Iain Grant kicks ass. Canada just ahead of Guyana.

Iain got everyone to laugh when he mentioned Canada’s peer group in term of mobile penetration. Nevertheless 2008 has seen a significant drop in data plans. And the new entrants should lead to a voice plans drop. Not much to expect for business users yet.

Sweat, blood and pocket money to build/grow your business/products

The round table gathered 3 innovative Montreal based wireless companies: Lipso, Soluteo and Radio IP. They are privately hold (after a VC shares buyback for Lipso). Bootstrapping is a key of their success as they could focus on their vision rather than being disturbed by short term vision of external investors. Vivianne Gravel, Lipso, also mentioned the benefits of collaborating with the right partners, both in Montreal and abroad. 4 established – and innovating – businesses were sitting on the other side of the round: CN, Vidéotron, Air Canada and Canoe. They insisted they were happy to find reliable local partners … even if, according to Patrice Ouellette, this is not always easy. Thumbs up to Francis Beaulieu for mentioning Mobile Monday Montreal as a place/hub to connect with local wireless innovators.

Everything mobile. Wireless broadband required.

Alex Suter gave an instructive speech on hyper connectivity. Your clients and your employees expect their mobile devices to give them what a wired connection would give them: IM, phone calls, conferencing, video. Wavesat multimode 4G chips let manufacturers build devices that allow you to be always connected, whatever network you use: 3G, WiFi, WiMAX.

Train your employees for a successful smartphones implementation

The CWMF didn’t gather as much geeks as it gathered business administrators. Benoit Descary went through the challenges he helps his clients to handle when implementing smartphones in their corporation.

Microsoft convincing on unified communications until the demo

Frédéric Asselin demonstrated how he is having only an email and a phone number on his business card. You call him and that rings on his laptop. It simultaneously rings on his cell phone if that is during business hours (defined in his Outlook calendar). A voicemail will be routed to his Outlook mailbox, as well as on his phone. The theory was great. And the demo was convincing … until he called to hear his calendar. He was supposed to speak he was 20 minutes late and the system would send a message to all the other attendees. But this we never saw.

Overall the event was admirably organised (even if there was no free WiFi). There were enough breaks to connect with other participants. I both met passionates and business administrators.

- Adrien O’Leary

Disclaimer: I have worked for Mobile Maestria, who is the promoter of the event, in September.

The Generation Y has an integrated bullshit detector
Michelle Blanc warmed up the audience with both great quotes and figures. Your future employees and clients belong to the Generation Y.  You better be transparent and communicate, because they’ll talk/write about you anyway.

Experiment, experiment & experiment!
Jacques-Hervé Roubert surprised me. I was afraid his presentation would be too corporate but it was not. He based his presentation on the iPhone site/project they built for L’Oréal Paris to invite the audience to go mobile and to experiment.

Email marketing is not cheap/dead. Be relevant!
Laurence Ohayon and Fabienne Callu demonstrated how focusing on activation/reactivation pays. I appreciate they gave ROI figures for two projects they have done, B2B project with Canada Post and B2C project with Air Transat. They concluded with 4 key best practices 2.0 to keep in mind: dialogue, permission, added value and relationship.

The seated lunch gave me the chance to meet an online media strategist from Montreal as well as a digital marketer (at P&G) from Toronto. This is something I really appreciated. I wish there was more place for interactions during the event. PodCamp and WebCom remain my favorite Web 2.0 events in town. Nevertheless I appreciate there was free WiFi. This was fun to write more than 15 tweets … and I was not the only one.

- Adrien O’Leary

- Adrien O’Leary

I will cover the event for MontrealTechWatch. Please feel free to get in touch with me if you plan to attend the event. You can also join the LinkedIn group to start discussing with the participants and the speakers.

- Adrien O’Leary

Links
- Event: http://ww.wirelessmanagementforum.ca/
- Schedule: http://www.forumgestionsansfils.ca/program.php
- Registration: http://www.forumgestionsansfils.ca/registration.php

Disclaimer: I have worked for Mobile Maestria, who is the promoter of the event, in September.