Rogers About to Get Something they Didn’t Want: Competition

I got a news-flash email from the CBC today (I’m no one special; I’ve signed up for alerts like this):

The federal government is $4.2 billion richer with the conclusion of the cellphone spectrum auction on Monday, while customers stand to win as five new companies are now well positioned to launch services over the next few years. The windfall is considerably larger than the original $1.5 billion many industry analysts had predicted before the auction began on May 27.

I linked to the related story on the CBC web site, and 3 passages caught my eye. (in all cases, bold and italics are mine) First:

The big winner — and biggest spender — among potential new entrants was Toronto-based Globalive Communications Inc., which currently sells home phone and internet service under the Yak brand. The company has emerged from the auction positioned to launch a national cellphone service with 30 licenses broadly distributed across the country.

Second:

The new entrants are widely expected to build third-generation networks based on global system for mobile communications (GSM) technology, which is what Rogers and its Fido subsidiary use, or its newer fourth-generation offshoot, long-term evolution (LTE).

and Third:

Iain Grant, president of the Seaboard Group telecommunications consultancy, said a national carrier could be up and running by Easter at a cost of $500 million, although other estimates say a launch could take a year or two. The trickiest part of starting up will be negotiating rights for transmission sites, many of which will either be on top of tall buildings or on towers owned by Rogers, Bell and Telus.

So here we are, looking at a Spring of 2009 roll-out for at least one competitor to Rogers/Fido Wireless, and did Rogers position themselves well for such a situation? In my humble opinion, absolutely not. Anyone in Canada has seen this coming (anyone who was not in Rogers management, that is). In the past years, months and weeks, Rogers has made so many Canadian consumers so angry that they can count on no customer loyalty whatsoever. Their brand may very well be damaged beyond repair. Any new cellphone vendor who supports a GSM 3G network will be able to grab a large pool of customers ready to switch immediately, or when their contract with Rogers is up (and you can bet that they’ll put that date on their calendar!)

How did Rogers screw this up so badly? The recent history of Rogers, particularly with respect to pricing and marketing tells some of the story. If you live in Canada and have had any dealings with Rogers, you’ll know much of this, so feel free to skip to the end…

First, over the past 3 or 4 years, Rogers charged some of the highest data and call rates in the world. Then, in 2007, consumers and tech watchers criticized them for being slow to bring the iPhone to Canada after it was available in the U.S. for a year.  In April of 2008, Rogers chief executive Ted Rogers told investors the iPhone would arrive in Canada some time later in the year. In June, Rogers set the iPhone’s debut for July 11 (along with several other countries throughout the world), but were quickly met with harsh criticism about the data pricing plan, which was perhaps the second highest in the world (with Sweden being the highest) . Some high-profile tech personalities in Canada went on television to announce that they were going to jump ship (in some cases paying a sizable penalty). Only after thousands of current and prospective customers signed online petitions protesting these rates,  encouraging Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs to put pressure on the company, did Rogers relent with a drop of the highest rate to a reasonable level ($30 per month with a usage limit of up to 6 GB per month), but this rate is available only until the end of August. On the day of the roll-out, Rogers’ registry networks crashed simultaneously with Apple’s iTunes registering system after the new iPhone was unveiled. The Outage lasted into the afternoon at some locations and it wasn’t until the next week before some customers could activate their phones. Rogers representatives said they expected record first-day sales, but declined to disclose how many phones were shipped to stores or how many they had expected to sell. As I write this, Rogers (throughout Vancouver, at least) is still sold out of the iPhone.

All in all it was a highly visible fiasco. Rogers utterly botched the iPhone roll-out in just about every way it could be botched. They could have finally made many current customers happy with a new device and would be seen today as the sole provider of one of the most sought-after tech gadgets. Instead, they generated several days of bad PR, displayed poor planning, and missed immeasurable marketing and sales opportunities. There have been numerous speculations that the reason they ran out stock is that Apple was so peeved at the high data rates that they actually diverted iPhone shipments from Canada to more reasonable European carriers. Whether or not this was true, Rogers’ lack of candor regarding availability, lack of understanding of the product, and complete screw-up of logistics and network volume on the day of the roll-out is something that will not fade quickly from the memory of most Canadians (and probably not by this coming Easter).

It will be interesting to see if the mass exodus from Rogers to whatever new carrier Globalive will fund will be as swift and massive as I expect it will be. Rogers has run their business ‘like there’s no tomorrow’, but in the Spring of 2009, ‘tomorrow’ will arrive.

Beating the Rush

I was surprised, but not all that much by this article, published today in the Vancouver Province:

Brain Drain a Thing of the Past as Americans Flood In
(To quote Norma Greenaway of the CanWest News Service:)

OTTAWA - The number of Americans admitted to Canada last year hit a 30-year high, fuelling a pattern that suggests the drain of Canadian brains south of the border may be a shrinking phenomenon.

The number of Americans accepted in Canada reached 10,942 in 2006, almost double the number admitted in 2000. By contrast, the number of Canadians admitted to the United States in 2006 dropped sharply from the previous year, falling to 23,913 from 29,930.

The data were gathered and analysed by the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies. Executive director Jack Jedwab says an analysis of the numbers shows Canada is enjoying an upswing as a preferred destination for Americans, many of whom are increasingly well educated.

Also, the trend is reflected in the reverse (i.e. Canadians moving to the US) as well, and leads to the following net numbers:

Jedwab cited figures that showed the U.S. accepted 4,447 more economic immigrants from Canada in 2006 than the U.S. accepted from Canada. That was down from 14,223 in 2005, a year the U.S. opened its doors wider to immigrants, and down from 6,916 in 2004.

I’m going to assume that first sentence should have read: the U.S. accepted 4,447 more economic immigrants from Canada in 2006 than Canada accepted from the U.S. (otherwise, it doesn’t make sense).

If this is the case, immigration could be following the same route as the dollar, leading to at least parity, and then perhaps the situation where there are more people moving to Canada from the U.S. than the other way around. Also, the people who are moving are typically the kind who would have moved the opposite direction in the past:

In 2006, 4,498 people were admitted as economic immigrants, which means they need to collect sufficient points to gain entry. This narrowly also outpaced the 4,468 immigrants brought in under family-reunification rules.

“Canada is undoubtedly narrowing the brain drain,” Jedwab said. “The most educated class of immigrants we’re getting right now is coming from the United States.”

We suspected this might be the case from anecdotal evidence, but now it looks like it’s borne out in the actual numbers. It will be interesting to see if the ’surprise’ I sometimes get from Canadians when I tell them our story will fade.

A Two Year Anniversary

While Pam and I have always celebrated our wedding anniversary in August (it will be 17 years, this year!), we also now celebrate another anniversary today, which is the date we settled here in Vancouver. Back in 2005 we arrived here with a bunch of suitcases, an inflatable mattress and blanket from Target in Bellevue and a couple of laptops (including my ancient Tibook, not quite ready to retire).

It hasn’t been quite long enough for those first few weeks and months to take on the glow of ‘cherished memories’, but they weren’t all that bad either. It did take an extra 3 or 4 months for our furniture and other belongings to finally make their way here from Boston (with quite a few broken items), but we made do, camping out in our nearly empty condo and furnishing it for the summer via a couple trips to IKEA and Canadian Tire.

This evening we took a walk along False Creek, just like we did regularly in 2005. Sometimes two years feels like a short time, and sometimes it feels like a long time ago. So much has happened, and so much as changed, that I’m thinking it’s the long time ago feeling for me. No regrets, though (we both agreed).

A Local Online Tech Community Up for Sale

When I first thought of moving to Vancouver, one of the pivotal decisions I made was to come and make a preliminary visit and go to a sort of tech trade show, called Techvibes Massive. It was put on by the web site and associated online community of the first word in that name. As of today, Techvibes is up for sale on eBay. According to the listing:

…why are we selling? Our company originally had a diversified strategy and we’ve recently moved towards a more focused one. Our websites include www.clubzone.com, www.techvibes.com, www.casinozone.com, www.petsmo.com, www.discovervancouver.com… but as of the 2006 we’ve decided to focus our resources 100% on clubZone.com.

Techvibes’ Massive Show was how I found my first job here, and even how we found the place we are now living in! (A chance conversation with a stranger in the Beer Garden at the end of the day ended up with an invitation to have a look at the condo that he was selling as he was moving to Toronto, and the rest…is Real Estate.)

Thousands of sites link in to Techvibes.com, helping the site achieve a Google page rank of 7, and great page indexing. Alta Vista reports over 478,000 inbound links, with over 72,000 pages indexed on Google.

The site currently pulls in approximately $5000 to $10000 per month in revenue from a variety of sources including banner ads, featured listings, google adsense, and seo text links. In it’s prime the site pulled in over $10k per month alone just from Adsense but has dropped off in the past year from site neglect.

If someone has the resources to build Techvibes back up, they could very easily get the site up to in excess of $50k per month with only a few staff.

There includes a double opt-in database of approximately 42,000 profiled members.

The brand name Techvibes is very strong in the Vancouver, BC, Canada Technology community and could easily be leveraged.

The current asking price is $60,000 US (about $70,600 Canadian).

Follow-up: It appears that there is some controversy about this sale, with some members of the community upset about the prospect of their emails and names, etc. being sold off to the highest bidder. The discussion is going on, oddly enough, on the Techvibes site itself.

One more Follow-up: Apparently the listing has been removed from eBay because:

Geesh, well whoever complained to eBay - it worked. They removed the listing saying that it was illegal to sell a database of personal information.

I was actually planning on removing the eBay listing this morning anyways because we’ve had so much interest and most of the inquiries require a fair amount of due diligence… so I don’t think an eBay auction would work unless we were able to provide a lot more information (financials, access to analytics etc.) to the general public.

( -Mike Schwarz, current President of Techvibes)

So the site is still up for sale, but now it will be a far less public transaction.

We Have Landed

Here’s how it went.

They say that when you are deprived of sleep, you temporarily lose some short-term memory, so maybe that’s the reason that that some of my trip to Buffalo is little fuzzy. Here is what I do remember:

I left on Tuesday morning and flew first to Chicago. I knew I was back in an American airport immediately as I entered and heard that horrible Texan woman’s voice you now hear in all US airports (“THENK-YOO for your cooperation”). The longer your layover, the more times you have to hear it. I’m now positive that one or more circles of Hell include her announcements at regular intervals. My connecting flight to Buffalo was delayed several times because of mechanical trouble, and we switched gates no less than 3 times, but we eventually got a new plane and I arrived at the Buffalo airport about an hour late, 11 PM. I checked into the nearby Sleep Inn and got something to eat at a nearby Denny’s and then tried to sleep. I was still on Pacific Time and nervous about what was to come the next day, so that was hard to do.

The next morning, I called a taxi and left for downtown at about 7:45 AM. The scenery along the highway and near the HSBC Center was uniformly grey and depressing, with many empty warehouses, and clusters of neighborhood houses all looking like they were huddling together for warmth. It had snowed the night before, but less than an inch. If this was to be the place where I was to make a good-bye of sorts to the US, I’d be hard pressed to find a bleaker spot.

The cab dropped me off by the 30-story HSBC Center, the tallest building in downtown Buffalo. The Canadian Consulate was on the 30th floor. Even though it was only about 8:10 and the Consulate had not opened yet, there was already a line of about 25 people in the lobby. A short, brisk woman with a strong Upstate New York accent (which I recognized from the days I lived in nearby Rochester, and to my ears is still the aural equivalent of drinking a glass of distilled vinegar) gave us each a sticker and herded us into two groups; my group was sent to a glass corral a few hundred feet away. She then took the first group, lined up by the wall near the elevators, up to the 30th floor and then returned in a few moments for us for the same. When we reached the Consulate, she carefully and precisely directed us to rows of chairs at various places around a windowless waiting room. The room was bare except for these plastic chairs, arranged in rows as if viewing the television high on the wall at the front, which was showing non-stop CNN coverage of the death of President Gerald Ford. As people were called to either the reception window or one of the cashier windows, we shifted our seating, moving over, returning to a different row or leaving. I calculated about 75 people who were dealt with in total. The administrator woman (who’s name I never learned), gave a spiel every time she returned with another set of people until 10 minutes before 11:00 AM, at which point the Consulate would take no more business. We were to put the sticker we’d gotten in the lobby on the back of the card with our number we’d receive from reception, men were obliged to give their seats to women, there was no leaving this room during the day, no use of cell phones, etc.

During the wait, I spoke to neighbors sitting nearby from Mexico, Honduras, England and India. I did not meet another American, although I suspect there were a few. At about 9:30, I provided my completed forms, photos and fee of $980 CAD to the reception window. At 11:30 was called back to receive my completed materials. There, pasted into Pam’s and my passport, was a visa that could be used one time, allowing me to ‘Land’ in Canada as a permanent resident (which I would be doing the next day). After some best wishes and congratulations exchanged with my fellow Immigrants, I called the cab from a pay phone (knowing before about the no cell phone rule, I had left mine at the motel) and returned to the Sleep Inn. I took a chilly walk to another nearby restaurant (an updated Greek Diner), where I had a huge plate of meatloaf and potatoes. My body had no clue what time zone I was in, and I essentially had nothing to do until I was to leave, at 6 AM the next morning. Since a flight at 4 AM required me getting up at 3, that was the equivalent of 1 AM Vancouver time, and I decided to try and get to bed as early as I could stand. After talking to Pam and my brother to share the good news that I had accomplished my tasks, I listened to my iPod and tried to sleep.

The next morning I took the first flight to Washington’s Dulles Airport, made the tight connection to the Vancouver flight. Another delay because of equipment problems, 6 hours, 3 in-flight movies and one snack-box later, I arrived at the sunny (!) Vancouver airport at about 1:30 PM local time.

The waiting and paperwork weren’t over yet. After following the usual long snaking line through customs, I presented my materials at a special room for Immigrant Landings, and learned that my Permanent Residency ID card would be mailed to me in about 6 weeks. The staff was very friendly and welcoming, and I marveled at how one girl managed to speak about 4 or 5 different languages, including Hindi, Cantonese, French and Tagalog. I tried calling Pam several times, but somehow her phone was turned off or not receiving me. Nevertheless, I caught a cab home and collapsed. Kind of an anticlimax, but that’s the way these things go, I suppose.

The next day, Pam took off from work, rented a car and drove to the US border, and after a couple of hours of waiting in the line of cars and the prerequisite U-Turn from the US side, presented her paperwork in much the same way that I had when I landed (small ‘L’). We both should now receive our ID cards somewhere around the beginning to middle of February.

So ends our journey, and we now have the right to permanently call the country of Canada our home. In a few years we will have the opportunity to become full citizens, which we intend to do. I can’t say that I feel any different now (Pam declared when she returned from her trip to the border that she felt ‘Landed’), but we’re both looking toward the New Year of 2007 with anticipation and excitement. The months of waiting and putting off planning are over. It’s official: We’re now here to stay.