Riz’s Blog

Everything and Anything

Seems Like a Pretty Obvious Case of Predatory Pricing to Me

July30

Novus is offering fibre-to-the-home is some residential buildings in the city.  In response, Shaw is offering those customers 15Mbps service with a 100GB cap for $9.95, 200 channels of TV service (with 25 high-definition channels) for $9.95, or digital phone service with free installation, also for $9.95 a month.  Other Shaw customers are not eligible for the offer

via Michael Geist – Shaw Drops “Price Bomb” on Fibre Competitor.

posted under Commentary | No Comments »

Zombie Lunch Room

July1

via rkelland

CrackBerry

June15

Today I was at the beach, practising volleyball for the HOPE volleyball thing. We had just finished a 2 hour practice and I was minding my own business, drinking a delicious grape slush-puppie in the car. I whipped out my blackberry to check my email and whatnot while I was sipping on my beverage. I decided to call my dad to let him know I was going to drop by to pick up some stuff from their house. Suddenly while I was on the phone a police officer tapped on my window.

Officer: Sir, could you turn off the car and hang up your phone

Me: Sure (A little confused as to what is going on)

Officer: Sir, we had a report that you doing some crack in here

Me: No (WTF!)

Officer: Please step out of the car sir

Then I spent the next 10 minutes talking to police and having my car searched extensively for cocaine. Hooray!

Apparantly some bystander had seen me drinking out of a straw a jumped to the conclusion that I was doing cocaine in a crowded beach parking lot in the middle of the day. Maybe using my crackberry had me looking like a spaced out junkie.

via Sabrina’s Blog – CrackBerry.

HA!

May28

2jzht1

May19

beer-store
via: BlackBerry Cool

Negative Option Billing

May6

I’m no lawyer but this sounds like Negative Option Billing:

Rogers Wireless will start charging 15 cents for each incoming text for cellphone customers who don’t have message plans, starting July 7.

It’s sort of the same reason that Canada Post doens’t charge the recipient of mail. How can you agree to pay for something you have no knowledge of?

Thoughts?

Reduce Your Cost of Capital the Apple Way!

May6

I have no idea how much money Apple is sitting on that is owed to developers but this sounds like a great way to reduce your cost of capital. It’s just an extension of drawing out your accounts payable but in this case you don’t have to apply any interest to the balance. Free money!

SMS (160) v. Twitter (140)

May5

Recently there was an article on where the 160 SMS limit came from:

Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

The article goes on to desribe how the 160 limit seemed so perfect that the SMS creators went as far as to cut out the space of allowed characters so they could squeese 160 characters out of what was previously limited (in design) to 128 characters.

This leaves me with a question then: if 160 is perfect for SMS (based on some investigation), then why isn’t it right for Twitter?

Why did twitter choose 140? My quick Google searches haven’t turned up anything. Did they just pick some number or did they do some sort of investigation/study?

The World is Just Awesome

May3

Bloggin for Money!?

April30

Does RIM now pay me to blog? Not really. They pay me to help build BlackBerry software. They’re also happy letting me blog for them in my free time. It’s like  to getting paid for company blogging, without actually getting paid for it. Oh well, a step in the right direction:

http://blogs.blackberry.com/

and my first post.

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