Alberta Innovation Voucher Program Launched

Last Friday, the Alberta government announced a pilot of their long-awaited voucher program for small to medium sized Technology companies.  The vouchers are meant to be used at authorized service centres (like TRLabs and others found here).  The idea is to use these voucher to cover up to 75% of the costs of engaging the service providers on a project basis.

There will be $4 Million over two years that will be rolled out in stages.  The pertinent points:

• The first batch of money will be awarded in March 2009, for projects to officially start April 1.
• The deadline for this first stage will be February 13, 2009.
• Companies can apply for one $10,000 and one $50,000 voucher over the life of the pilot.
• The work must be complete within 9 months of receiving the voucher.
• If a company does not win a voucher in one round, they can reapply in the next.
• Companies need to have less than 51 employees & less the $5 million in revenue
• Companies need to be registered  and doing more than 50% of their business in Alberta.

One overall theme to the program is that it is geared towards “innovation” projects.  In other words, they are looking to fund projects that help get new products and services to market, not fund business as usual.  That approach should be kept in mind when filling in the online form.

Also, it is expected that the applicant has made some preliminary plans with the service provider before applying.   This “pre-qualification” will give confidence to all three parties that project is grounded and has a high chance of success.

The program is deliberately broad to maximize the reach to the SME sector.  If you have any idea in mind that you think could qualify, contact one of the providers as soon as possible to get the ball rolling.

NEWT is dead, long live NEWT!

We’ve been inundated with requests for a clarification on what is going to happen with our lab and services.  First of all, thanks for all the interest.  In a strange way, that announcement was one one of the best marketing campaigns we ever had!

However, the integration of NEWT into TRLabs does not mean our operations will cease.  Our lab and equipment are available for use by the industry and we are accepting and executing projects as before.  I have been retained by TRLabs full time, so please contact me if you have any need for our services.

Second, our integration into TRLabs means that we expect to expand what we do, as we have access to additional research resources as well as the lab resources in the other sites across Western Canada.  These details are being worked out, but if this expansion gives you any ideas, please contact me as well.

We expect to roll out more information on the full spectrum of TRLabs services shortly, so stay tuned.

NEWT is closing

The decision has been made official this week that TRLabs will be closing the NEWT lab, effective Dec. 1, 2008. This is an unfortunate decision to made on the eve of Alberta’s Innovation Voucher program and at a time when it is more important than ever to diversify the Alberta economy.

As mentioned below, the test and validation functions of NEWT will be integrated into TRLabs.  What form that will take will depend a lot on the industry need in the next few weeks.  If you have a project waiting in the wings, now’s the time to let us know.

The official letter from our CEO is below:

It is with regret that I inform NEWT and TRLabs industry members that NEWT will cease to operate as a division of TRLabs, effective December 1, 2008. This was a tough decision made by the TRLabs Board of Directors considering a number of factors – primary among them a challenging industry revenue forecast further hampered by less than ideal market conditions.

This decision has three immediate implications:

1) The NEWT function will be integrated into TRLabs. Development, testing, and validation now forms part of the TRLabs mandate and service offering. TRLabs will be exploring opportunities to take what it has learned from NEWT and apply it to potential testing and validation services across ICT, and distributed across TRLabs;
2) The NEWT brand will cease to exist;
3) Duane Sniezek will remain the primary contact point for NEWT and TRLabs’ ongoing exploration of testing and validation activities and business development during a transitional period to come.

NEWT was founded in 2002 as a representation of a simple idea – that the gap between basic research and the marketplace in Canada is an enduring one, and NEWT could effectively step into that gap with a threefold value proposition to industry: lower development costs; assurance of interoperable products; and acceleration of time to market for winning products. For six years NEWT had a good run – a first of its kind in Canada – and the first open access wireless development centre in the world. External reviews conducted by our government partners were positive. Industry lab use days exceeded 1000, and the number of projects completed with industry surpassed 90. There are numerous success stories.

TRLabs’ belief in and commitment to the provision of product development, testing, and validation services to industry remains steadfast. For the last several years TRLabs has re-positioned its mandate, its research program, and other operational features in response to evolving industry interest, funding conditions, and marketplace conditions. In this context, NEWT has effectively provided a stepping stone toward a more encompassing TRLabs mandate that today includes development and commercialization activities – a full R&D service offering to industry that better aligns with industry need while maintaining academic and government engagement. TRLabs’ broader mandate also creates a mutually beneficial and productive inter-relationship between applied research and commercialization-focused activities.

TRLabs stands at the threshold of an era of new possibilities, in part enabled by NEWT’s very successful track record. TRLabs is proud of NEWT’s accomplishments, and will move forward with NEWT’s spirit no longer outside TRLabs’ core brand and mandate – but part of it.

If you have a product development, testing or validation need or idea, we would like to hear from you.

Regards .. Roger

“Do-Not-Call-List” Starts Today

Sept 30 is the first official day of the Canadian Do-Not-Call-List.  Once you are registered, telemarketing organizations are required to stop calling you within 31 days.  Peace and quiet, right?  Not so fast, there are many exceptions, and according some sources, up to 85% of these irritants (airlines, charities, newspapers, survey companies and even companies that have done “business” with you within 18 months) can keep calling you.

The only way off of those lists is to contact them directly and get on their internal DNCLs.  Or for these “exempt” organizations, you can use Michael Geist’s “iOptOut” service that will allow you to get on those internal lists by filling out one quick form.

Take back your dinnertime!

2G iPhone Unlock and Upgrade to 2.1

Last week, I took the plunge and upgraded my iPhone up to 2.1. I was waiting a bit to let the “pwnage” tool work itself out and let the bugs get worked out of the 2.0 firmware by Apple. However, when I found out there was an iPhone app for the Evernote service, I just had to upgrade.

To do it, I more or less followed these instructions here.

My only hiccup happened when I tried to install the new patched firmware to my phone via iTunes 8 on my Macbook. I tried three or four times and got some scary “Unknown Error: -2005″ and “Unknown Error: -1612″ messages with my blankscreened iPhone. Happily it was never bricked, I just needed to hold the power button down for about 15 seconds.

Just a side note, I’ve noticed that Macs an interesting philosophy for errors in their apps: either show no indication that something went wrong, or pop up a cryptic useless message. I much prefer the Linux world of logging everything to a log file somewhere. You may not understand it, but at least you have something to paste into Google!

Anyway, the web wasn’t much help, while these errors are sometimes cleared up by switching USB ports or taking out the SIM card, no one had any consistant explanations or solutions. I figured that the problem might be my USB ports when I recalled that I had not been able to get my external HD to work on one of them earlier in the week.

So, I put all the software on my iMac at home, tried again and “ta-da” it worked first time! It took around 30 minutes to finish all the installation and re-syncing, and within an hour or two I was being more productive with Evernote and less productive with Spore: Origins.

Good luck!

4G Ascendant – Great time to be an equipment supplier?

With a flurry of new spectrum, new carriers being brought to the wireless market and new phones and applications finally giving people a reason to use 3G, times should pretty good for equipment suppliers.  They will need basestations, core network upgrades and substantial backend data capacity.  Not to mention the boon for their suppliers (such as chipmakers) who will also benefit from this renaissance.

The difference may be that this second boom may be dominated by new entrants like ZTE and Hauwei who may have substantial price advantages and the traditional telecom players will feel the price pressure.  You would think that the fortunes for the traditional players like Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola but so far those companies are generally flat and the news usually bad.   There is a bit of a bright spot though, a quick glance at Google’s communication equipment index shows an upward trend (including a sharp jump up on July 21 while the S&P dropped) indicating that the market may be starting to buy into this inevitable upgrade.

What will be interesting will be which technologies are deployed and for what purpose.  A lot of major carriers have announces plans for LTE, WiMAX is very much in the game, CDMA will have a future for a while as a mature 3G technology and (since hell may be freezing over) TD-SCDMA may commercially launch in time for the Olympics in China.  It will also be worth watching to see if the new entrants get into the voice game, or use their spectrum for data-only applications, such as WISPs or selling data terminals like Amazon’s Kindle.

I hope that this all means the next five years will produce a bonaza of bandwidth, applications, competition and brilliant new business models.

LTE Watch: More Rumors of a Telus/Bell HSDPA Overlay Network

RCR Wireless is reporting that an announcement of a WCDMA/HSPA overlay network from Telus may be imminent.  This not particularily unexpected, since CDMA carriers are losing significant roaming revenue and carriers worldwide are planning for LTE with the CDMA roadmap looking bleak post-EVDO.

Having this overlay network would bring in roaming revenue while the backbone networks are built to handle evolution up to LTE in the next few years.  I would suppose that Telus and Bell would also start to tranistion their customer base over to the new devices as contracts come up.

This should be good news for their customers who will be able to take advantage of true world phones (not to mention iPhones) and more competition in the Canadian marketplace, which currently has only one GSM/HSDPA provider: the infamous Rogers.

UBS: Telus Mobility, Bell Canada looking at W-CDMA/HSPA overlay – - RCR Wireless News.

Innovation Vouchers in Ireland

I came across this little nugget today.  There is a tech Innovation Voucher program running in Ireland, with details available here.  It looks like a similar program, and there is a application form there that might be a good guide to the kinds of questions that will be on Alberta’s form.

A couple of other interesting items from the Irish program:

• The vouchers can be used for “knowledge transfer” from the participating organization to the SME, as long as the knowledge is new to the company and it is for further innovation to a product or service.
• Companies can pool their vouchers together for more purchasing power.

Anyway, as I said, checking out the application form would be a good idea to get a head start on the Alberta process.

Alberta Innovation Voucher Details Emerging

More details are starting to come out about the new voucher program.  Starting in September, Advanced Education and Technology will start accepting applications.   Available to Canadian companies that do 50% of their business in Alberta, technology SMEs will be able to apply for $10,000 or $50,000 vouchers to use at approved service providers in Alberta.  The vouchers can be used for payment of up to 75% of the service.

So, while we haven’t seen the application forms yet, we can infer a few items that will likely be required to get a voucher:

• Company details (Name of the company, size,  location, amount of business in Alberta)
• Company Product Details (what you are working on, what the project will be for)
• Who your service provider is and how you are working together

Now is the time to start thinking about the needs of your company, planning those projects and drafting up your submissions.  Talk to the service providers and draft up proposals to hit the ground running in September.

The tech industry doesn’t get many breaks, so take advantage of this very generous program while it is around.

Sun’s Virtual World

The blog “Leading Virtually” has an interesting article on Sun’s Project Wonderland, a virtual work collaboration tool.  Virtual worlds are nothing new of course, Second Life has been around for a few years, as has World of Warcraft, but recently businesses seem be getting in on the act.   Second Life in particular has what looks like a virtual business park for interviews, simulations, etc.

Now Sun has a product being trialed by employees and educational institutions to collaborate and do business.  Sharing and collaborating on applications while chatting with your co-workers is not new, this can be done with Skype, GoToMeeting, etc.  However, melding the 3D virtuality with app-sharing functionality (putting these apps up on virtual walls) to create virutal workspaces is kind of neat.  Tie that together with the feature of being able to walk around and use “spatialized” vocalization and now you can chat with other people that happen to be close by.

Maybe this will provide the random interaction that teleworkers miss?  These lobbies may become the new watercoolers for the converations and interactions that make worklife interesting.  Add in the rising costs of air & land travel and a population increasingly used to living online, and this may become the norm faster then we think.   We’ve already seen consumers dropping landlines for mobiles; perhaps cars for broadband connections is next?

Photo from :Editing a Document in a Virtual World, Originally uploaded by TaranRampersad