Urban Vancouver

The Edmonton Council for Advanced Technology (ECAT) will be holding its annual summer networking barbeque on Wednesday, August 20th. The event aims to bring together businesses, industry associations, students, and other supporters of early-stage, technology-based enterprises in the Edmonton region.

This year’s theme is “Women and youth in science, engineering and technology.” The schedule starts at 2pm with the show grounds opening and the opportunity learn more about WISEST. A BBQ, music, and ABCtech profiles will continue throughout the afternoon, followed by a surprise guest speaker at 6:30pm. The evening concludes with Music in the Meadows and other entertainment.

Moonlight in the Meadows takes place at the Whitemud Equine Learning Centre. Tickets are $50 each, or $450 for a group of ten. Online registration ends August 19th at noon. For more information, contact Perry Kinkaide at 1.866.241.7535 or via email.

Ever wanted to see the future without having to worry about Morlocks eating you? Me, too.

And now you can! Well, sort of. ZiiTrend is a Vancouver-based “social prediction community” that employs the popular social media tactic of crowdsourcing with humanity’s limitless capacity to keep predicting events and trends… no matter how many times we’ve gotten it wrong in the past.

Does ZiiTrend actually work? Let’s see. Some of the ZiiTrend community’s stock predictions seem right on the money, or just about, hovering around 95 per cent accuracy (Note: Not all ZiiTrend financial prediction are so accurate. But if you followed the page for a bit… Worth looking into.)

Then there’s the league sports predictions. Hmmm. More money-making opportunities. Time to call a bookie.

Other predictions… One per cent of Zii-sters think we will find a new civilization on Mars in 2008. Actually, if chances were really that high, I expect we’d be devoting about ten times the resources to our space program. But you never know.

Will Apple support unlocked cell phones in 2008? That’s a big negative. Yeah, pretty much.

And in international news, the Iranian nuclear issue solved by diplomacy? A majority of ziibos say “yes”. That’s pretty optimistic, given the word on the street. But you never know.

And possibly the most important prediction for the future on the ZiiTrend site: Will ZiiTrend survive beyond 2009? Click to see the future of ZiiTrend…

Out of a discussion happening on the Seattle Tech Start-ups mailing list and a side meeting that got called last week, the following list of resources was posted to the Seattle Tech Start-ups list.

Seattle Startup Resources - this is the list of organizations that I wish that I had known about when I arrived in Seattle. Its broken into Frequent Events, Infrequent Events, Entrepreneur support/educational
institutions, Funding sources, and Web Resources.

Start-up Minded Events - where in Seattle where you are likely find technical people, hanging out having fun while working on changing the world.

Frequent Events (Every week or month):

• Open Coffee at Louisa’s Coffee: Early stage entrepreneur and investor networking in Seattle. Occurs Every Tuesday Morning at 8:30am at 2379 Eastlake Ave E in Seattle.
• Saturday House: Seattle Saturday House is a weekly gathering of several people who meet and do … whatever they want! People work on projects, people talk about ideas, people conspire and hatch plans, and people play games with each other. Every Saturday at Giraffe Labs in Pioneer Square.
• Seattle Lunch 2.0: Learn about cool local Companies and technologies over your lunch hour - Various locations and times.
• Seattle Start-up Drinks: A simple concept: start-up culture in cities around the world gathers around a bar to have a pint and discuss what they are working on, what they need help with and what they can do for each other. Occurs the Last Friday of every month at various locations.
• Seattle Tech Start-ups (STS): A group of entrepreneurs in the Seattle area who give and seek advice on running technology start-ups. We meet about once or twice a month. This is targeted at founders of, employees of, or those folks interested in joining local technology companies. Be ready to talk shop, get into technical arcana, and discuss the nitty-gritties of running/working at/launching a tech start-up. Occurs first or second week of the month at The Douglas Forum at the Executive Education Center, University of Washington.
• Six Hour Start-up: A group of hackers/designers/entrepreneurs meeting to try and build and lunch a start-up in less than six hours. Second Weekend of every month at various locations.
• Venture Breakfasts (NWEN): A monthly breakfast with a featured speaker talking about start-up related issues.

Infrequent Events: (Every few months, it is best to find out about when these events occur from sites like MeetAtThePig or Seattle 2.0, or Gary’s Guide)

• Barcamp: An ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.
• Ignite Seattle: Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking)
• Mindcamp: Seattle Mind Camp is an unconference that is held annually in Seattle.
• NPost: nPost networking Event for tech start-ups, Demos and getting to meet members of the local start-up community.
• Think Tanks (NWEN): Evening Knowledge Exchanges that are recognized as the go to forums for new ideas.
• Workshops (NWEN): Graduate School level workshops on various topics such as VC Financing, Human Resource, Bootstrapping, IP Protection and more.

There are a lot of other events that occur here in Seattle which attract interesting, smart technical people : Bizjam, Start-up Weekend, Dorkbot, Powertool drag strip races, Seattle Scrum, Seattle X-Coders, Seattle Ruby Brigade, Python Users group…. Its best to subscribe to a few of the calendars above to find out about those events.

Entrepreneur Support/Educational Institutions:

• Biznik: Is a Seattle based social network for entrepreneurs, they have a wealth of events and information on starting up a company.
• Score: Small Business Administration, hosts workshops, offers counseling and has a wealth of resources for start-up entrepreneurs.
• Freelance Seattle: good for finding freelancers to help with design/code/branding/localization/etc…
• MIT Enterprise Forum: Hosts several different types of events though out the year, Dinner Programs which can be a companies presentation of key issues the company is experiencing or has experienced or an experts panel with a featured topic of interest, Venture Lab workshops which is a lecture series on various topics and Global Broadcasts from Cambridge aimed at different topics.
• NorthWest Enrepreneur Network (NWEN): Has Venture breakfasts, workshops, pub nights, and hosts the Early Stage Investment Forum yearly.

Funding Organizations:

• Alliance of Angels
• Founders Co-op 
• Funding Universe
• Ignition Partners
• Keiretsu Forum

Web Resources:

• John Cook’s Venture Blog: Explores start-ups, Venture Capital and Life in the Pacific Northwest Technology Community
• Meetatthepig: A calendar for geeks, makers and other world changers.
• Seattle 2.0: Marcelo Calbucci’s website with local start-up events, and the Seattle Start-up List of Seattle Internet start-ups, includes an extensive list of Seattle Start-up Blogs.
• Seattle Tech Start-ups: A fairly high traffic email list of various founders and others involved creating new Internet companies.

Location is one of the latest features—or central focus—of many of today’s social networking apps. And so, it seems that location-based services appear to pop up every day.

The Apple iPhone’s spate of location based apps is a perfect example.

But when was the last time you found a location-based networking service that was focused on your community?

Enter Shizzow. A location-based social networking service for Portland, Oregon. And only Portland, Oregon.

Shizzow provides the technology for you to notify your friends of your location, with as little effort as possible, so you can spend more time hanging out with your peeps and less time trying to coordinate bringing them together through phone, email, SMS and IM.

Currently, in private beta, Shizzow promises to provide a more simple and straightforward way of finding friends and acquaintances:

Shizzow is designed to understand where you are—and to tell people where you are—as simply and easily as possible. And I’ve been duly impressed by how hard they’ve worked to make sure that the database of locations is as deep and intuitive as possible.

For more information, visit Shizzow. Or to get a beta account of your own, show up to Portland Lunch 2.0 on Wednesday, where Shizzow will be handing out beta accounts to Lunch 2.0 attendees.

nextMEDIA – Monetizing Digital Media returns to Toronto, November 18 – 19, 2008 with the answers to the big question that is on everyone’s mind: How can I make money from digital content?

This unique two-day event features a full program of keynote speakers, topic driven panels and practical case studies along with numerous networking opportunities - both formal and informal.

Meet the monetization challenge head on. Register today.

Why attend? nextMEDIA is the only Toronto conference where you will:

• Hear from the best minds in advertising, media, and publishing as they share their monetization secrets
• Learn what business models are working
• Gain insight into how to create partnerships and close deals
• Learn tactical as well as strategic approaches to monetization

• Network with CEOs, CTOs, Directors, Presidents and Senior Managers.

This year, the 2008 Canadian New Media Awards will be integrated into the nextMEDIA conference with finalists in 14 categories honoured at an evening gala on November 18, 2008. Conference attendees will have the opportunity to attend the gala and meet the winners.

Techvibes Media Inc. is a proud media sponsor of the upcoming Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) in Vancouver. IMC is produced by Internet marketing experts, for Internet marketing experts, and for all of you who’d like to become Internet marketing experts.

The IMC speaker line-up is impressive - a virtual who’s who of the Web. Building up to the conference, we’ll be highlighting some of the speakers here on the Techvibes Blog. First up was Andre Charland of Nitobi, then the folks from Capulet, then a guy from Google, a VanCity favorite and the world’s most successful lingerie marketer.

Make Testing Sexy — Case studies from Victoria’s Secret

by Jonghee Jo, Victoria’s Secret

Website testing becomes indispensable to maximize website performance, but where do you begin? What exactly should you test? How do you get executive buy-in? How do you maximize returns on testing investment? Hear battle-tested guidance on how to implement testing culture in the organization.

Jonghee Jo is a senior web metrics analyst at Victoria’s Secret. He has coordinated Website Analytics and Testing efforts for the largest fashion e-commerce site in the world, www.victoriassecret.com since 2006. Prior to Victoria’s Secret, he managed analytic marketing projects at Xerox and Oracle. Jonghee earned his MBA degree from Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University with a concentration in e-Business Management and Analytic Marketing.

Register for the IMC before August 15th and you’ll pay only $795 for the two-day conference.

Yesterday I posted about GS New Media’s virtual world for tweens/teens. It crossed my mind as slightly worrisome that such a thing could prove to be a gateway drug to something like World of Warcraft, cultivating a generation of pale, air conditioned children who expect experience points from their every action.

AndyCamper, from Ottawa, seeks to introduce kids to the outdoors. The site combines information, activities, and videos relating to plants, animals, geology, and astronomy. It uses articles, videos, and pictures to introduce a subject (like “bugs”) and then gives them related outdoor activities (”build a bug jar”). One interesting activity is geocaching, where people hide “treasure” and post the coordinates online for others to find with a GPS device. Oh, the things kids get to do these days.

Good, original content for kids is valuable and hard to find, and AndyCamper delivers a nice selection of it with the promise of regular updates. The content is further branched out to Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. A mobile site is also provided to deliver the content to an iPhone or iPod Touch. Their content also appears to be designed with educators in mind. The site has no advertising, but sells t-shirts, stickers, and activity cards. Nice job, campers, on using social media to encourage kids to engage the outdoor world around them.

Skyway West is a privately owned company founded in 1996 to help businesses achieve the benefits of high speed networking supported by reliable connections and connect businesses either directly, or through the Internet, using ADSL, Fiber and Wireless technologies.

Position: Channel and Sales Manager

Description: Persuade LAN integrators and Interconnects that Skyway Internet services and management systems better meet the needs of their customers than competitor offerings. Maintain and nurture existing partners (50) via email, phone, site visits and monthly newsletter. Close referrals.

Experience: WAN and LAN sales, marketing or support experience.

Technical requirements: Understand the benefits of static IP addresses, low latency, low jitter and other determinants of Internet performance and be familiar with private networking, firewalls, Internet bonding and fail over.

Key attributes: Enjoy Internet related work and providing superior support. Answer email and voice messages in a timely manner, pay careful attention to detail and excellent time management skills. Courteous and helpful to other Skyway staff, customers and partners.

Contact: Bill Campbell @ 604-482-1224 or bcampbell@skywaywest.com.

Via Seattle PI/John Cook, Seattle’s Junxion has been acquired by Vancouver’s Sierra Wireless in an asset sale. This is the second recent instance of an American tech company being bought north of the border, after NowPublic acquired Truemors last month. Rumors earlier this year mentioned a figure $2M price but the final price is undisclosed. Junxion produces a line of distinctive-green-box, enterprise-grade cellular routers that power, among other things, wifi on Microsoft’s company commuter buses. This meshes well with Sierra’s various wireless offerings, though demand for cellular routers may be hampered by the rise of mostly-affordable 3G networking.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is mixing it up in 2008 and that’s a good thing. The CIRA Annual General Meeting is coming back to Vancouver for 2008 and will be held at the Pan Pacific Hotel on September 10th from 11:30am to 4:00pm. This year they’re got a special keynote speaker that should bring some .CA domain owners out of the woodwork - Canadian New Media Superstar Amber MacArthur (AmberMac to those in the know) will be the highlight of the agenda with a guest appearance at 2:30pm.

So if you own a .CA domain name and want to participate, be sure to pre-register before September 9th.

Bonus: CIRA will be raffling door prizes to CIRA Members who attend the AGM and prizes include one 15 inch 2.4GHz Apple MacBook Pro Laptop, one Canon EOS Rebel Xsi 12.2MP Digital SLR Camera with 18-55 IS Lens Kit, and two 16GB iPod touch digital music players.

Next week we’ll be having our second tweetup here in Edmonton. It’s a great way to meet other Twitter users from Edmonton and area - there’s quite a few of us already and the number keeps growing! The event is fairly informal and relaxed, the goal is just to have some fun meeting new people! You can read about our first tweetup here. Hard to believe it’s been three months already!

It’s always a challenge to find a date and time and venue that everyone can make it out to, so we’re trying something different this time. Here are the details:

WHO: Twitter users in Edmonton!
WHAT: An event to meet one another in meatspace.
WHERE: The Billiard Club on Whyte Avenue (map)
WHEN: Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 6:00pm
WHY: To chat about anything with other Twitter users!

If you’re planning to come out on Thursday, add your name to the list on our wiki. You may also want to follow edmontontweetup and/or myself on Twitter for updates.

See you there!

Rare venture capital news out of Saskatoon, where VendAsta Technologies has announced $3 million in first round funding from Victoria Park Capital for their MyFrontSteps.com social site. MyFrontSteps aims to create a social network that lets homeowners share their experiences with local service providers (contractors, home maintenance, real estate agents, etc.), and also to allow those providers to manage their presence on the site. The press release uses the term “social graph”; perhaps no one told these guys that Facebook already owns Canada’s social graph. I digress though, there are no dominant social sites targeting homeowners and home service providers, so there is definite room to grab this market.  Saskatchewan developers: they’re also hiring.

This week Toronto’s GS New Media announced that it will be using Sun Microsystems’ Project Darkstar to develop a virtual world based around the (apparently quite popular) children’s TV series “The Saddle Club”. Contrary to the name, Project Darkstar is not a moon-size space station part of Sun’s plans for world domination, but an open source software framework for creating massive online games and virtual worlds. Building a virtual world supporting thousands of users operating simultaneously in the same space raises difficulties beyond simple hardware and bandwidth demands; Darkstar is designed to address these.

The executive team of GS New Media is a well picked mix of tech and children’s media, sporting experience with Orange, blogTV, Webkinz, Disney, and Scholastic. The Saddle Club Virtual World is slated to launch in 2009.

AdHack is hosting a Beta Launch Party tonight, 7pm to Midnight, at the Anza Club (8th Ave and Ontario St), and are holding it DIY-style:

We’ll have great DIY games and activities for you to participate in throughout the night.

Prizes? You better believe it.

Music? DIY too. Bring your iPod (or MP3 player) and you’ll get a shot to play DJ for a song or three. Introduce your favourite selections to the crowd. Get them dancing on the tables.

Tickets? A little DIY. Why the heck not?!

Here’s the low down.

Bring a copy of one of your all-time favorite ads. It can be an AdHack ad or an ad you found elsewhere. Whatever tickles your fancy. From the ads you bring in we’ll create a montage. Your ad will be considered your ticket in, with an RSVP.

Visit the event page. Ticket offerings may be closed, but I’m sure you could fire off an email and ask nicely.

A frisbee’s throw from the shores of Burrard Inlet, Park Royal Mall in West Vancouver was Canada’s first covered mall when it opened in 1950. It appears very modern, though corners of it still betray it’s age. Last night, I biked over the bridge for the launch of the mall’s latest facelift, the first of a new concept in Future Shop stores.

The centrepiece of the new store is the “Connected Home” hub in the middle of the store. This area is spacious and features only a handful of select products set up as one could in their home, like an Xbox 360 connected to a TV which can pull media from a Windows Home Server. Staffing this area are Connectivity Experts, a newly created non-commission position dedicated to answering customer questions and explaining how one can connect together all the shiny gadgets. The area seemed optimized to the clientele of the area, i.e. an espresso machine that cost as much as my MacBook Pro.

Beyond this hub, the rest of the store looks fairly typical, though has obviously received a fresh coat of pain, updated signage, and lighting of a cooler colour temperature. The video game section has received more prominence, with dedicated Gaming Experts, another new position, and a tree of TVs hooked to demo consoles. Notably absent from the store were audio CDs, a sign of changing times. The store features the new ConnectPro in-home service for home theatre or computer installation.

If you approach the store from the interior of the mall at the right angle, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for an Apple Store. This is a “store within a store” similar to those seen in some Best Buy locations, but larger and more segregated from the rest of the computers. No textual signage, only the white Apple logo. The tables and backdrop in this area were similar to those seen in Apple Stores and it was staffed by an employee wearing an Apple shirt. Elsewhere in the store, Macs are also displayed beside PCs, a notable change from the olden days before Macs were cool and appealing to the masses.

A question that I heard raised twice is how Future Shop is distinguishing itself from its parent company Best Buy. Burnaby-based Future Shop was purchased by the American Best Buy in 2001. In the years since, Best Buy has opened stores across Canada seemingly competing with their wholly owned subsidiary. It was explained that when the purchase first happened, Future Shop’s brand recognition was high so it didn’t make sense to rebrand the stores. Going forward, they want to position Future Shop as the higher-end retailer, and Best Buy as lower-end. The stores already reflect this with one key difference: Future Shop salespeople operate on commission while all Best Buy employees are hourly. However, the explanation of this strategy seemed somewhat vague, possibly reflecting that it isn’t solidly fleshed out. It’s plausible that the company isn’t worried about this as long as both chains are performing well.

The second of these concept Future Shops will be the Edmonton South location, opening in the Fall. I’m more curious to see how this store concept works there; in my humble opinion, selling big TVs and consumer electronics in West Van is too easy. Kudos to Future Shop for making strides to humanize the big box store experience.

Via Twitter, Vancouver’s Raincity Studios relaunched their Bryght community content hosting service. You might remember it was last November that Raincity bought Bryght; the two companies were already partners and shared office space. In addition to a fresh look for the site, they’ve also modified their pricing structure, with Bryght Light shared hosting at $20 a month (or free, ad-supported), and VPS options from $50 to $160 a month. For those who weren’t aware of Raincity/Bryght’s allegiances, “Community Content Hosting” means Drupal to them. The two companies have a long history of working with Drupal and supporting it’s open source community.

Interesting to note: both the Bryght and Raincity Studios websites are now localized in Chinese, reflecting Raincity’s pursuit of the Chinese market.

Raincity’s blog doesn’t mention the relaunch yet, but it is clad in Beijing 2008 colours as Raincity’s head duo of Kris Krug and Robert Scales take a break from Raincity’s Shanghai office to take in the Olympics. They’re equipped with an arsenal of gadgets to deliver their independent take on the events through Flickr streams, videos on NowPublic, and more. They’ve already posted lots; providing an interesting view of the event that you won’t see on CBC. Have fun dudes, and hopefully your citizen journalism doesn’t get you thrown in a Chinese jail (and hopefully that line doesn’t get Techvibes blocked in China).

Jevon MacDonald’s “How Startups will save Venture Capital in Canada” identifies the lack of a sufficient number of startups as the core problem in Canada’s VC/entrepreneurship ecosystem. I have to agree with him in that the major challenge in Canada is the lack of a sufficient number of fundable startups. Being fundable doesn’t mean that the startup will actually need to raise money, merely that the startup has identified a real customer need, and has a plan to capture the opportunity in that market.

Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs in the Web 2.0 world currently suffer from an obsession with technology. Instead of generating a business model, identifying paths to market, or validating assumptions, many tech entrepreneurs are focusing on choosing one technology over another and being buzzword-compliant. Building a startup in this fashion is kind of like creating a superhero who has lots of cool powers and gadgets, but neglecting to create a back story that explains to the reader why the hero is driven to fight crime. If you’re this company, you’re Batman – except your parents weren’t murdered in front of you as a child by The Joker, and you had a relatively happy and fulfilling childhood.

Instead of focusing on technology, a startup (or any company for that matter) needs to focus on its business case. Clarifying the business case can be grueling, but at its core it only really requires good answers to a few key questions:

1. What problem will your startup/product solve?
2. Who has this problem?
3. How are they currently solving this problem?
4. Who else is solving/has solved this problem?
5. How are you different than any of the other solutions?
6. How will you make money from providing this solution?

This is the usual point in the article where I provide a personal story to illustrate my point. So, not wanting to disappoint, here we go:

The first product I worked on as a product manager was quite possibly the most boring piece of software ever created. It was also extremely lucrative. It took one programmer, one QA person and me to build, test, and market it…yet it retailed for $7500 for a 2-CPU version (yes, it was licensed on a per-CPU basis). While I can’t provide insight into the revenue for the product, the company I worked for publicly disclosed revenues over the four years I worked there in excess of $100M on a product line consisting of only a half dozen products. Suffice it to say, a non-trivial percentage of that $100M could be attributed to this product. The return on investment on the product was well over 1000%. While this product wasn’t a startup in and of itself, its revenues would put many startups in Vancouver to shame.

What was this magical money-making software? Well, it was a command-line encryption utility. It took files and encrypted them, or took encrypted files and decrypted them. That’s it. It featured no graphical user interface, and used a dozen different standard public domain or otherwise open/standardized cryptographic methods to secure the data.

Any software engineer or technology-centric entrepreneur that hears me talk about this software is instantly horrified. “Why would anyone buy this software? And for $7,500?!? Why not just use a copy of GPG (a free, open source program that does exactly the same thing)?” The problem with an engineer’s response to this is that it focuses solely on the software itself. But nobody just buys software, they buy a solution to a problem. The totality of that solution is not limited to technology, but also includes knowing the customer’s motivation, how much the solution is worth to them, where they look for solutions to problems, and even where they go to buy. All of these pieces fit together.

So why was this software successful? Why was it able to charge so much?

• Urgent problem: Enterprises regularly transfer large amounts of data between themselves and their partners and have built systems to automate these transfers. However, over the past five years enterprises have faced an explosion in the number of federal, state, local, and industry mandates requiring them to protect confidential business, financial, customer, and employee data. Given the alternatives (negative press, lost customers, fines, loss of license to operate, prison), companies wanted a solution that could secure these data transfers, and they wanted it fast.
• Well-defined target customer: At a high level, the customer for the product could be anyone handling large amounts of sensitive business or customer data. However, the nature of the laws governing data privacy made it very easy to be more specific - financial services companies. Anyone in financial services had standardized on FTP for large data transfers, and now stood at the intersection of a large number of very scary industry and government mandates that required them to protect customer, employee, and financial data. So, there was not only an urgent problem that needed to be solved, but customers with lots of money who were willing to pay for software that solved that problem.
• Over-priced, aging existing solution: Interestingly enough, the customers already had a solution in place in many cases. However, the company providing that solution had sold off most of the core assets and was running a minimal skeleton support team. Customers were annoyed because problems weren’t getting fixed, and there was little indication that they could continue to rely on the solution to continue functioning on newer platforms. The existence of a solution was useful for two reasons: it validated that there was a problem that needed to be solved, and it told us how much customers were willing to pay.
• It came from someone they trusted: The company I worked for was a well-known information security brand, and had been for nearly a dozen years. Most people in IT would have used early versions of this company’s software while they were in college, and hence it was the first company that came to mind when they started looking for a data security software product. While it is unusual for a startup to have a known brand, technologists often overlook the inherent value of marketing. If no one knows your solution exists, or knows the unique capabilities it provides, it doesn’t matter if your solution has inherently better technology or not.

To summarize (using this handy format): The product provided a command line encryption utility that secures large data transfers for enterprises, such as financial services companies, that are subject to regulations requiring them to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. Unlike competing solutions, the product provided an up-to-date, supported solution that integrated easily with existing data transfer solutions, and came with the commitment of ongoing support from a leading information security software provider.

Jevon is correct that the required solution is for Canadian startups to start hustling, and that hustling means building viable businesses. When you can answer the six questions I outlined above in a succinct manner, and back up any claim you make with hard facts, you’ve got yourself a viable business.

Congrats - now get back to work!

So your smartphone gets 6 GB (or “unlimited”, or similar) of mobile data a month at 3G speeds, but your web and email use barely dents that quota. What’s to be done? You can start photo-documenting your daily commute, or streaming internet radio at the beach, but more usefully you could use that mobile data with your other mobile device: a notebook* computer. Tethering is the act of using a phone’s mobile data through a notebook, making that data plan considerably more useful.

Last week, an app called NetShare, by Nullriver Software of Ontario, was posted to the iTunes App Store. For $9.99, this app effectively turned your iPhone into a portable Wifi hotspot that you could connect a notebook to. Less than a day later, the app was removed. Then they put it back. Then they removed it a second time. In a post dated yesterday, Nullriver writes…

“We’ve finally gotten in contact with Apple. Looks like the lack of communication was due to automated e-mail systems being employed on both ends, which resulted in e-mails being lost in transit. We’re working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore.”

NetShare isn’t back yet, and a likely reason for this kerfuffle is that AT&T’s terms of service prohibit tethering, except with a (more expensive) plan specifically for the purpose. Rogers doesn’t seem to provide any official statement, though folks on iPhone forums claim that Rogers representatives have told them tethering is allowed (unfortunate how we have to rely on the word of call centre reps as corporate policy).  A key difference is that AT&T’s iPhone plans are unlimited data, whereas Rogers might be happy to charge 50c per MB for exceeding your limit.

It’s worth noting that the same tethering functionality can be accomplished for free by “jailbreaking” an iPhone to run unauthorized apps, and a little command line work. The phone has the capability, any restriction is an artificial one. The carrier likely wouldn’t be able to (and more likely wouldn’t try to) differentiate tethered traffic from regular phone traffic, though it might look suspicious when you start downloading torrents of the latest Battlestar Galactica episodes. This technique is not for the faint of heart, or those who want to maintain their warranties.

The ball is in Apple’s court to explain themselves. Were the app reviewers not paying attention to the implications of NetShare? Is it Apple’s duty to enforce cell carrier policy? Will any app get pulled if a cell carrier objects? Can the Canadian App Store get the app back, at least? Is it reasonable to pull an app without notice or reason given?

*Test of using the term “notebook” as opposed to “laptop”, after a very warm lap session this weekend that proved these machines are no longer suitable for extended use on one’s lap, but may be suitable as a non-surgical birth control method.

The Vancouver Sun ran an article today about Yaletown-based Suite101.com, a how-to site for any and every topic. Now in it’s 12th year of operation, Suite101 continues to hire new employees and grow traffic, while facing competition from new sites such as Google Knol and IAC’s Life123, and entrenched sites like HowStuffWorks and About.com (which seems to have recently updated it’s former 90s, ad-laden layout). Despite the age of the site, CEO Peter Berger acknowledges that the market for these sites is still in early stages: “People don’t understand how big this market will become.”

The photo accompanying the article shows editor-in-chief Joy Gugeler holding a magazine with the headline “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”. Berger states that among their competition advantages is being selective about writers and having dedicated editors.

“We still have the intention to give well-researched advice, but it’s educated opinion that is sourced journalistically,” Gugeler says. “There is a high level of accountability.”

The article also mentions the micropayment royalty structure that Suite101 uses, where authors aren’t paid up front, but receive a portion of the Google Ads revenue. Thus, writers are rewarded for popular articles, and have a better chance of making money over time with Suite101, a top 2500 site, than trying to sell advertising on their own. Earlier this year, they launched a German language version, and later this year, will add video content to the site.

Disclosure: Suite101 investor Dr. Boris Wertz is a Director of Techvibes Media Inc, and as their former officemates, Suite101 shared cake with us on employee birthdays.

Whereas many web startups dream of being acquired by Google or Microsoft, Toronto’s PoolExpert has exited with a north-of-the-border acquisition by Rogers Communications for an undisclosed amount. The nine year old PoolExpert is a leading site for fantasy hockey, baseball, and Formula 1 pools. Being a Canadian site, hockey is their clear leader; Alexa stats show a dramatic traffic jump during the seven months of the NHL season.

Why would Rogers buy a company when they could develop something in house? For one, PoolExpert brings “hundreds of thousands” of users, and secondly, the site already has a viable business model, charging a small fee of $2 per person, per pool, in addition to running ads. The press release hints that PoolExpert will be folded into the existing sportsnet.ca. This acquisition adds to Rogers’ growing collection of sporting properties including the Sportsnet channels and website, The Fan sports radio in Toronto and Calgary, the Toronto Blue Jays, and the Rogers Centre in Toronto (formerly SkyDome).

It’s good to see an acquisition of a Canadian company by another Canadian company, and also good to see Canada’s big media players taking an interest in web properties. PoolExpert founders Ron Watson and Steve Hulford already have another venture underway: FileMobile, an “on-demand social media platform”, which ranks #108 on our Canada Start-up Index.

Fun Fact: The SkyDome was originally constructed in 1989 for about $600M, paid by municipal and provincial governments along with a group of companies. After years of financial problems, Rogers purchased the stadium in 2005 for only $25M; 4% of the original construction cost. Two punchlines: Hopefully PoolExpert got a better deal, and it would be nice if I could get an iPhone for 4% of the original cost.