OZ Communications, a very successufl mobile communication software provider, announced tuesday that they were being bought by Nokia, and they’ll integrated into their Nokia Services & Software division. Since OZ is a private company, details of the deal were not disclosed, and we’ll have to wait until Q4 2008 to see the amount paid by Nokia.

Apart from OZ’s diverse array of mobile messanging software, its most valuable assets is its relationships with mobile carriers across North America and Europe, with 5.5 million paying users.

This is very good news for OZ’s founders, and for any other mobile software upstart in Montreal, as you can’t find any better exit than an acquisition by Nokia, the leading mobile company in the world, with a proven track record for innovation, and will still be the heavyweight in the room even if there are new contenders. Alternatively, you could wonder if OZ could grow and become a Fortune 500 company without Nokia, but they would have had to reinvent themselves, such as developing for the iPhone or the Android platform instead of their business model with carriers.

The question also remains if the OZ engineering team is to stay in Montreal and become a Nokia R&D center (I’m crossing fingers) or they’ll be “shipped” to Finland. Either way, I hope we’ll see the existing talent(s) at OZ starting new ventures in Montreal.

Normand Cyr, CEO of Mobile Maestria, organises the first Canadian Wireless Management Forum. More than 200 participants are expected. The event is taking place on Thursday the 9th of October in Montreal. It brings together some of the most innovative businesses in Canada: Research In Motion, Lipso, Air Canada, Soluteo, Wavesat, Radio IP Software, Vidéotron, The SeaBoard Group, StrategyCorp, …

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.

Austin Hill presented today at Techcrunch50 Akoha, a social gaming service for people who want to play it forward.

He handled superbly the presentation, with a mix between personal stories, the demo, and also introducing the cards. The presentation was received very positively by the judging panel; and when they asked for details, Austin Hill told about upcoming new features, showing the project’s maturity, and also showing clearly that this is just the beginning, with much more exciting features to come. Alex Eberts and Austin Hill also distributed kindly schwag to attendees plus decks of cards.

Seeing this presentation, I think it’s fair to say that Akoha deserve all the buzz… Stay tuned, a review shall come up very soon.

Praized has launched yesterday an iPhone version of the main portal hub, with a focus on search, and also top places near the user. The geo-localization feature is not yet implemented, but it shows a glimpse of a web application for finding local places on the move.

In the same day, the startup also replaced their homepage with activity streams of users, à la Facebook, with updates coming from all the communities powered by Praized. Previously, Praized.com was also in itself a “Tribe”, but it seems it’s shifting away to become a central hub.

Seeing the frequent updates from Praized, with new product features coming every week, I’m thinking that they are executing a highly detailed plan. As an external observer, I wish though that their team, beginning from the CEO, use the product more often on their blogs and communities, as advertised initially. But so far, the only founder who’s using the Praized platform and highly integrated it in his blog is Sylvain Carle, with handy links to the place’s Praized page. Or maybe I’ve been dissecting too much Jason Calacanis …

WirelessNorth, which tracked the national wireless auctions for the past months, sums up the result of the auctions, which were setup by Industry Canada to provide additionnal bandwidths to new and existing wireless companies.

The 3 existing telecommunication companies, namely Bell Canada, Rogers and Telus won additional frequencies in most provinces. Rogers Wireless alone brought to the table $999 million, in an auction that was planned previously to gather in total just $1.5 billion. If you had any doubts about the profitability of this industry, the auctions just confirmed that it’s a cash cow for the existing carriers.

For consumers, the most important fact to remember from these auctions is the arrival of 2 new companies, Globalive and Quebecor. Globalive managed to get frequencies in all Canadian provinces, except Quebec, while the media group Quebecor is now covering all Quebec, plus South-Eastern Ontario. Since previous reports from these companies confirmed that they will both use the GSM standard, they could (at least in theory) offer a nation-wide wireless access to their customers through a partnership. Of course, this will also mean lower prices for consumers, due to increased competition. Quebecor especially is known for this business strategy when they acquired Videotron and then slashed prices, reviving the cable in Quebec. I expect (well I hope) the same thing to happen; with much lower plans offered to consumers, which will then boost mobile usage, with new user behaviours & mobile applications.

So what’s next? Each bidder has 30 days to pay the auctionned spectrums; and the federal government will also see through each bidder’s structrure, which has to be at least 47% Canadian-owned. Each new carrier will then have to compete (or partner) to get key locations to install their antennas; followed by the roll out. This is estimated to cost $500 million, taking at least 1 year. (which means if you were waiting for a 2nd carrier to get an iPhone, you will have to wait for at least the 2nd half of 2009)

So everyone complained about Rogers but Apple (and Rogers) finally won. This morning, Rogers and Fido stores in downtown Montreal had as much as 100 people lined up, and the whole activation system blew up one hour later. Even in late afternoon hours, customers were still coming in, not to protest data plan rates, but to hand in their credit cards. Clerks had then to use the “emergency activation line”.

It’s an iconic day, celebrating Apple’s dominance in consumer electronics, and also Apple’s major influence in mass culture. I’ve seen articles stating that the next generation of computing, following Moore’s law, would be netbooks such as Asus’s eee PC; but seeing the frenzy downtown, I’m ready to bet on the iPhone.

I will end here for the article; here’s a small funny video though for those who want to see more of the shiny gadget.

(click to see the video at bombe.tv)

Last week, two contenders dropped out of the Canadian wireless spectrum auction. MTS Allstream, a Manitoba-based telecom company, announced that its partnership with private equity firms Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Blackstone Capital Partners was dissolved, making its chances to win the wanted spectrum unlikely. Just a few days ago, a joint venture which was initially led by Novacap, a Montreal-based private equity firm, also withdrew from the race. It was announced that the proposal didn’t meet federal laws concerning foreign ownership in a holding, capped at 46% in Canada.

The story behind the last flop is of course much more complicated than that; Novacap teamed up originally with US VC firms Columbia Equity Partners and M/C Venture Partners. One month later though, the venture’s capitalization changed, with 3 other investors magically appearing, Rho Canada Partners, Cyntech Holdings Ltd., and BMO Capital Corp; and this is where they didn’t comply anymore with federal regulatory laws.

I have no comments about all this backstage action; but I hate to see the direction where the auctions are going. The only serious companies left are Shaw Communication, Québecor, and Globalive Wireless. [see initial list]

When you go through the list, the amount of deposit required just to participate in the auctions are staggering. Contenders to nation-wide licenses are putting in hundreds of millions of dollars, and we haven’t started the auctions yet.

It occurs to me that these auctions are going to worsen the state of the Canadian mobile telecom industry. We are currently in a state of oligopoly, with 3 big carriers running the market and charging the highest prices in the world to their customers. As a result, Canada is lagging behind every other developed country now [except broadband Internet avalaibility]. With these auctions, where the price of entry is well beyond the means of most firms in this country, new players, if we’ll have any, are going to protect that investment; with even higher prices.

This isn’t any good for anybody. We reached the point where mobile phone and mobile data accessibility is essential to any developed country, as essential to economic developmnent as basic infrastructure such as roads or higher education.

As such, I think all barriers to entry to entry should be removed; by beginning with these auctions. Of course, there is the argument that frequencies are scarce, and to decide who is going to own it, the most natural thing to do is auction them off. But the Canadian telecom space is not the US’s, or Japan’s, and does not have the luxury of behaving the same way. If it wants to get back in the race, it must:

• kill off the wireless auctions,
• in exchange, add a clause that any new mobile company must allow open access to their network; so that any other company can become an operator very easily,
• find a way to let small players in, even if they do not have the resources to launch a nation or province-wide mobile network,
• enable quick & total number portability for users, between different companies,
• forbid early termination fees,
• also separate network services from content, and prevent carriers from locking their users to a pre-constrained set of applications and websites on their handsets.

The model will essentially free the current mobile market; will stop a telco to lock down a customer for years; remove all barriers of entry; ultimately driving prices down but also driving mobile usage up, making it a win for everybody, customers and companies alike. And in my opinion, that’t the only way we’ll close the gap.

Picture: Freedom by Almighty_Fotografie

Tungle has released yesterday a new BlackBerry interface for its calendar group scheduling service. The interface allows users to get updates from Tungle, and then interact with the service without their laptop and Microsoft Outlook, which was up to this day the only avalaible interface to Tungle.

The new feature means that Tungle is 100% committed to business users, who use Windows and a Blackberry handset. In comparison, many “fashionable” startups are after interfaces for iPhones or other popular clients like Gmail or Google Calendar.

Also, the move has certainly a lot to do with their investors who have just partenered with RIM.

Wavesat has now a brand-new chip named Odissey that is compatible with Wimax, wifi, and also future 4G networks. It’s the first chip of its kind, and is targeted for future small electronic devices such as USB dongles or cellphone handsets. The chip has embedded DRAM memory and uses very low power.

The promise is that users will be able to switch  seamlessly between different kind of networks, and getting high speed connections anywhere.

This is uncertain times for wimax. The technology is a marvel on paper, but what we’ve got is a “last chance” venture in the U.S. led by ClearWire, an operation surviving thanks to leases from Comcast, Intel, Google and Time Warner. Wavesat has undoubtly a great engineering team; but history has shown that it takes more than engineering (hint:  lots of money) to make wimax an adopted technology. I’d like Wavesat to also have a line of chip compatible with 3G technology and not bet all their future on wimax.

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.