The BlackBerry Partners Fund is launching today, and it’s a $150 million fund specifically targeted for mobile startups. The fund is managed by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners.

It’s announced as stage-agnostic and also platform agnostic, meaning that they are willing to take a look and fund a mobile application that is not specifically made for BlackBerry handsets, although one condition is that a BlackBerry version should be planned at one point in the roadmap.

The fund’s limited partners are RIM, RBC, and Thomson, although investment decisions will be taken only from the JLA and RBC Venture Partners. See Rick Segal and the Wellington fund blog for more details.

Things are heating up recently in the mobile space, with a radical shift from hardware to software. The iFund was announced just one month ago, when Apple launched the iPhone platform. Just late last week, Nokia’s CEO also announced that they are moving from being a traditional manufacturer to a stronger focus on software. This is amidst reports of huge projection for the mobile space ($15billion market in 2013) and huge amounts of money thrown at new mobile networks in the US, and right now in Canada. Undoubtably, RIM also realized that while they had a very strong core product, they were lacking in third-party applications that would enrich BlackBerry and make it more pro/consumer friendly.

Mobile applications are the new frontier, and needless to say, it’s exciting to see that the action is happenning right here.

OZ received this week $10 million funding from Wellington Fund, a Toronto-based fund specialized in venture debts for growing companies.

OZ provides Instant Messenging plus many other applications such as mobile email or mobile social presence. You might have never heard of the company, because they sell the solution directly to wireless carries, such as Bell, AT&T, T-Mobile, Rogers, Sprint etc.

OZ announced they will be using the funds to develop new products, such as mobile social networking.

From Wireless North.

The Web 2.0 Expo revealed the ever-growing fascination with everything mobile.

An expert in the field of Mobile Design, Brian Fling declared that the iphone is already 0.09% of all web traffic.This may be true . Remember, not long ago Google announced that it had 50 times more searches on iphone than on any other handset.

While Apple is preparing for the Apple Developers conference, Nokia is still the overwhelming dominant mobile manufacturer. They have 39% of the market , more than the three next suppliers combined! – Motorola, Samsung and LG. Recently, Nokia has announced the next stage of its Widget platform for Symbian Series 60 smartphones. The new stage will give developers access to GPS, contacts book, communications stacks, e-mail and SMS functions on the phone.

For Marc Davis, Yahoo’s social media guru, there’s no doubt that the future is about mobility . “The next web,” he says “will be about place and time.”

Yes, the mobile web 2.0 is pounding at the gates.

Last summer, I read a very interesting book called Mobile Web 2.0 by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish.

In it they enunciate the seven principles of mobile web 2.0 :

1) Mobile Content captured at the moment of inspiration - like photo, twitter,etc. (Last week a student twittered his way out of jail!)

2) I am a tag, I am not a number- freedom from the restrictions of various network operators.

3) Multilingual mobile access.

4) Digital Convergence.

5) AJAX/Widgets.

6) Location-based services.

7) Mobile search.

Clear and concise definition of mobile web 2.0. Now bring on the applications.

With the (locked) iphone (3G version ? Probably) coming soon to Canada, courtesy of the sole GSM operator here, Rogers, it’s time to rrrummblllee.

The Rogers group announced their Q1 results this morning, all very good news, great revenue by user, etc. And then Ted Rogers announced they’ll have the iPhone on their product line this year, in Canada.

The announcement in itself is less than 3 lines, and I refuse to speculate or add anything to the announcement. Just saying that since he likes to practise brevity, he should get a twitter account. Although I guess he will be too busy collecting the Rogers tax getting all of your paychecks in the bank.

150 people attended Mobile Monday Montreal (MoMoMo) on April 14. A friendly and welcoming ambiance prevailed throughout the 3-hour event which paved the way for lots of networking opportunities for the attendees.There were four speakers and each one had to address one topic.

• How can Traditional media like radio create value with SMS ?

• Sylvain Langlois from Astral Media talked about the excitement the radio broadcaster feels when he sees the scrolling SMS messages on the screen.At the same time, it saves him/her time answering the phone and chatting with the listeners. He also talked about the obvious value for publicity people.In addition, he mentioned the Boutique Mobile where listeners can purchase content. 

Here, I would like to open parentheses to talk about a similar business model in Europe: O3 is the largest radio station in Austria. They have implemented a mobile service solution called Radio Hitservice. The solution is comprised of several steps: 1)customers would send an SMS (price 0.30 EURO) in order to receive information about the artist and song title currently playing.2) After receiving this info, customers could easily access any associated product like ringtones, wallpapers, CDs…3) Based on the information gathered a customer profile is built in the CRM database. 4) Customers can then take advantage of this profile and use more services like the hit reminder - it allows listeners to sign up (via WAP,web or SMS) to receive an alert when a song is played next.This solution has become very popular :1) 150,000 customers + 250,000 requests/month. 2) 80,000 mobile club members- in the CRM database. Consequently, the number of listeners grew and advertising revenues increased.       

• How can Radio Canada position itself within the mobile community with its demographic?
• Stephane Bousquet of Radio-Canada mentioned that the listeners are still mostly interested in getting the news data. He added that there could be better alternative to SMS, like MMS and the mobile portal.In addition, they plan to target the enterprise users like the Blackberries and the other smartphones like the iphone.     
• Why did RDS acquire the mobile rights to publish video clips of the Canadian Hockey Club ?

• Robert Turcotte of RDS remarked that the users still do not know how to access all their handsets features. He added that there is some work to be done from the vendors side in order to raise the awareness of the subscribers to their hansets features. He also said that the audience for the last Hockey match reached a peak of 1.2 million.

• How can advertising agencies demonstrate to clients the importance of mobile media?

• Luc Cornier of Cossette Communications said that they have created focus groups of heavy mobile users so that they could understand the mobile ecosystem and be able to identify the rising opportunities.In addition, he said that evangelists should be chosen from within this industry in order to guide the users.

I want to note that the questions of the audience revealed frustrations when it came to the high costs that the mobile end users incur.

Finally, I sensed lots of positive energy and enthusiasm within the crowd in this first Mobile Monday Montreal that will eventually be held on a monthly basis.With this bonding of energies it seems that lots of major hurdles can be overcome in order to make Montreal a shining example in the mobile industry .

CTIA Wireless 2008, a global marketplace targeting the wireless industry, with 1,200 exhibitors and 40,000 attendees in Las Vegas, just ended on April 3. There was a keynote lineup of executives from Sprint Nextel, Verizon Wireless, Microsoft and Virgin Group like Sir Richard Branson in addition to US senators like John Edwards. Amongst the handset revelations there was the iphone inspired Samsung Instinct and RIM’s Curve 8330 with GPS.

A Montreal based company called Copernic Mobile won first prize in the CTIA Wireless 2008 E-Tech Awards. The E-Tech (Emerging Technologies) Awards program gives industry recognition and acknowledges the best wireless products and services in several categories, including Enterprise Solutions. A panel of industry analysts, media and technology experts reviewed nearly three hundred submissions from established and emerging companies and judged product entries based on innovation, creativity and vision. Marc Ferland, Copernic’s President and CEO accepted the prize in person for best Enterprise Solutions.

In other news, a significant report finding by Report Buyer showed that wireless data is driving growth in U.S. Telecommunications Industry. It indicates that by late 2007, data service revenues accounted for approximately 18% of total wireless service revenues, up from 4 % in 2004. The majority of wireless data revenues were being generated by non-messaging applications like music downloads, mobile TV, video blogs and internet-accessed entertainment services.

Finally, a statement by WSJ’s Walt Mossberg ( an insider to Apple pre-released products ) predicts that Apple’s iphone 2.0 version with 3G Capabilities will be released in 60 days! Should we wait or go for the current one ?

Canoe reports that Nomad is giving up on its project to install a city-wide wimax network because of the high costs.

Nomad announced with Radioactif last year that they would market a mobile high-speed internet plan to 90% of Montréalers, along with a voip and digital TV plan. Nomad was then presented as the technical consultant in charge of installing routers and antenas, but it seems they understimated costs, which are said to be on average $700 to cover a square-kilometer-wide area.

Nomad’s CEO also mentionned that it costs $75million to buy a wimax license in Canada, which they are unable to cope up with, and is crying lamenting at the end of the story that small technology companies can’t do anything against the likes of Bell or Rogers. It’s noteworthy that both telecom companies already maintain a (pre)-wimax technology in Canada, named Inukshuk, and therefore are in no hurry to update their network.

Wimax was announced to be the new technology that would take over UMTS and 3G networks, wifi, and even regular broadband Internet. It seems though that wimax is too costly and has too many shortcomings. A week ago, an australian telecom company, buzz broadband, complained loudly on their wimax venture, which revealed to be a disaster after spending dozens of millions of dollars in the technology; while Comcast, Time Warner, Google and Intel announced two days ago a new partnership of $4 billion in order to save all investments already made.

So we are now back at square one. Regular wifi still rules in Montréal, and the market is still waiting for a mobile high-speed data network.

Last friday, a small group gathered at Station C to talk about developing services and applications for mobile phones.

The meetup was somehow improvised after rapid exchanges on twitter, around me, Martin Dufort, who started previously Kakiloc, a mobile “location-based twitter”, and Fred Brunel, who was already poking the iPhone SDK.

And so was born the idea for a meetup. Which is completely crazy for me to announce, given the fact that I am weeks late on my own current work schedule, and had about 0 hours to start a new project on mobile apps, let alone organize a new meetup, à la barcamp. But what do you know, it occured to me that the iPhone SDK completely changes the game and introduces a new paradigm on how we will access and use information. I have to thank though Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mireault for the support they gave for this meetup, and who are doing an awesome work on putting things together at Station C.

For the meetup in itself, about 10 people or so came up, with a good mix of developers/hackers/entrepreneurs/geeks/early adopters. Fred Brunel told us that he worked for a french company for 5 years, which was developing and distributing games for cell phones, and one of their biggest technical challenges was the diversity of platforms. For instance, they had a proprietary technology that would compile on the fly a binary for use for a given customer. Apple’s distribution system, on the other hand, completely overrides those challenges, and for the first time in mobile history, you can imagine a single developer capable of creating one application that would fully run on millions of devices. The beauty of the system is also the fact that it bypasses the user’s telecom carrier, whose standard business practices is to tax any service that its subscribers wants to use.

We also talked about Google Android, whose set of features matches Apple’s platform. But here again, the fact that cell phone manufacturer will have their own implementation of Google Android will be a huge burden to developers: for instance, you can’t be sure that your end-user will have access to 3D features, or you don’t know if the user has a touchscreen, a full keyboard, or a standard cell phone keyboard, amongst other things.

We continued afterwards the discussion at Chilenitas, a small family-run restaurant nearby with great food and drinks. While, Station C is a great place, you feel sometimes like being in a modern art museum, and Chilenitas was just the right place to take a beer, chill out, and get real on what we exactly wanted to do.

A Léger Marketing study reveals an impressive rise of voice Over Ip telephony in Québec in 2007. Figures in 2006 showed that only 16% of subscribers were using voip, but the new study shows that the rate is now 44%, nearly a +200% increase in just one year.

The figure is surprising, as voip technology was only introduced in the province in 2005, and it was then estimated that the technology would take over land-based telephony only in 2010.

If Québec experiences the same growth in 2008, then legacy telecom operators like Bell or Telus have a lot to worry. Companies that offer voip-based telephony services include Videotron, which offers to replace your telephone line via cable, Rogers, plus a myriad of third-party service providers like Kovasys, Groupe Neotech, Aheeva or Savoir-Faire Linux which offer to install Asterisk or another solution so that you’d get an entire phone system through your Internet connection.

These companies, especially Videotron, highlights value-added services like cheaper long-distance calls, and more options, like accessing your voicemail through the web, which would be impossible with a classic telephone land line.

It strikes me that in Québec, some technologies see impressive growth rates, seen nowhere in the world, like voip or broadband Internet, while other technologies like mobile Internet are still waiting to be adopted by most Québecers. Go figure…

The proposal for a Montréal Mobile developer meetup received an unexpected interest, and I have now nearly 20+ people interested in showing up.

I am excited to announce that we have now a venue, which is Station c, 5369 bvd St-Laurent, and a date, which is Friday 21st of March, at 5.30pm

Station C is Montréal’s new coworking space, and I arranged with Patrick Tanguay so that we can use exceptionally the place for this meetup. Thanks, Patrick!

The meetup is open to hackers, developers, user interface designers, or anyone interested in mobile applications and its usage. The format of the event will be barcamp’s — we will have an open schedule/live wiki, and anyone wishing to talk about a special topic can just write an entry. If you have been to RococoCamp, then we are heading to exactly the same format.

As always, be prepared to share, and also come with your mobile devices/laptops/tools.