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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I have had the privilege of attending a couple of events at which new ideas in Health Care delivery were discussed as well as the issues of an aging population. The issues are huge, the Baby Boomers are getting older but they are going to want to keep active and they are going to expect to have anything and everything fixed. A self-serve mentality is increasingly the norm among all demographics now, and the health care industry is starting to respond. For example, Google and Microsoft (via HealthVault) already allow you to store and manage your health records online and connect you to health services.
At both of these events, I got to watch the following video. I never get tired of watching the cool tech they show in action. According to a Microsoft presenter that introduced this back in the fall, all this tech is currently working, albeit in prototype form, in the Microsoft Labs.
(A higher-resolution version of the video is available directly from Microsoft)
Here’s a really neat blog that deconstructs an idealized future handheld device to highlight the most important features for users. Some of these we are starting to see with the iPhone, but, alas, we still somewhat short in the “fully open” software department. Perhaps Android ?
In the meantime, I am going to try and find a way to make my iPhone keypad look like his sketch below. That’s brilliant!
On June 11, the Alberta Government announced a new $178 million dollar plan to stimulate the high tech sector. While the details are forthcoming, the programs announced look very innovative, and it will be interesting to see how it will play out. Some of the key highlights:
A “voucher” program. Presumably the idea here is to sell a kind of coupon that SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) can use to purchase services from qualified organizations. Whether this will be any private business or only for non-profit organizations (probably) is unclear at the moment. This will be an interesting innovation, however, since the SMEs will be in the driver’s seat and will stimulate the competition between the non-profit organizations out there to provide the best services.
A $100 Million Alberta Enterprise Corporation. The action plan calls the goverment to become a limited partner in a number of funds that will be created for the various technology industries. By partnering with private entities in these funds, the government will be getting the benefit of their expertise in vetting the companies that will approach them for investment.
A youth “Technopreneur” fund. Available to young graduates, a great way to help get young people try out the word of small business. I find this exciting because, when I went to school (many more years ago then I care to dwell on) small businesses were just not on the radar, and I didn’t know anyone who planned to go to a small company (this was at the dawn of the tech bubble). It will be facinating to watch how this generation acts in the workplace, with an entrepreneurial mindset as a default, not an anomaly. A program like this could really help build a risk-taking mentality in our new grads.
These and the other six actions in the plan are part of an important plan to diversify the Alberta economy keep a lot of the homegrown entrepreneurial skill and talent right here where it belongs.
