Mark Evans writes about Rogers' and Bell's plans to reduce bundling discounts.  He attributes this to the lack of a need to offer these incentives, as there is the so-called "convenience" factor of dealing with just one service providers.  Granted that the Canadian consumer might not be as cost-conscious as other nations' consumers around the world, and in fact, convenience does play a role in choosing more than one service from the same provider.  But I would be willing to bet that the other half of the story is the lack of a perfect (or as perfect as it gets) competitive market in the Canadian telecom landscape.  The reason for that is manifold - in the wireless side, for instance, contraction was to blame (once Rogers took out the market disruptor - Fido - "price discipline" came back), on top of the lack of action by the CRTC vis-a-vis wireless local number portability.  On the cable side, the DBS players (Bell Canada and Shaw) have not really given the Canadian MSOs (Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, Cogeco, etc.) a run for their money.  Not that I expected Shaw to cannibalize its own cable revenues, but at least ExpressVu could have made things interesting here in Ontario.  But the last salvo was the CRTC VoIP decision, which really took out any chance of any significant price cuts for local service.  So is there really any surprise not to see any bundling discount?  There is no major incentive, as "price discipline" rules and maximizes profits for these companies.  Only when we have a more competitive system in place will bundling discounts come into play.   more »

The baseball trade deadline came and went and my Blue Jays once again stood pat (hey, that used the be the same line a few years before they won the World Series back-to-back, when Pat Gillick was the GM).  But considering Roy Halladay's injury and that this is the year of really experimenting with some youngsters such as Gustavo Chacín, this has not been a bad year thus far, and the Jays are still in contention for a wild card spot.  Wonder if Om Malik would make a little wager for this weekend's series when the Evil Empire (aka the NY Yankees) visits Toronto...

In the spirit of baseball, here's a tech gizmo from Japan (via engadget) from the Ishikawa-Namiki Komuro Laboratory in Japan. The lab is engaged in studies of parallel processing for sensory information.  The gizmo is called a "high-speed catching system" and can catch fastballs up to 300 km/h.

   more »

The battle between Microsoft and Google is definitely heating up, with the latest round being a lawsuit coming from Microsoft against one of its executives (Kai-Fu Lee) and Google.  Microsoft is claiming that Mr. Lee was violating a non-compete clause in accepting a Google offer to head out a new R&D Center in China.  But who is Kai-Fu Lee?  His bio is still up in the Microsoft corporate site - and is apparently a brilliant scientist who made his mark not necessarily on search algorithms, but rather on speech recognition.  Here is another interesting take on the story, from the Seattle Times.    more »