Gas prices too high? So stop importing oil
Dumb electricity We need smart grids
Listening to you Big companies want to read your tweets
Vampire slayer Gadgets to cut your electricity use
Living the green life
May 2011
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e d it o r 's l e t t er / peter w olc ha k
Digital economy was nowhere in this election We needed action. We got an election and a missed opportunity Canada was on the very precipice of progress on the digital economy. Industry Minister Tony Clement was expected to unveil his government’s plan at the May 3 Canada 3.0 conference. The appearance would take place, after all, a full year after he took to the same stage to ask for input on ensuring Canada is a strong player in the worldwide digital economy. Surely a year was enough time to craft a detailed, aggressive and progressive strategy. Then the election was called for May 2, and Clement’s appearance was cancelled. So close. As you are reading this the election is over, but at time of writing the vote is still a week off. With the polls showing surging NDP support, it looks likely that the centre-left vote will split and Canada will have another Conservative minority government. Harper may score a slightly stronger mandate but, in terms of hard political numbers, the expectation is that not much will change in Ottawa.
Where was digital? Kim Campbell famously opined that elections are no time to discuss serious issues, and politicians largely followed her sage advice. Green Party leader Elizabeth May was not alone in pointing out that municipal issues, homelessness, health care and the environment were largely ignored. Also missing was any serious discussion of Canada’s digital economy. Mentions of “the economy” were plentiful, especially in Harper’s standard stump speeches, but the term invariably had an old-economy connotation: we are meant to think of auto plants and natural resources. The word “digital” barely passed the lips of any politician. An Internet search for “Harper digital economy” for the month prior to the election showed just one result among media organizations, and that thanks only to the NDP’s Jack Layton: on April 21 he called Harper a “Commodore 64 in an iPad world” who “thinks an app is something you order before dinner.”
Platform pledges Layton made the comment as he unveiled his own party’s plan for the digital econo6
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my, and only in those dusty and rarely read platform documents do we see actual digital economy plans. The Liberals took the strongest stance. The party called broadband access an “essential infrastructure, just as the electricity grid and the telephone network were a century ago.” It also set a timeline of three years for all Canadians to have access to basic broadband, stated that “Internet traffic management must remain neutral” and called for the federal government to be more aggressive users of technology. On security and copyright it offered only say-nothing pleasantries, but overall the Liberals were fairly strong, at least on paper. The Conservative platform presented an overly sunny assessment of Canada’s current digital-economy standing, but that is to be expected from the sitting government. It also pledged to support “collaborative projects between college and small and medium businesses,” which is a good idea. The NDP also promised broadband for all, funded in part by the national carriers, and pledged to outlaw ’net throttling and usage-based billing. So where does that leave us? The parties all have good basic ideas, and it has to be said that most are in line with the plan presented to the Conservatives last year by the Backbone Advisory Board. (http:// goo.gl/4eAdt) But ideas were never the problem; there are a lot of good ones. The problem has been a lack of action. So let’s hope Layton is wrong and Harper does not believe apps are pre-dinner starters. Let’s also hope the Government of Canada, whatever its specific political composition, is poised for decisive action on the digital economy. We’ve waited a long time, and the rest of the world is moving ahead without us.
Publisher Steve Dietrich sdietrich@backbonemag.com
EDITORIAL Editor Peter Wolchak pwolchak@backbonemag.com Contributing Editor Lisa Manfield lmanfield@backbonemag.com Art Director Shelley Walker swalker@backbonemag.com Production and Prepress Peter Pasivirta Online Communications Manager Sue Ansell sansell@backbonemag.com Contributing Writers Mathieu Yuill, Danny Bradbury, Ian Harvey, Lisa Manfield, Jim Harris, Lawrence Cummer Contributing Illustrators Jon Berkeley, Jason Reish Contributing photographers Dana Pugh Cover image Photo compliments o f Natural Resources Canada
ADVERTISING SALES Associate Publisher, Director of Sales Dinah Quattrin Tel: 416 993 9636 dquattrin@backbonemag.com ●
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PLEASE SEND COMMENTS TO: E-MAIL pwolchak@backbonemag.com LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Letters may be edited for length and clarity. MAILING ADDRESS 187 Rondoval Crescent, North Vancouver, BC V7N 2W6 FAX 604 986 5309 ●
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WEB SITE www.backbonemag.com MEDIA KIT www.backbonemag.com/mediakit EDITORIAL OFFICE 1676 Wembury Road, Mississauga, ON L5J 4G3 editor@backbonemag.com SUBSCRIPTIONS One-year subscription $25.95 (+ HST) within Canada $40.95 outside Canada To subscribe call: 604 986 5344 online: www.backbonemag.com/subscribe ●
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Backbone magazine is published six times per year by Publimedia Communications Inc. Year established, January 2001. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher, or the staff. All editorial is deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. The publisher is not responsible for any liability associated with any editorial or products and services offered by any advertiser. Copyright © 2011 Publimedia Communications Inc.
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Numbers from ThinkQuarterly
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Your business probably runs on Microsoft software. To see how your computers got to where they are today, Scottish IT pro Andrew Tait used the VMWare virtual environment to install every
79 per cent of students subjected to a media blackout for just one day reported adverse reactions ranging from distress to confusion and isolation
with DOS 5.0 and Windows 1.0 and finishing with Windows 7. He also took some time to play Doom 2 and Monkey Island on every version that supported them. The video he produced is a fun http://goo.gl/IQTVQ.
10 per cent of under-25s think it is ok to text during sex 100 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have executives on LinkedIn By 2014, mobile Internet should take over desktop Internet usage 48 million people in the world have a mobile phone but do not have electricity at home A birthday card with a chip that sings "Happy Birthday" has more computer power than all the Allied Forces of 1945
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version of Windows, starting
trip into the not-too-distant past:
Globally, we spend 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month. That’s 326,294 years
To see more of TinkQuarterly, go to: http://thinkquarterly.co.uk
Video: From DOS to Windows 7
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To get more detail, go to: http://goo.gl/IQTVQ
Kudos: $1 million donation to U of Waterloo The Kik Messenger smartphone app has been a huge hit for Canadian entrepreneur Ted Livingston: it reached one million downloads in only 15 days and Kik Interactive recently raised $8 million in seed funding. And Livingston, to his credit, is giving back: the 23 year old recently donated $1 million to the University of Waterloo’s VeloCity Residence, the incubator that nurtured his own entrepreneurial desires. And a fun fact about Livingston: he didn’t graduate.
A child with a smartphone has instant access to more information than the U.S. president did only 15 years ago
There are three times as many smartphones activated every minute than there are babies born ThinkQuarterly is a small book created by Google UK and sent out to partners and advertisers.
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He left the Engineering and Mechatronics program to start his company. Hey, if it’s good enough for Bill Gates.
All content also at: backbonemag.com/ magazine
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c lo u d c o mp ut i n g / c a s e s tudy / ia n ha rvey
Building a global cloud How one company tied all its offices, processes and people together and cut costs by 62 per cent François van Doesburg, president, IS/IT services director
Standard technology platforms deliver many business benefits (simplified support, streamlined processes, reduced costs), but when an enterprise is spread across Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and employs about 1,450 people, creating that standard platform is problematic. And that was the challenge facing Cossette, the advertising and communications services giant, and its vice-president of IS/IT services François van Doesburg. “We had outsourced five contracts for Microsoft Exchange servers in 2003; [the contracts] ran until 2008,” and with the renewal date approaching, the company started crunching numbers. “It was about $21 a month per user for 200 megabytes; one gig was $25 to $26,” he said, adding that with almost 1,500 employees those fees add up quickly. Owning the servers would have been cheaper but more problematic, given the geographic distribution. “Also, beyond email, our people are sharing a lot more documentation than they e-mail.”
The Google alternative Investigation led them to Google Apps, a suite of cloud office tools that encompasses everything from e-mail to word processing, spreadsheets, shared calendars and presentation. The big attraction is that the information is held in the Web, making it accessible to any authorized user. And at $50 a year per user, Apps is more affordable than solutions such as Microsoft Office. Also, as van Doesburg said, many of the creative folks at Cossette work on Apple machines, and Web-based solutions are operating-system agnostic, allowing IT to treat every user in the same way. Cossette started with a small pilot project in early 2009 and then “decided to roll this out to the entire IT team in May 2009,” he said. What impressed the team, van Doesburg said, was that when 12 b a c k b o nem ag. com
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Bill Whyte,
director of IT and operations
someone complained a feature wasn’t available—the ability to drag and drop a file into an e-mail for example—it would be added shortly afterward. “With other systems, sometimes you wait years for something to get fixed,” he said. But Google adds new features regularly and, as the system is Web-based, no one has to install upgrades. “It really was a love story from the start.”
Quick rollout, cost savings Still, there is a big difference between switching one department and switching an entire organization in three countries. The organization ran the pilot for one year before deciding to make the switch across the company.
The first deployment group involved 450 people in five U.K. offices who were being combined into one location, so upgrading their systems was timely. The U.K offices formed the template for subsequent deployments, said Bill Whyte, director of IT and operations, and the last of the offices will be switched over in 2011. All employees are also getting access to subsidized smartphones that will plug into Google Apps. “The big thing is simplicity,” Whyte said. “There’s one password and Mac users don’t feel like second class citizens.” User experience aside, it was the numbers that impressed the board, van Doesburg said. “It was costing $384,000 a year; that has dropped to $144,000, a 62 per cent cost saving. There were some one-time non-recurring training costs, but it is cheaper and scalable, which really impresses the CFO. In fact, I’ve talked about this experience a couple of times to other groups and I’d be more than happy to talk to any CIO who wants to know how it went and what we learned.” B
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Living green in
photo: dana pugh
Imagine living in Canada’s only masterplanned solar energy community. You’re picturing tie-dyed shirts, hybrid cars, organic food and a general atmosphere of modern suburban bliss out of an early Jim Carey movie, right? But other than the array of 800 solar panels on every garage, and the relatively unobtrusive Energy Management Facility on the edge of this 52-unit residential development, Drake Landing Solar Community is much like any other Canadian development. “You definitely don’t have to be a weirdo to live here,” said Robert Pew, a mechanical engineer who, with his wife and two children, was one of the very first to put down roots there. Located in the bedroom community of Okotoks, a 30-minute drive south of downtown Calgary, Drake Landing is the first largescale purpose-built community anywhere in the world to generate heat from solar and store it in the ground for use during the winter months. Today, that system delivers up to 80 per cent of the community’s heating requirements and removes five tonnes of greenhouse gases per home from the atmosphere every year. Keith Paget, manager of special projects with homebuilders Sterling Homes, said that when his company began constructing Drake Landing in 2005, it expected “the Yuppie-type person” would be most attracted to its clean-energy, low-carbon approach. “In the end, we got a variety of everybody,” including the downsizing “over-50s crowd,” young families and singles.
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Pew said people were drawn from as far afield as Washington State and Quebec specifically to be part of the Drake Landing approach. It is fair to say, though, that many environmentally conscious types call these 1,600-square-foot units home: visitors will spot a fair number of rain collection systems, composting bins and “zero-scaped” yards. (Zero-scaped yards, like Pew’s, have no lawn and use plants and flowers that are better suited to the region’s dry climate.) In fact, Pew said the only downside to living in Drake Landing is that during those long, hard Alberta winters, snow can build up on the solar panels, forcing him to actually shovel his roof. He also said his garage, which is steeply angled so the solar panels can draw in as much sun as possible, casts a fairly long shadow over the backyard, causing the snow to linger a bit in the spring. With other like-minded people in the neighbourhood, Pew said Drake Landing residents are a fairly tight-knit bunch. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few folks who are there just because they like the houses. According to Pew, there are even a few environmentally unfriendly monster trucks that can be seen prowling up and down the streets from time to time. “I can’t imagine those people are here because this is a solar-heated community.”
How it works When you’re talking about a place that’s bitterly cold for a good chunk of the year, it’s easy to forget that Southern Alberta is actually an ideal location for generating solar energy. Okotoks, for example, is among the sunniest cities in Canada, boasting an average of 2,400 hours of sunshine annually.
Drake Landing All types are flocking to this world-leading experimental solar community
You definitely “don’t have to be a weirdo to live here.
”
–ROBERT PEW, one of the first Drake Landing buyers
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Dr. Watson will
illustration: jason raish
IBM’s latest supercomputer has conquered Jeopardy and it’s now getting ready for your next checkup
IBM in February set out to prove once again that computers can beat humans at their own game. Watson, its latest showpiece supercomputer, took on two of Jeopardy’s biggest winners—Ken Jennings, who holds the record for most wins, and Brad Rutter, who has won the most money. It was a match reminiscent of 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue Supercomputer beat world champion chess player Gary Kasparov. Since then, IBM has searched for ways to showcase technology’s power to impact lives. Why Jeopardy? “Back in 2004, one of our executives noticed that at 7:00 pm in the restaurant he was in, everyone went to the bar to watch TV during Jennings’ run,” said Jennifer ChuCarroll, a member of IBM’s Watson algorithm team. “One of our criteria is that it has to be a research project and it has to get the public’s attention.” And get attention Watson did. Not only did its Jeopardy performance send ratings soaring for the veteran show but it also got people talking about the potential of natural language processing. “We wanted to show that a computer can do something people think is smart and on the cutting edge.” If you watched the show, however, you’ll know that Watson didn’t answer every question correctly. In fact, its accuracy rate was about 70 per cent. That’s because the process by which it works to answer questions produces a series of potential responses, each with a confidence rating. Getting to those responses means understanding the question, which requires making relational linkages between its various components. “It parses
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the question into names, places, dates and their relations,” ChuCarroll said. “For example, if it’s a book by an author, it has to know there’s an author relation. So it needs to know what to search for to get the most relevant content, and it uses lots of scorers on the candidate answers. It puts out over 160 answers, but only the top three were shown with confidence ratings.” It does all that in three seconds, before buzzing in to respond. And luckily, 70 per cent accuracy was enough to win a million dollars on Jeopardy, which IBM donated to charity. It’s also proving enough to revolutionize industries much less trivial than TV trivia games. First up: health care.
Watson goes to the doctor With its ability to access 16 terabytes of data (200 million pages of content were loaded onto Watson for the Jeopardy match, using only a quarter of that space) and answer questions posed in natural language, Watson has great potential for applications in health care. “Watson is going to be able to help humans find the information they need from a large collection efficiently,” Chu-Carroll said. For doctors, in particular, it’s a pressing need. “There’s a long history of collecting information in medicine,” said Dr. Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine in biomedical informatics at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. “There are electronic textbooks and PubMed, which has every article that’s ever been published, and original research. Watson has access to all of that in a fraction of a second.” To assess doctors’ needs and adapt Watson
see you now
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We're stuck with a du South of the border, the federal government is pumping billions into making its electrical systems more intelligent. It’s a great idea, so why aren’t we doing it too? Canada may be a key producer of staple goods such as wood, oil and wheat, but let’s not forget another key export: electrons. Canada is the fifth largest producer of energy in the world and exports approximately 51 gigawatt hours to the U.S. each year. Moving that power around the country and south of the border effectively continues to be a challenge, however.
Traditionally, electrical grids have been dumb. Their ability to understand what was happening to the electricity flowing across them has been limited, as has their understanding of what customers were doing with those electrons. That makes it difficult to introduce new energy sources to the grid and it cripples attempts to reduce energy wastage.
How smart is Canada’s smart grid? Canada’s smart grid movement has received some funding from the federal government’s Clean Energy initiative, which devoted $1 billion to clean technology development. Most of the funding for smart grid developments has been provided at a provincial level, however, which means that the race has been unevenly run. How have each of the provinces and territories fared in their pursuit of a smart grid?
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Yukon Yukon Energy has consulted with energy stakeholders and produced a 2010 to 2012 energy strategy that calls for demand-side management, net metering and a renewable energy target.
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BC
BC Hydro has announced a smart metering program that will see B.C.-based Corix utilities roll out the two-way devices to 1.8 million homes across the province. Capgemini will oversee the back-end project implementation.
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Alberta 75% of Alberta’s energy currently comes from coal. The province has undertaken a public inquiry on smart grid technology. The results were originally to have been published at the end of 2010, but at the time of as of April 2011 it was still in progress. Some automated metering projects have rolled out, enabling meters to be read via power lines. Fortis (a power company that delivers to five provinces, including Alberta) rolled out 108,000 meters, although the Alberta Utilities Commission refused to pay $22 million extra after it went over budget. Fortis and the AUC are now in dispute and an announcement should be made by June.
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saskatchewan Little work has thus far been conducted on smart grid technology in Saskatchewan, which still relies heavily on ageing coal-based plants, but which is currently mulling a nuclear option. Investigating smart grid technology is currently listed as an objective of the medium-term plan adopted by SaskPower, its electricity company. The medium-term plan runs from 2016 to 2023.
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dumb electricity grid But modern electrical grids across the developed world are getting smarter, equipped with two-way communication devices that use the same basic protocols the Internet uses.
Starting with smart meters For many, smart grids start with smart meters. Traditional electricity meters—the ones requiring a worker to come out quarterly to take a reading—don’t talk to the grid. A smart meter talks back, telling the grid how much electricity the customer is using on a regular basis. Duncan Stewart, director of research in life sciences
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and green tech at Deloitte Canada, said some smart meters take instructions, too. “The smart meter would work really well if the meter could control the dishwasher,” he said. In an ideal world, an electrical utility experiencing peak demand might charge more for electricity than it would when demand was low. If the utility could instruct a smart meter to tell a washer and dryer to start its cycle an hour later (with the customer’s consent) then it could save that customer money. Appliance vendors are already working on smart appliances: Whirl-
Northwest Territories ATCO subsidiary Northern Utilities has installed automatic meter reading systems in Yellowknife.
Definition
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Nunavut Nunavut is served by the Qulliq Energy Corporation, delivering energy through Nunavut Power. It is not connected to the North American grid and has none of its own production facilities. It uses diesel generators serving local communities.
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SMART GRID: A set of utility applications that enhance and automate the monitoring, control and functionality of electrical distribution networks.
Ontario Ontario mandated that every home should have a smart meter by 2010, and according to IDC Energy Insights, more than95% of the 4.7 million eligible endpoints in Ontario had smart meters by the end of last year. It also passed the Green Energy Act in 2009 that allocated more money to investments in smart grid technology.
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Quebec The main power company in Quebec, government-owned Hydro-Québec, landed $6 million in funding from the Federal Clean Energy Fund last year to develop a smart grid project zone in the south shore area, near Montreal. IT was was “sketching out” elements of a smart grid last year with its research arm, Ireq.
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Newfoundland In its 2010 general rate application, Newfoundland Power said that beyond automatic meter reading, it has no plans to implement smart grid technologies, and questioned its cost effectiveness.
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and PEi New Brunswick Power, Nova Scotia Power and Maritime Electric Co. are all working on a smart grid pilot project called PowerShift Atlantic. The project, which will cost $32 million in all, received more than $15 million in funding from the Federal Clean Energy initiative.
Manitoba Manitoba ran a pilot project with pay-as-you-go smart meters in the middle of the last decade, but there has been been little movement since then. b a c k b o n e ma g .c o m
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Social media,
lend me your ears
illustration: jon berkeley
Companies are establishing social media listening posts to better hear what customers are saying Everyone knows the key to a good relationship is communica- about social media, assigning dedicated staff via its Social Outtion. And half of that equation involves listening. Yet when it reach Services (SOS) program and @DellCares customer care comes to the relationships businesses have with their custom- and tech support, which operates in 11 languages. “If you need ers, listening—particularly on social media channels—has not help, that team will reach out,” Mehta said. “The reaction we got from that was amazing. That got us thinking about where been a strong suit. In a 2010 study entitled New Conversation: Taking Social else listening could be invented across the company—for qualMedia from Talk to Action, the Harvard Business Review re- ity control, ideating and as an early warning system.” Realizing that a higher degree ported that 75 per cent of companies of listening would not only solve surveyed did not know where their most valuable customers were talk- Almost 31 per cent of companies customer problems but could also improve sales, help in the acquisiing about them. Nearly 31 per cent weren’t measuring social media ef- weren’t measuring social media tion of talent and inform product development, Dell decided its social fectiveness and less than 23 per cent effectiveness and less than media strategy needed to be even were using social media monitoring bigger. “We needed to do this at the tools. 23 per cent were using social company-wide level,” Mehta said, Only 12 per cent of the companies “otherwise we might miss systemic surveyed felt they were using social media monitoring tools or broad-based issues.” media tools effectively, and these So Dell launched its Social Media respondents consisted mainly of –NEW CONVERSATION: TAKING SOCIAL Listening Command Center in Decompanies that made use of various MEDIA FROM TALK TO ACTION, 2010 cember, an operational hub based at communication channels and metrics, that had a strategy for social media use and that integrated its Round Rock, Texas campus, designed to allow the company to effectively monitor and respond to communication across social media into their overall marketing operations. multiple social media channels. And likely those that also focused on listening. Using Radian6 social media monitoring software, the comDell: getting an earful mand centre tracks “all social media around the world,” said In December 2010, Dell launched a Social Media Listening Com- Richard Binhammer, a Dell senior manager in strategic corpomand Center, and it’s fair to say the move was forced on the rate communications, social media and corporate reputation company. Back in 2005, angry customers bludgeoned the brand management, “including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, community in the blogosphere, accusing it of turning a deaf ear to com- forums, YouTube and podcasts.” If it sounds a bit like a war room, that’s exactly what it looks plaints. But times have changed at Dell: nowadays, listening has become more than just a social media strategy: it’s a com- like, with glass walls and giant monitors tracking social media conversations in real time. The listening centre currently logs pany philosophy. And social media has given the company many extra ears 22,000 daily social media mentions for Dell, and it’s not just the with which to hear. “We started our listening program in 2006,” number of messages being counted, but also their topics and said Manish Mehta, vice-president of social media and commu- sentiment, as well as the number of followers and their reputanity, adding that listening enabled Dell to recognize three types tion and location. How does the company handle such volume? “Not every of customers: “customers who needed help, customers who talkone you would respond to,” Mehta said. “The ones that are truly ed nicely about our products and customers with great ideas.” This resulted in the launch of Dell’s IdeaStorm platform, actionable are few. If a customer needs help, we help him or which allowed the company to capture ideas customers were her. If the customer is an influencer and has made a great sugoffering. But it wasn’t until a year ago that Dell got more serious gestion, we’ll reach out. Dell’s philosophy is around customer
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Green devices, pr and one flat-out f Kill power vampires Belkin Conserve Valet, Insight and Smart AV Vampire or standby power is the electricity wasted by devices that draw power even when you’re not using them, like game consoles and phone chargers. Natural Resources Canada pegs the average per-household vampire load at between 5.09 and 5.80 terawatt-hours per year, and it calls that a conservative estimate. Belkin recently released a set of products aimed at taming vampires. The Conserve Insight ($30) sits between a plug and TVs or game consoles. It measures electricity use in watts and calculates the cost of operation and the amount of carbon dioxide produced. For your home theatre, pick up the clever Conserve Smart AV ($40): the surgeprotected power bar detects when your TV is switched off and automatically powers down the plugs connected to components like game consoles, Blu-ray players and stereo receivers. A couple of always-on plugs handle equipment that needs to stay powered, like a DVR. A third Belkin gadget, the Conserve Valet ($40), is a multi-device charger that shuts down when the BlackBerrys, iPhones and Game Boys are charged. This is important because standard chargers draw power even when no device is connected to them.
Good thing it's durable Parrot AR.Drone Quadricopter It’s a helicopter, it’s controllable from an Apple iPhone or touch, it has cameras that stream video to your handheld and it moves fast. And the whole copter can be surrounded by an included foam bumper, which is good because indoors you will crash this into stuff. Often. The Drone’s four horizontal rotors make it feel more like a flying hovercraft than a helicopter; the relative speed of each rotor steers and moves the copter and allows it to automatically adjust for turbulence. The Drone generates its own Wi-Fi network to link to your handheld, so it can be used indoors or out. There is also an augmented-reality game that lets you fire “missiles” at other Drones. Unfortunately, the battery tops out at about 15 minutes, and for the first few flights you’ll just start getting the hang of it as the juice dies. But don’t let that deter you: this is one fun toy. It retails for $350 and is widely available at Best Buy. 44 b a c k b o nem ag. com
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roductivity tools fun toy Living up to the hype Motorola Atrix
If you follow mobile technology you’ve been following the Atrix, and with good reason: the handheld sports a dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a qHD smartphone display, front- and rearfacing cameras, a biometric fingerprint reader and up to 48GB of storage. Those are specs more reminiscent of an ultra-light notebook than a smartphone. The Atrix costs $170 on a three-year contract from Bell and it is one of the best Android handsets on the market. But wait, there’s more, because Motorola used the processing power of the Atrix to ask a really interesting question: why carry two sets of processors and two data stores? Because that’s what everyone lugging a notebook and a smartphone does. Why not instead use smartphone brains to power a notebook? Enter the LapDock ($330), which has the look and components (keyboard, screen, battery) of a thin and light notebook but without any smarts. The processing and data come from the Atrix, docked at the back of the LapDock. The combo offers the phone’s screen and all its functionality plus a minimalist OS that launches Web apps and supports a Firefox browser, Google Docs or other online office suites, and a native PDF reader. Together it doesn’t quite deliver the full notebook experience, as there’s no Windows and no big apps like Microsoft Word, Photoshop Elements or Apple iTunes. So if the overall experience is less than that of a notebook, why bother? Some people shouldn’t: buy the phone but stick with a notebook or netbook. But users who don’t need a full-on Windows experience in a mobile solution will be attracted by the portability, convenience and reasonable price of this dynamic duo.
web gear Belkin www.belkin.com Motorola www.motorola.ca Parrot http://ardrone.parrot.com
All content also at: backbonemag.com/magazine
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events
conferences expos tradeshows forums
and other events
May
Essentials of Outsourcing - Executive Education
Outsourcing Strategy and Scoping Executive Education
INplay 2011 Interactive Ontario Toronto, Ontario, May 17-18, 2011
Centre for Outsourcing Research and Education (CORE) Toronto, Ontario, June 7, 2011
OCE Discovery 11 Ontario Centres of Excellence Toronto, Ontario, May 18-19, 2011
Technology Impact Awards 2011 Vancouver, British Columbia, June 7, 2011
CORE (Centre for Outsourcing Research and Education) Toronto, Ontario, September 20-21, 2011
Canadian CommTech Show Kelowna, British Columbia, May 18-19, 2011
All About the Cloud SIIA San Diego, California, June 13-15, 2011
CVCA 2011 Annual Conference Vancouver, British Columbia, May 25-27, 2011 Mesh 2011 Toronto, Ontario, May 25-26, 2011 e-Health 2011 Canada’s Health Informatics Association (COACH) May 29 - June 1, 2011 The Canadian Telecom Summit 2011 G.S.T. Conferences Inc. Toronto, Ontario, May 31 - June 2, 2011
June Social Media Camp Victoria, British Columbia, June 3-4, 2011 Information Technology Law Spring Forum IT.Can Canadian IT Law Association Toronto, Ontario, June 6-7, 2011
The Business of Cloud Computing Opal Events San Diego, California, June 13-15, 2011 SC World Congress 2011 Data Security Conference & Expo Toronto, Ontario, June 14, 2011
August Grow 2011 Dealmaker Media Vancouver, British Columbia, August 17, 2011
Itech Summit Diversified Business Communications Vancouver, British Columbia, September 22, 2011
October Banff Venture Forum 2011 Banff, Alberta, October 6-7, 2011 Data for All - Opening Up the Cloud Cybera Summit 2011 Banff, Alberta, October 6-7, 2011 GTEC 2011 Canada’s Government Technology Event Ottawa, Ontario, October 17-20, 2011 IT.CAN Conference (Fifteenth Annual) IT.Can Canadian IT Law Association Toronto, Ontario, October 27-28, 2011
September Itech Summit Diversified Business Communications Calgary, Alberta, September 20, 2011
If you would like more details on these events go to: Backbonemag.com/events
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