SCANSite.ca

Public wants government to take lead on climate change: PwC

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:15:16 -0500

Posted by Tyler Hamilton
A global survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers has found that 94 per cent of Canadians expect to change the way they do business over the next two or three years in anticipation of climate change policies, and 98 per cent believe regulation is the best way to influence that change. Roughly 60 per cent of Canadian respondents think the government, not the private sector, should have primary responsibility for leading behavioural change. The global average here is 44 per cent, and only 23 per cent in the United States. So is government doing enough? Uh… no — 70 per cent of Canadian respondents said current government policies — and I assume they’re talking federal policies — are ineffective.
So, it makes one wonder: Why is our federal government attaching itself to the U.S. hip on these issues when clearly, Canadians think differently and want our government to lead, not follow? Opposition parties have failed us on this issue, particularly the Liberals. Federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has been ineffective on the climate change file. He’s been invisible. Even if there is a change in government, it’s unclear what it would accomplish. Increasingly, I’m hearing from the business community that a carbon tax would be the preferred mechansim for pricing carbon. There is growing fear that cap-and-trade is the wrong way to go, if only because it’s complex and open to widespread manipulation and abuse.
Is it time to rekindle talk of carbon taxes and “green shifting” on the federal political scene? Some might consider it suicide, based on how former Liberal leader Stephane Dion got killed on the issue. I disagree. I think it can be resurrected, and should be resurrected. But it needs a convincing leader behind it, one who is able to articulate the benefits clearly and stand up to the scare tactics of the Conservatives; one who can build alliances with the business community, with consumer and labour groups, and with provinces and municipalities.
Any takers?

Assessing Canada's new copyright bill: The Video

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:13:09 -0500

Posted by Michael Geist
The day after the government introduced Bill C-32, I spoke at the GRAND Annual Conference, a federal NCE on Graphics, Animation and New Media. While the full talk discussed recent attempts at copyright reform, I've pulled the discussion on C-32 into its own video. The 16 minute talk - a combination of slides and audio (recorded off an iPhone so excuse the quality) - is available online and posted below.

Voyces innovator series launched

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:53:23 -0500

Posted by Alec Saunders
At eComm a group (or perhaps a rabble…) of voice industry insiders launched a new blog we called Voyces. It’s a collective blog written by a group of friends who are passionate about the future of the communications industry. You may even have stopped by once or twice and read a few of the things we’ve written.
Larry Lisser launched the first of the new Voyces Innovator Series posts today [Ed note: Original post June 2], based on an interview he did with Carl Holmquist, CEO of Swedish Innovator Freespee. It’s a great piece, Larry is an intelligent interviewer and writer, and Holmquist’s company sounds like a marvellously interesting and well kept secret.
Head on over, and enjoy! AND… stay tuned for more interviews with innovators in our industry.

GreenCentre beats a century

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:47:45 -0500

By Tony Patterson

GreenCentre Canada, a Queen's U initiative, reaches a significant milestone as the number of invention disclosures it has received tops one hundred.
Founded by PARTEQ Innovations at Queen’s just 14 months ago year ago, GreenCentre Canada (GCC) has received more than $20 million from Ontario and from the federal government, which has designated it a National Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research. To date the centre has attracted a total of 110 technologies from chemists and researchers at 25 academic institutions across nine provinces.
GCC is trying to de-risk and commercialize early-stage green chemistry discoveries generated by academic researchers and industry. These technology disclosures are the first step in identifying promising new green chemistry innovations.
Technologies brought to GCC undergo a 90-day review process by an in-house committee of industry and commercialization experts. To date, 15 technologies have been recommended for further development. Three additional technologies have also been granted funding for further early development work under GreenCentre’s in-house Proof-of-Principle program, with five more funding announcements pending.
GCC maintains that its commercialization model is unique for the way that it involves industry partners in governance and in the decision-making process about which green technologies are selected for development. Its arguments in this regard appear to have been persuasive in attracting some impressive private sector sponsorship. Among the industry partners are Ford Motor, Nova Chemical and the Paris-based global leader in water treatment, Veolia Water Solutions and Technologies.

Skype on 3G mobile impresses

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:01:22 -0500

Posted by Alec Saunders
Monday, using the newly announced Skype over 3G for iPhone, I made a number of Skype to Skype calls on iPhone and iPad. The calls were made from my office as well as from the car. Initial thoughts:
Crystal clear sound. Never have I heard that kind of sound quality on a mobile device.
Sound drop-outs. Yup. Skype on 3G is great in a fixed setting. However, while in motion it suffers as the car roams from one cell to the next. It’s as bad or worse than an ordinary cellular telephony under the same circumstances.
Missing “must have features”. Bluetooth and Voice Dial. You really can’t use Skype to make calls while in motion unless you start the call first, and then begin driving. Ordinarily, I key my bluetooth speaker, which lights up the iPhone voice dialer and then I tell iPhone who to call. Skype on iPhone is simply not well enough integrated with iPhone to do this yet.
All in all it’s an impressive technical achievement, as many have already written, and I’ll be using it a lot.

Queen’s study says government support for solar a no brainer

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:57:13 -0500

Posted by Tyler Hamilton
A Queen’s University study in the journal Energy Policy has come out in favour of strong government support for solar manufacturing in Ontario. The study looked at six scenarios under which both federal and Ontario government support would be provided.
1.Full construction subsidy.
2.Construction subsidy and sale
3.Partially subsidized construction
4.Public ownership of manufacturing plant
5.Full loan guarantee for construction
6.Income tax holiday
Under all scenarios, “both governments enjoyed positive cash flows from these investments in less than 12 years and in many of the scenarios both governments earned well over 8 per cent on investments from 100s of millions to $2.4 billion,” according to an abstract of the study. “The results showed that it is in the financial best interest of both the Ontario and Canadian federal governments to implement aggressive fiscal policy to support large-scale PV manufacturing.”
The research for the study apparently began well before Ontario announced a deal with Samsung C&T, which agreed to enter the Ontario market in a big way with billions of dollars worth of investment in both solar/wind manufacturing and energy project development. The Samsung deal has been heavily criticized because of the special incentives the company is getting, including a premium on top of the province’s already rich feed-in-tariffs for solar and wind projects. Joshua Pearce, co-author of the study and a professor of mechanical engineering at Queen’s, said if Samsung delivers on what it has promised then Canada — and specificially Ontario — will benefit greatly in the long run. “We gave them a little bit of incentive and Samsung will give us a lot of jobs, less pollution, and a long term substantial source of (government) revenue,” Pearce is quoted as saying in a Science Daily article. “We are absolutely winning on this deal — there is no question.” He said for all the criticism of the Samsung deal, it’s important to put it into perspective. “The market is much larger than the Samsung deal. The question now is how to bring even more photovoltaic manufacturers to the province.”
I’m an optimist on this issue, so I’m happy to read the Queen’s U conclusions. And as I’ve said in the past, I believe it’s important to have an anchor tenant in the province that will attract other companies and ultimately develop into a clean energy cluster. However, I do have concerns regarding the sustainability of the situation in Ontario. The feed-in tariff program needs to be carefully managed so that this newly established industry isn’t shocked when prices for solar and wind start coming down. We’ve seen in other jurisdictions that companies can pack up and leave just as quickly as they arrived. One problem is that the feed-in tariff for solar, while perhaps not too high when it was announced, looks much too high today now that the glut in solar products has led to falling costs. The Ontario Power Authority established its feed-in-tariff prices based on an assumed return on investment, but now that costs for solar have fallen so dramatically companies rushing into the market are looking at getting a much larger return on their investment. This sets us up for a boom-bust market, something we want to avoid. The power authority says it will review feed-in-tariff prices every two years, but I think after one year it needs to review them now — and lower them accordingly, particularly for solar.

Skype's "small fee" is noise, guys

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:14:26 -0500

Posted by Alec Saunders
Sometimes you have to really shake your head at the quality of the commentary on the internet. Fact: Skype has finally released a version of Skype for iPhone that supports calling over 3G networks. Never mind the fly in the ointment that all the commentary is stuck on – the fact that Skype wants to charge a “small fee” for you to use it on a 3G network. Frankly, that’s noise. People will pay for the ability to make a high quality Skype call on 3G, and not pay their carriers long distance termination charges in foreign markets. So long as the fee is reasonable, nobody is going to object.
There’s no point in getting your knickers in a twist over the fee. Skype needs to make money, like any other business, and the fact that they’re charging for this service is irrelevant to the larger story it represents.
So, what does this really mean?
The carriers, by permitting this use of Skype on their networks, are finally coming to grips with the fact that data is now more valuable than voice. I wouldn’t care to speculate about whether or not the carriers will receive any of Skype’s small fee, but you can be darn sure they’re licking their chops over the data plans they’ll be selling.
Andy Abramson wrote last week that analyst firms are predicting mobile VoIP to overtake traditional telephone service. Mobile VoIP just got a huge shot in the arm. Any skepticism about that claim as been roundly dismissed today.
Skype’s SILK codec just gained dramatic credibility as it proliferates to millions of handsets. This will put serious pressure on royalty bearing wideband codecs, as vendors will find Skype’s royalty free approach increasingly attractive.
When iPhone OS 4.0 finally ships, minute revenues for carriers may take an even greater hit as millions of Skype on iPhone users keep Skype running continuously in the background to receive incoming calls as well as making outgoing calls.
All in all, this one small change by Skype is a portent of a huge potential shift in the power base of the communications industry. Not bad for a five year old band of bad boys from Estonia. Not bad at all.

Dry winter, spring means water levels on Ontario rivers and lakes at historic lows

Thu, 27 May 2010 20:56:26 -0500

Posted by Tyler Hamilton
I had a short article over the weekend about low water levels in Ontario and the impact on hydroelectric generation. Obviously, this is an issue that goes beyond Ontario’s borders. Record low snowfall over the winter and a dry spring has erased more than 1,000 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity in Ontario, and it’s likely to get worse. I just got off a conference call with the International Joint Commission, which regulates water flows and use on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. Clearly, it’s not just the rivers that are suffering. “The levels of all of the Great Lakes are below average, and indeed are lower than they were at this time last year,” according to commission staff. “Lake Ontario is 30 centimetres, or one foot, below the average for mid-May and 36 centimetres below a year ago.” (Picture to right was taken by Gord Miller, Ontario Environmental Commissioner. It’s a shot of a small lake in northern Ontario. Thanks for the pic, Gord).
Lake Ontario levels are determined by inflows from Lake Erie, inflows from rivers, and precipitation, minus evaporation and consumption. Precipitation from January to end of April has been at a record low. “It’s the lowest amount for that four-month period since records began in the 1900s.” Now, I won’t make a direct connection to climate change here, since a single season of record-low precipitation is not evidence of global warming. However, this situation does illustrate how sensitive we are to climate change and how much the impact could truly be if low precipitation and dry winters become more common as a result — and I’m guessing they will. The following comments from Andrew McCammon, executive director of the Ontario Headwaters Institute, puts it this way:
Lower lake levels will result in less power available from hydro-electric generating stations, as well as in stranded docks and exposed rocks in cottage country. But they may also result in increased dredging costs for marinas, reduced loads on Great Lakes ships, the loss of coastal wetlands, changes in fish species, and potential impacts on municipal infrastructure such as the re-location of drinking water in-take pipes. More importantly from an ecological perspective, lake levels tend to be an early indicator of what is transpiring upstream. If a lake is down 1.5 meters, what has already taken place upstream? Is a drier climate reducing our wetland complexes? Have small streams withered? Are whole forests drier, with greater potential for fire, pest infestation, and other impacts?
Everything is interconnected. We forget about this too often.

Ottawa's venture capital industry a shriveled husk of its past

Thu, 27 May 2010 20:44:43 -0500

Posted by Alec Saunders
In 2001, when my family and I moved from Seattle back to Canada, we had a choice between Ottawa, Waterloo, and Toronto. At the time, Ottawa was booming. Venture capital was pouring into the city, and it proudly proclaimed itself Canada’s Tech Capital, and Silicon Valley North. So we moved to Ottawa.
A decade later, the picture is much different, as the Ottawa Citizen has reported in Nothing Ventured this morning (May 26). The graph included in the Citizen’s article paints an ugly portrait. In 2010, Ottawa’s venture funded start-ups are starved for funding, with just $10.8 million raised in the first quarter of this year, compared to $1.38 billion in 2000. Even worse, it appears that year 2000 hype and rhetoric around Ottawa as Tech Capital of Canada was simply …. hype. Today’s anemic funding environment appears to be the same as historical pre-bubble levels.
Many will rightly point out that funding is available from other geographies, and that is true. However, start-up companies need more than funding to prosper. They need strong boards, good advisors, mentors, access to a talent pool, and world class educational institutions to support them. Ask a Silicon Valley VC whether or not they would invest in Ottawa, and the answer you will get is a qualified no. It will be something like “It would have to be an exceptional team, with an exceptional idea, and a massive market opportunity, because we have plenty of deal flow right here in our backyard.”
Here at home, I’ve travelled to Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, and London to meet investors. Despite their proximity, it’s still a couple of days on the road to meet. Whether you’re in Toronto or Silicon Valley, the economics of sitting on an Ottawa board of directors don’t make sense. It takes two days of travel to have a meeting, whereas you could have 10 board meetings in the same period of time with companies that are local.
If Ottawa is to be competitive, then Ottawa needs a local venture industry. We have plenty of local entrepreneurs. Now we need the team at OCRI and our municipal government to focus on economic development for the tech sector — bringing capital to the region, creating support networks for companies that are here, and fostering a competitive environment for Ottawa companies to succeed.
Otherwise, we really will be just that sleepy little ex-lumber-town on the Ontario-Quebec border that Queen Victoria named as the Capital of Canada.

CVCA audience crib notes

Thu, 27 May 2010 20:36:37 -0500

Posted by Mark McQueen, CEO Wellington Financial LP
Dateline: Ottawa, May 26
Have you ever attended an industry conference and wanted to ask a pithy question, but didn’t for fear of a negative reaction from the panelists or audience regarding your “too true” question/statement? Fear no more. In the interests of arresting any further deterioration of Canada’s start-up and venture capital ecosystem, here are some helpful crib notes on the opening day of the annual Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association conference in Ottawa.
Invariably, one of more panelists will say “the VC model is broken”, or “VC returns have been poor”. These panelists will often be the very limited partners who have suffered from the recent results of Canada’s venture capital industry. In their experience, they could be right. The GP choices they made didn’t generate the returns they’d anticipated; at least not so far. Why risk your career and put more money into an asset class that hasn’t served you well of late?
With that thematic as the backdrop, many LPs have completely shut off their investing spigot, while others are using the lack of LP competition to opportunistically and dramatically change the terms of their VC investing strategies, whether your fund has earned investors a positive return in the past or not. To borrow a cliche, the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater.
This “VC returns suck” concept has become accepted wisdom within the domestic LP community, even if it isn’t supported by the facts. On a relative basis, VC returns exceed almost ever other asset class (see prior post VC returns trump all, June 2-09) other than, perhaps, Bordeaux wine futures.
Should you have the courage, here are a few points you could make to rebut what has become a staple of any VC confernce over the past four years:
Myth #1: “VC returns are poor”
Fact: As at 12/31/09, the 3, 5, 15 and 20 year returns of the US VC Index exceed the returns of the DJIA, NASDAQ and S&P 500. Only the 10 year DJIA return exceeds the venture return, but the NASDAQ and S&P continue to lag both.
Although these are U.S. figures, several Canadian VC industry funds have earned their investors a positive return in recent years, according to data published by the CPPIB. These names include Celtic House II (2002 vintage), Edgestone Venture Partners I (2000 vintage), Lumira Capital I (2002 vintage), and of course Wellington Financial’s Fund II (2004 vintage) and Fund III (2006 vintage).
Myth #2: “The VC model is broken”
Fact: According to CPP Investment Board CEO David Denison, long term investors need to have a long term horizon, and not get caught up in one, two, or even ten weak return years:
Our five and 10-year results should be viewed in the context of the performance of major global financial markets over the same period. The past 10 years of investing have taken place during the worst calendar decade of performance for equity markets in the nearly 200 years of recorded stock market history,” said Mr. Denison. “If we look back over the span of the last 25 years the CPP Reference Portfolio, which serves as the market-based benchmark for the CPP Fund, substantially outperformed the 4.2 per cent real rate of return on a rolling 10-year basis in all periods except calendar 2008 and 2009. We are confident that with the Fund’s current portfolio composition and reasonable levels of capital market returns, we will be able to generate the returns required to sustain the CPP at its current contribution rate over the longer term.”
What Mr. Denison, the Dean of Canadian Limited Partners, is saying is incredibly relevant to the VC asset class. If the long term investment experience of VC investing has been positive, which it has, one cannot ignore the impact that a 10 year negative NASDAQ return will have on private valuation multiples for Tech, Biotech and Lifescience companies. If the public market returns have been brutal, private company investors can’t perform well, he says. What could be more relevant to the VC industry than this simple explanation, put forward by someone with $24 billion committed to private equity and venture capital sectors?
To reduce VC allocations to zero based upon short term industry results (and not the long term performance of the asset class) is no better than investing new capital based upon short term results; something that is diametrically against the basic investing philosophy of the pension fund world.
To my CVCA colleagues: fell free to use these crib notes over the coming two days. Don’t leave it to others to fix our industry’s false storyline.
If these urban myths aren’t dealt with soon, the entire start-up and VC ecosystem will be lucky to be a shawdow of its former self. LPs have every right to allocate the funds under their stewardship as they see fit. But let’s not let these allocations be determined based upon false assumptions. If Mr. Denison is right about how the CPPIB sees the world, every LP in Canada of any size should have an allocation to venture capital.

There’s enough deep geothermal to power all of Canada. So why can’t we try just a bit?

Wed, 19 May 2010 17:02:54 -0500

Posted by Tyler Hamilton
How much power generation in Canada comes from geothermal energy? Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
How much of Canada could be powered by geothermal power? All of it. Many times over.
There is, of course, a catch or two. Cost is one. Location is another, because not all the best sites are near population centres. Still, as two new studies from Canada’s top geothermal researchers show, there’s a heck of a lot of geothermal resource to work with if we tried. And as I point out in my Clean Break column this morning, geothermal could be just as significant a contributor to Canada’s power needs in 20 years or 30 years as hydroelectric power is today. Again, that’s if we tried.
Stephen Grasby, a geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, and co-author Jacek Majorowicz, an Alberta-based geothermal consultant, have come out with two studies looking at enhanced geothermal system (EGS) potential in Canada. One study will appear online this month in the Journal of Geophysics and Engineering (I was expecting it out by now). It looks at the overall potential of EGS in Canada. Another just published study, this one in the journal Natural Resources Research, looks specifically at high-potential regions where EGS development would offer the biggest bang for the buck. “Results show areas with significant EGS potential in northern Alberta, northeastern British Columbia, and southern Northwest Territories related to high heat flow and thermal blanketing of thick sedimentary cover,” they wrote. “Estimated installation costs in 2008 dollars are under $2 million per megawatt.”
That’s about $6 billion for 3,000 megawatts — more than competitive with nuclear, not just with respect to capital costs, but also operational and maintenance costs. Also, none of the high costs associated with storing spent fuel indefinitely or with decommissioning old plants. This figure, of course, is for developing the most promising EGS projects. Cost will rise depending on location, rock conditions, availability of an outside water source, and depth of required drilling. Still, the studies make clear the opportunities are immense. The Geophysics and Engineering study, for example, said projects could be developed right across the country, including parts of Ontario, if you drill deep enough. Over time, as drilling costs fall and expertise of EGS climbs, this could happen one day.
“At 10 kilometres we can expect EGS temperatures in the 150 to 200 degrees C range across most of Canada, except some areas of the Canadian shield,” wrote Grasby and Majorowicz. “Given the widespread distribution of geothermal energy, and the high energy content, the potential geothermal resource in Canada is significant,” they concluded.
Sure, there’s risk to heading in this direction, just as there was risk of investing in the early days of the oil sands or nuclear industry. I would argue there’s much more risk drilling for oil offshore in the deepest ocean waters. For example, an accident could happen and you could end up with the equivalent of an oil volcano erupting kilometres below the surface. (Okay, now I’m being facetious).
The fact remains: geothermal power is baseload, it’s clean, it’s plentiful, and it can be done using proven drilling and rock fracturing techniques in Alberta’s oil patch. The Canadian Geothermal Association is targeting development of 5,000 megawatts of geothermal power by 2015 using conventional techniques. Imagine, if we started doing that development now in parallel with EGS research and development, what we could accomplish by 2030? It could be possible to wean Alberta entirely off coal, for one, and it would put us in a good position as we move to electrify the transportation sector.
These two Canadian studies come three years after the release of a groundbreaking U.S. study led by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their research suggested EGS in the United States could realistically supply about 100,000 megawatts of power generation capacity by 2050, assuming the proper policies and R&D investments were committed. The MIT study didn’t cover Canada, but several experts who participated in that study said their conclusions could also apply to the Great White North. Still, it’s nice to have our own data — and this is exactly what Grasby and Majorowicz have given us.
Canada, clearly, needs a national geothermal development strategy — and it needs one now.
Time to beat the drum.

Digital Strategy consultation's unasked questions: Who leads? Who pays?

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:52:52 -0500

Posted by Michael Geist
Last week Industry Minister Tony Clement unveiled the government’s much-anticipated Digital Economy Strategy consultation. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes the consultation is slated to run for two months and includes an online forum, face-to-face meetings, and a 40-page document that sets out key areas of concern. Five areas for discussion are identified: capacity to innovate, building a world-class digital infrastructure, growing the ICT industry, creating digital content, and building digital skills.
Skeptics will argue that the consultation is long overdue or perhaps even comes too late. Canada has inarguably lost considerable ground in comparison with many other countries around the world that were quicker to identify and implement digital strategies. While the delays have been marked by a gradual hollowing-out of the Canadian tech sector and sliding global rankings on network and wireless connectivity, Clement has firmly established himself as the most committed Industry Minister on digital issues since John Manley in the late 1990s.
Prioritizing digital issues is a first step toward remedying the situation, but a decade worth of policy neglect will not be solved overnight. Despite lingering doubts about whether the government is listening — many Canadians fear that last summer’s copyright consultation may be largely ignored — those concerned with Canada’s digital future can ill-afford to stay silent on the sidelines. I hope to address some of the substantive questions raised by the consultation in a future column, but the more immediate concern are two unasked questions that cut across all issues - who will lead the strategy and how will the government pay for it.
Clement is the obvious point person for digital strategy leadership, yet the consultation document demonstrates that the issue is not so clear cut. Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development Diane Finley both contributed to the document, leading to different points of emphasis among the chapters. Moreover, many other ministers — including public safety, health, the environment, trade, and finance — could reasonably argue for a role in the process.
Given the broad scope of digital issues, Canada needs a single point of leadership with the ability to advance the strategy at the cabinet table and to cut across sectors. Many of our trading partners have created ministerial positions (or at least junior ministers) with responsibility for specific digital issues. For example, Australia has both a Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research and a Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
If Clement is to lead, he needs clear responsibility and a mandate on the issue, not the prospect of cobbling together support from cabinet colleagues zealously guarding their turf after Canadians have spoken.
Even with leadership addressed, a successful national digital strategy requires funding. The question of how the strategy will be paid for is omitted from the consultation but represents a basic pre-requisite. While not all aspects of the strategy will require significant investments — many policy solutions involve minimal government expenditures — developing digital skills training programs, ensuring broadband access for all Canadian communities, and fostering the creation and promotion of Canadian new media are just some of the objectives that come with a price tag attached.
The most obvious source of funds comes from the consultation itself. The digital television transition, which seems to have stalled in recent months but is still nominally set for August 2011, should lead to spectrum re-allocation and auction. The transition holds the dual promise of injecting new competition into the wireless sector and filling government coffers with billions in new revenue. Those billions should be earmarked for the digital economy strategy, effectively enabling the strategy to pay for itself.

GIPS acquired by Google. How does Abramson pick them?

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:30:47 -0500

Posted by Alec Saunders
It's been a busy day [Ed. note: yesterday] in the blogging world as folks have chimed in on the Google acquisition of Global IP Sound. Many have noted that GIPS supplies Google’s competitors in the voice world as well as Google, and wonder how long that relationship will continue. Over on the Voyces blog, I wrote that this acquisition is a strategic response to Skype, while Tom Howe rightly observed the subtlety that this acquisition is all about the migration of voice to the edge of the network. And in a far ranging post on his blog, Rich Tehrani finishes by saying:
If I had to bet, I would say Google execs are walking around their campus with Android-powered tablets with built-in videoconferencing 24×7. Moreover, they are thrilled with what they see and they feel productivity is skyrocketing. As a result they realize the value of companies making codecs to supply these devices will skyrocket. This acquisition not only allows the company to pick up an asset which will increase in value, it can be used to help defend hardware platforms which use Android and run the risk of being sued by Nokia, Apple and others.
And perhaps the most interesting story of them all is fellow Voyces blogger and VoIP Godfather Andy Abramson’s (pictured) seemingly miraculous ability to pick clients who become acquisition targets. GIPS is the eighteenth he’s worked with that has exited. Clearly, the man has the Midas touch.

The smart grid and the need for privacy protection, now rather than later

Fri, 14 May 2010 07:35:26 -0500

Posted by Tyler Hamilton
It’s nice to see Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, being so proactive on the issue of privacy as it relates to deployment of the smart grid. (Disclosure: Cavoukian is a good friend of mine and co-author of a book we wrote on privacy issues back in 2002).
Cavoukian’s latest annual report highlights the privacy risks involved with the rising use of smart meters and the increased collection of granular data about when and where people are using electricity. “In a future smart grid scenario that does not build in privacy, intimate details of hydro customers’ lives could be easily discerned by data automatically fed by appliances and other devices to the companies providing electric power (eg. what time you cook, shower, or go to bed — and the security issues such as whether the house has an alarm system),” Cavoukian writes in her report. “Once inferences can be drawn on granular energy consumption information flowing outside of the home, such as real-time energy use data, future consumers may have questions including: Who will have access to this sensitive data? For what purposes? What are the obligations of companies making smart appliances and smart grid systems to protect my privacy?”
Cavoukian has a new program called Privacy By Design, which places focus on the need to build privacy into new technologies and systems from the outset, rather than scrambling to make privacy/security fixes after there has been a major — and often embarrassing — information breach. The whole point of this is to learn from past mistakes during the early days of Internet, Web and e-commerce development, when companies rushed ahead to come out with services without considering the privacy implications. This got many companies, including big names like Intel and DoubleClick but also high-profile retailers, into a lot of hot water. The rise in identify theft only brought increased attention to the problem. Whether it was disgruntled employees looking to take advantage of this information from the inside, or clever hackers looking to steal information for a profit or for bragging rights, having so much detailed information about individuals in one place is — in Cavoukian’s words — a “treasure trove” that needs to be protected like Fort Knox. You can bet there are already hackers out there looking to make a name for themselves by being the first to access consumer information through smart grid infrastructure, even during these early days.
That’s why it’s crucial that utilities and their partners think of information privacy and security now, rather than as a Band-aid measure later. Not only is this a good strategy to avoid future legal challenges, it will also save them a lot of hassle and embarassment in the long run if they treat privacy/security seriously from Day 1. For that reason, I think Cavoukian’s Privacy By Design message needs to spread across the industry as we embark on what’s expected to be a massive, multibillion dollar smart grid buildout.

City of Ottawa launches open data site

Thu, 13 May 2010 15:11:58 -0500

Posted by Michael Geist
The City of Ottawa has launched a new open data site, releasing data sets on museums, pathways, outdoor rinks and other recreational facilities. City council voted to support the principle of making all municipal data available to the public in accessible format.