within 5 minutes. Not so of regular book shopping. In fact I hazard to guess that I’ll read more with a Kobo than I did with real books and if many of us do so, this will be a boon for the publishing industry but alas, not so much of one for the retail bookstore.
by Charles Plant | Jul 23, 2011 | Innovation
I was amazed to find out recently, the volume of texting going on. What Instant messaging is to the computer, text messaging or texting is to the phone or mobile device. According to Nielson Co. in 2009, “American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008—almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.”
Originally sent using SMS, (Short message Service) text messaging, refers to the exchange of brief written messages between fixed-line phone or mobile phone and fixed or portable devices over a network. Text Messaging now refers to messages that may contain image, video and sound content. Texting has been a boon for the telephone companies as it gives them something more to charge for whereas much of IM is not paid for. Statistics about the use of Text Messaging say:
- The ITU (October 2010) estimates that 6.1 trillion messages will be sent worldwide in 2010, that is triple the number sent in 2007 (1.8 trillion). That means 200 000 text messages are sent every second, earning operators US$14,000 every second (if the average text costs US$0.07)
- The most number of texts are sent in The Philippines and the United States.
- Portio Research (February 2010) estimates that SMS is used by four billion consumers worldwide and that worldwide SMS traffic will exceed 10 trillion in 2013.
- The global mobile messaging business is worth over US$150 billion, and will hit US$233 billion by 2014.
by Charles Plant | May 23, 2011 | Innovation
If computers, voice mail and cell phones weren’t enough to overwhelm the typical corporate user and blur the boundaries between work and home then email was the next nail in the coffin. In case you have forgotten, Email started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. These systems were primitive and only allowed communication between users who logged into the same host. This came to be useful in large corporations as a means of communicating internally as all employees with a terminal on a mainframe could become an email user. In the 1980s, networked personal computers on Local Area Networks became very useful. Server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were then developed. Unfortunately, these systems allowed communication only between users logged into the same server just as early systems were limited to users of the same mainframe. Over time, these systems came to be linked together as long as companies were using the same protocol. Eventaually the adoption of ARPANET and later Internet protocols allowed email messages to be sent over the internet efficiently.
Some statistics about email usage in 2010 show that the numbers for email are:
- 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
- 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 480 million – New email users since the year before.
- 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
- 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
- 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
- 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
by Charles Plant | Apr 23, 2011 | Innovation
Mobile phone technology, while not increasing the volume of data or the volume of communications received by an individual on a daily basis, certainly started to blur the boundaries of home and office and by working and vacations by making it possible to reach people everywhere. No longer was an employee “out of the office” as the office could travel with the employee wherever he or she went. Statistics on mobile phone usage are interesting. It shows that globally there are more than four times as many cellular subscribers as there are land lines. Even in the Americas there are three and a half as many cell phones as land-lines.
Mobile phone statistics state that:
- In 1985, there was less than half a million cell phone in use, now there are nearly 280 million
- 1.2 billion handsets are sold every year
- Over 150 million phones are being replaced every year
- On average, people use their cell phones for only 18 months
- 4,239,956 people are having a cell phone conversation at any given second in the world.
- Wireless revenues were more than 250 times greater in 2010 than in 2000
- 15% of Americans have interrupted sex to answer a cell phone call
- 32% of men and 23% of woman say the can’t live without their cell phone
- 27% of North American citizens used cell phones in 1999 – 93% of North American citizens used phones in 2010.
by Charles Plant | Sep 13, 2010 | Innovation
In the course of looking for background on Canadian Inventions, I came upon a list of the top 50 Canadian Inventions (Five-Pin Bowling is number 4). This list came out of a show put on by the CBC (who else) in 2007. Following on the heels of the Greatest Canadian this show put it to all Canadians to rank our 50 greatest inventions. To see some background on the show go to www.cbc.ca/inventions/
I was trolling through this list and suddenly it struck me. I couldn’t identify a single company that had been created and gained worldwide prominence out of the first 15 inventions. Where was the pharmaceutical giant spawned from the development of insulin, the nutraceutical behemoth formed from Pablum? Instead I found a list of fabulous inventions which for the most part were opportunities not seized. Certainly Poutine has been a worldwide phenom but have we capitalized on its creation to bring untold wealth back home?
In the top 15 companies there were only two examples of a Canadian company that continues today to benefit from the commercialization of a Canadian invention. (Cobalt-60 by AECL and the Canadarm by MacDonald Dettwiler, for now anyway). I was very pleased to see that Wonderbra made the list but it was marketed by a Canadian firm for only 4 years before the company was sold to Sara Lee.
To be fair, Bombardier with the Skidoo, and RIM hit the list at numbers 17 and 18 but I was once told to keep lists short and I didn’t have time to keep on researching. Here then for your edification and enjoyment are Canada’s top 15 inventions and where they ended up.
1. Insulin, Treatment for Diabetes [1921, Frederick Banting, Charles Best] Marketed by Eli Lilly, US based pharmaceutical giant who made it big specifically as a result of insulin.
2. Telephone [1876, Alexander Graham Bell] Conceived in Canada. Patented and Marketed in the US by National Bell Telephone Company.
3. Light Bulb [1874, Henry Woodward, Mathew Evans] Unsuccessful at commercializing it. Sold their invention to Thomas Edison in 1879
4. Five Pin Bowling [1908, Thomas F. Ryan] Not a commercializable product
5. Wonderbra [1964, Louise Poirier] First successfully commercialized in Canada by Canadian Lady – Canadelle but by 1968 the company had been sold to Sara Lee out of the US.
6. Pacemaker [1950, John Hopps, Wilfred Bigelow, John Callaghan] Among many contributors to development – successfully commercialized by Cardiac Pacemakers Inc of the US in 1972.
7. Robertson Screw, 1908 [Peter Robertson] Sold almost entirely in Canada as the inventor refused to license the screws to anyone (including Ford) due to problems with the first licensee in the UK.
8. Zipper [1913, Gideon Sundback] Not really invented in Canada. Sundback was a Swedish born engineer working in the US at the Hookless Fastener Company
9. Electric Wheelchair [1952, George Klein] No Canadian manufacturer stepped up to the plate to build them so the designs were sent to the US.
10. Poutine [1957, Fernand Lachance] Not a commercializable product – actually not even a tasty one.
11. Cobalt-60 “Bomb” Cancer Treatment [1951, Harold Johns] Commercialized still by AECL.
12. Java Programming Language [1994, James Arthur Gosling] Done in the US by a Canadian for Sun Microsystems
13. Bloody Caesar [1969, Walter Chell] Not a commercializable product – but this one is tasty. Who wouldn’t want to own this patent.
14. Canadarm [1975, Spar Aerospace/NRC] Actually remained Canadian but may not remain so as MacDonald Detwiller tried to sell itself to a US company this year
15. Standard time [1878, Sir Sandford Fleming] Not a commercializable product
by Charles Plant | Feb 9, 2009 | Innovation
Top 10 Canadian Websites
I like to keep track of who’s watching what so I turn to Alexa.com frequently to figure out what people are doing when they’re surfing the net. I know, I know, Alexa’s stats are flawed, blah, blah, blah, but it is a quick and dirty tool for checking on web stats. Yesterday I was trying to figure out the top “Made in Canada” websites, you know, the popular ones that all the Americans are tuning into. I was a bit stymied in that analysis as Alexa doesn’t show the country of origin of the web sites it ranks.
However I was able to find the list of websites most viewed by Canadians, the ones we visit when surfing, no matter where they are hosted. This then is the list of the top 10 web sites most viewed by Canadians as ranked by Alexa.
1 Google
2 Windows Live
3 Facebook
4 Yahoo
5 YouTube
6 MSN
7 Wikipedia
8 Blogger.com
9 Government of Canada
10 Kijiji
The list contains all of your normal suspects, Google, Facebook, YouTube etc but then what to my wondering eyes did appear but…look again….the Government of Canada. I almost fell off my chair. The Government of Canada website ranks number 9 in Canadian popularity. What a country, it makes me so proud to be Canadian.
We look more at the Government of Canada website than we look at Flickr (#29 and a made in Canada site), and than we tune into NHL.com (#33, we’ll give Canada credit for this one). What’s up here, the government is more popular than hockey on the web? We value our relationship with the government more than potential human relationships as Plenty of Fish, another made in Canada site is number 41. But wait, more than anything else, in Canada the government is more popular than porn. Yes, the top porn site (pornhub.com) only came in at number 24. See, I bet you’re proud of your little old country now too eh?
So I checked out the Government of Canada website and found lots of good stuff there…pictures of flags, pictures of Stephen Harper, pictures of Stephen Harper with flags…you get the idea. What struck me most was that the site was free, I didn’t need to give them my email, I didn’t need to pay for a subscription, I didn’t need to look at those pesky pop ups and wait for it, not even one banner ad (unless you count the pictures of Stephen Harper as ads.)
We’re missing a big opportunity here to earn some money and reduce taxes in these economically challenged times. With all those eyeballs, what are we doing to monetize the site? We could charge a monthly subscription to all those Icelandic folks who are checking out the site to marvel at our budgetary prowess. We could put up banner ads to promote our health care system to Americans. We could use it to cross promote other great Canadian sites like the Ontario government website which doesn’t even make the top 100 list in Canada.
Since Stephen has become so great recently at consulting Canadians I would encourage you to reciprocate. Take a moment, write the Prime Minister and tell him what you would do to monetize his website. This way you too can contribute to make Canada a place where the government is more popular than porn.
