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.

Today is the final day for any company wishing to be a mobile carrier in the next few years. Industry Canada is receiving applications, both from legacy carriers, and potential new entrants, from a pool of 105mhz.

Industry Canada suprised everyone last fall whey they announced that 40mhz of the total pool would be reserved for new carriers — read MTS AllStream, from Manitoba, and Videotron Inc., from Québec.

Concerning applications, WirelessNorth reports that MTS AllStream has placed $340 million, for the bid, enough to buy all of the 40Mhz and become then a national carrier, coast-to-coast. On the other hand, Québecor already unveiled their intentions, and announced they are ready to invest up to $500 million to build a 3G UMTS network for Québec and also extend the service to other Canadian provinces. Also expect the 3 big telcos to pour in substantial amounts of cash to prevent entry of potential new competitors.

Now, the big question is, why should you care? First, it’s well-known that data rates and cell phone plans in Canada are scandalously high and prevents mass adoption of the technology or development of third-party applications and services. For instance, fact is that Rogers is the only GSM carrier in Canada (Fido also uses GSM, but they are owned by Rogers). This monopoly drives prices up, and discourages new cell phone makers like Apple to enter the market.

In this case, Videotron already announced they will be using GSM rather than CDMA for their wireless network, and hopefully, it’s possible to envision an unlimited data plan in Canada, which will pave the way for the iPhone.

Follow further development @ wirelessnorth.

I’ve raised the idea of having a Mobile Developer Meetup in Montreal.

If any of you is interested in developing for the iPhone SDK, or Google’s Android platform, or any other mobile device, leave a message. If we have more than 4/5 people interested, we will arrange something downtown — say next wednesday 19th around 6pm, or any other convenient day.

Things to talk about: geolocation, mobile commerce, mobile social networking, search, entertainement, web applications for mobile devices etc.

Vantrix, which specializes in video and content delivery for mobile phones, has announced a new product called Vantrix Store optimizer.

This so-called “store optimizer” allows a website to send personalized ringtones, wallpapers, and games to their visitor, without worrying about the specifics of the mobile phone or the format of the content. Sendmemobile.com, solow.com, and mbuzzy.com are one of Vantrix’s current customers for this new technology. In their case, they use Vantrix’s solution to send the latest tunes or the latest fashionable games to their members, or even’s a user’s own pictures and music, with the store optimizer converting and optimizing on-the-fly these files.

In case you are wondering what’s the big deal, this could in theory work with the hundreds of “web2.0″ websites on the Net, and allow the website’s owners to offer more personalized and unique services, up to the user’s cell phone. If there is a thing I learned recently, it’s that people are ready to pay a high price to customize what they have and show how unique they are.

This is also Vantrix’s first venture in the consumer market, as they offered previously their technology to mobile carriers or media powerhouses, like Orange, ABC, or T-Mobile. For me, this is a wise move for Vantrix. In this age, content gets olds very quickly and one way to make sure your services are always relevant is allowing your members to customize/design themselves their mobile phone.

Roberto Rocha reports at the Gazette about Concordia University’s new wifi network, making them the first Canadian University to implement a 802.11n system.

802.11n

This is not a simple technical update. Of course, they get now more coverage thanks to longer range, better throughput, and also better data rate, but what was interesting is that the new network comes with a whole range of services. The university is planning to offer outdoor Internet access through a subscription of 9$/month. The service would be accessible to the general public, making them an Internet provider company. Also, Concordia will offer students the option to offload calls from their mobile provider’s network and use instead the Wifi network to receive AND make telephone calls, making the university a VOIP and telecom company. This is done seamlessly, with devices switching to “traditional” telecommunication infrastructure when outside Concordia’s range.

The initiative is significant, as they cater to a 40.000+ population, and have 2 campuses in Montreal. It also gives a glimpse on the future, where we wouldn’t have any distinction between IP and PSTN networks. If universities, companies, and public organizations follow the lead, it would be possible in theory to have a city-wide 802.11n network in Montreal, and citizens could then have ubiquitous Internet and voip access.

The federal government unveiled yesterday the final rules for next year’s May auctions, which are largely in favour of new companies in the wireless industry. 40% of the new 105Mhz wireless spectrum will be reserved for new entrants, and existing telecommunications companies are to share their existing infrastructure with these new players.

This might just be the week’s biggest news; and certainly a big win for Canadians, one that will change their practices and how they will use their cell phones. More competition means plans (especially data plans) will be more affordable, and more Canadians will be able to use mobile services. It’s also a big sign for technology entrepreneurs and mobile software developers who can (finally) reach a local market.

Previously, it was nearly impossible to launch a mobile carrier in Canada due to costs and regulations which required any mobile carrier to cover most populated regions on Canada. This had the consequence of raising fixed costs for carriers, and thus raised prices of plans and services offered to subscribers.

On the telcos front, Bell Canada, Telus and Rogers are officially scandalized, while Videotron and regional players praised the federal governement for the move. They should understand though that if prices are going down, we will get a more flexible market, much more active users, and this will be good for everyone, for Canadians and telecom companies alike.

StartupNorth has also an enthusiastic post by Thomas Purve and comments about the news.