Goodbye Rogers! - Is a class-action appropriate?

Not that it will make a difference, but the story needs to be told -- if only for my personal sanity. I'll make it short here, I promise:

• Becky and I move back to Canada last year, she brings a BlackBerry (she had her own hardware, this is important) and I sign her up for no-contract service.
• Becky starts school at Ryerson - and they up sell her, over the phone, to a "student plan". Cool - good deal.
• Turns out we don't need Becky's line anymore, so we go to cancel it. Rogers dutifully cancelled the service.

Here's where it goes pear-shaped I get a bill in the mail, and I'm actually excited. Will be nice to not have that re-occurring expense. Turns out there was an early cancellation fee of $400 on the student plan.

This is BS for so many reasons:

1. We didn't even need their stupid student plan.
2. We didn't even get a "phone" out of the deal. If they had subsidized the phone, this is fair, but for an under-used wireless line, $400 is a little heavy handed.
3. I've been a subscriber of rogers services as long as I've been buying phone-internet-cable.
4. They screwed me last time I moved from Waterloo->Seattle with an early termination fee.
5. We don't remember, but at no time were we told that there was an early-cancellation clause.

Anyway, I digress - so:

• I call rogers last week and say "come on guys, this is crazy. I've been a rogers subscriber for years. I still have internet and cable with you. Cut me a break." The woman on the phone was arrogant and antagonistic and didn't budge.
• I tweet my discontent and several people write back saying "check out teksavvy". I call them up, and they're rad - nicest people on the phone (the one guy said sarcastically about their $0.25/GB overage charge, "yeah, we rape our customers" (!awesome), great price, no contracts, they're in Chatham. Great except I needed to confirm that my building supports their service.
• Confirmed today.
• I called Rogers to cancel, one last chance to be a good corporate steward. Nope. I told him to cancel the remainder of my services, didn't ask for anything, didn't really mention the wireless issue until he asked, "yes, I'm a little frustrated with the wireless guys." His retort, "what?! you expect that you're going to threaten to cancel over a $400 ecf from a contract that YOU signed?" Fair enough, but still.

Technically, that is legally-technically, it's probably my fault -- I should have inquired about early-cancelation-fees, though I don't remember signing a contract. The spirit of the situation here makes me think we need more consumer protection around this sort of thing:

1. It's illegal in California
2. It's regulated elsewhere

Here are the clinchers:

1. When I left Seattle for Toronto, TMobile hit me with an early cancellation fee. I called an explained - THEY WAIVED IT!
2. I recently got an annual fee for a TD visa card that we don't use anymore. I called and cancelled the card after-the-fact, and TD (a bank for christ's-sake!) waived the fee and closed the card.

When the banks are the good guys in a story, you know we have problems with wireless providers in Canada.

To all the Americans looking forward to the 'public option' imagine renewing your healthcard at the dmv. I am doing so in Ontario right now.

Ask Phil Asmundson what his duties are at Deloitte & Touche and be ready for an earful. As the vice chairman and national managing partner of Technology, Media & Entertainment and Telecommunications (TMT), Asmundson helps set the overall TMT strategy for the firm, advises clients directly, and serves as a member of the TMT Deloitte Editorial Committee. He is a regular speaker at industry events and is regularly quoted on emerging trends in the space.

Asmundson has spent 28 years at Deloitte & Touche and will speak at our upcoming conference, Mobilize 09. In the edited interview below, he discusses the impact of ever-increasing traffic on mobile networks and some of the ways carriers can avoid becoming dumb pipes.

Colin Gibbs: We’ve seen a dramatic surge in mobile data usage in North America in the last year or so as smartphones move into the mainstream and on-the-go computing gets legs. How are carriers' attitudes toward mobile VoIP and other non-cellular technologies evolving due to the increasing traffic?

Phil Asmundson: I think we’re at an early stage of wireless transformation that will ultimately require collaboration across various networks. Carriers have traditionally been reluctant to circumvent their cellular networks, but the shift to data from voice will ultimately force them to offload traffic. I think we’ll get to the point where carriers don’t care whether a call is being carried on their network or on another network, and I think all-you-can-eat plans are going to help drive that.

Gibbs: It still seems like some network operators are having a hard time accepting that, though. How far have they come in changing their thinking regarding non-cellular use?

Asmundson: I think they’re all in the early stages at this point. The carriers have always been the main point of contact, the control point for the customer, and it’s tough to relinquish some of that.

Gibbs: Earlier this year we read headlines detailing how mobile networks in Japan were struggling to deliver content to users. Are we seeing those kinds of network strains in the U.S. yet? If not, when should we expect them?

Asmundson: It really depends on how pricing goes. One of the things about smartphones is that they’re going to increase my usage so much that metering me, billing me on minutes, isn’t going to make any sense.

Carriers are quite reluctant to give up control, and I understand why if I had invested billions of dollars to build out my network, I would want to see a return on that investment, too. But I will also say that carriers are extraordinarily concerned about the experience of the customer out there. The real impetus that will push this over the edge will be when you start to have failure of access. That may not be just around the corner; that may be here already. But to me this is a good problem. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in math to conclude that voice ARPU is declining. If this is the case, the future of wireless must be focused on data traffic, not voice. That’s a big conversion to be done, which is why carriers are anxious to build out 4G networks.

Gibbs: I'm reading a lot about things like off-peak content delivery and the use of femtocells to minimize network traffic, but other than Wi-Fi, I have yet to see much real progress. How important will those kinds of solutions be in the next few years? What other kinds of potential solutions have you seen?

Asmundson: Ultimately, what we’re facing is that the interface between various wireless technologies will become very important. I personally believe that as you start to get into ultraband, ultimately we’re going to see a world where my device will communicate with networks in real time. It will look at many different attributes including signal strength, device type, congestion it will look at that in real time, and it will determine which technology is best suited to deliver that to me.

Gibbs: It seems that’s beginning to happen on very high-end, enterprise-focused mobile computers. But how close are we to seeing that with more consumer-targeted phones?

Asmundson: I think we’re years from seeing it because it requires a whole new revenue model. Media is really interesting if you get a dollar of media revenue you can watch how it’s sliced and diced up (among multiple partners). That’s how it would have to happen in telecom. This would be something that would be handing off in real time, and that would require new revenue agreements.

Gibbs: When will we see mobile broadband consumer services being deployed in any real way?

Asmundson: We have to get LTE and WiMAX first, so in any meaningful way we’re looking at four to six years. I think the economic downturn sure put a downturn on that, the availability of funds, because let’s face it: It’s expensive.

Gibbs: What tools can carriers leverage as they fight the war against becoming dump pipes?

Asmundson: I think there are a lot of revenue opportunities that go beyond the pipe, and maybe that’s the next generation of telcos. As you start to move more and more things that are personal to you into the cloud, there is the question of who’s going to store it for you. Who’s going to back it up? Who’s going to secure your privacy? I think there is a lot of opportunity for carriers who have huge data centers. They haven’t done an awful lot in that area I have one case I can’t talk about but there are some movements from carriers who are trying to get more aggressive.

Yelp: When Community Management Reinforces Real-Life Weak Ties

Yesterday, some family, friends, and I ventured from Waterloo to Toronto to participate in theYelp CMYE: Toronto Cupcake Crawl. It was a gluttonous, sugar-coma-inducing day wherein we sampled cupcakes from a dozen local and independent downtown vendors.

I was most impressed by the level of sophisication inYelp's community management. Kat, the Toronto-area Community Manager fit the role perfectly: outgoing, engaging, welcoming, and knows her food. Kat is actually employed by Yelp and, that got me thinking, how does Yelp-corporate justify paying her?

Seeding Content

I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm betting that some quant-jock-analyst at Yelp recognized that they were seeing a disproportionate number of searches for 'cupcakes' in toronto. Google Trends is showing that 'muffin' search volumes have been steady-to-decling, whereas 'cupcakes' have been steadily increasing to the point where 'cupcake' search volumes are at par with 'muffin' searches.

Ultimately, Yelp wants to drive users to their site and get them engaged to drive page views and, therefore, ad revenue. Having high-quality, trust-worthy, recent, relevant content is an engagement-driver. At time of writing, the cupcake crawl has 10 reviews totalling ~350

0 words.

As an aside, I was amazed at the role of mobile computing played in creating this content. Several people were Tweeting, but more interesting, people were shooting and posting images of their cupcakes in real-time using their iPhones. A lesson-learned for UGC-reliant sites -mobility lowers the barrier-to-contribution for your site.

Converting Weak Ties to Strong Ties

When I was at Livemocha, no tangible benefit occurred to me to introduce our community members at face-to-face events. After observing the Yelp community in action, it's clear:

1. Members that engage face-to-face are your most dedicated customers
2. Your most dedicated customers are most engaged
3. Your most engaged members contribute content (this is, by far, a minority, of your users)

Converting the weak ties of users that know each other only as avatars and nicknames to strong ties (friendships) means your highly-engaged users return to your site to be with their friends, and these friendships make more effective/ relevant the other engagement mechanisms in place (point systems, for example).

In conclusion, for those that care, Babycakes was the best-of-show (but, truthfully, I'm more of a cookie-man).

I'm at SFO way too early. Awesome week in the valley-coming back in 3 weeks hopefully.

http://ping.fm/p/i035X - Tired of hard drive failures. Raidin' it now.

Think of mapping applications as spatial browsers. How does maps as a platform intersect with web?
Sent from my BlackBerry� wireless device