Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

My old friends, since you’ve been asking, here what’s new with me these days. Much! Starting just last week I’ve taken on a great new client. That work is going to be keeping me really busy 3-4 days of the week for the next few weeks. I’m helping out one of downtown’s major financial organization with a project that’s both rather enjoyable and devilishly secret.

While that work is paying the bills, Jevon and I are fast at work on the Firestoker poject. Yes, watch for these rumours to start coming true around the 22nd of September. Of course, if you can’t wait this long feel free to give me a call, let’s go for coffee and I’ll give you private demo of our upcoming product. In other very cool Firestoker news, Jo Brown has just agreed to join our team, at least for the near term. She’s in charge of sales and we’ve anointed her the Queen of Revenue. (yes my gosh, revenue! how déclassé un-web2.0 of us, and she doesn’t even keep a blog — oh the humanity…) And of course, we’re hiring developers too and hoping to make an announcement on that soon as well. You saw the job posting right?

And lastly with the other 2 or 3 of the 26 hours of the day, I’m signed up for a completely irrational number of filmfest movies and concerts this month. Mini-reviews to come! and then democamp and casecamp and with luck, another enterprise 2.0 camp…

what of the other usual sorts of personal updates? no, sadly no new spouses, houses, little ones to report. No, no puppy, not even a fish. Maybe next month? At least items for the long-term checklist, alongside “sleep”.

From the window 37 floors up and street level in the lobby at Bay and King, I can see it. Yes it’s there, it’s open and free. Now, has anyone had any luck connecting to the damn thing?

update: I mean, besides Mr Miller ?

Have you seen what the carriers in Canada charge for EVDO access? A great service that many in the US and elsewhere rave about. get a little card for your laptop and “Life is good—it’s like the whole world is one big Wifi network with this card. If you own a computer that can use an EVDO card, you have to get one.” (Guy Kawasaki). Great! I’m sold… so what are Bell Canada’s rates for EVDO wireless data transfer?

Now for the math. EVDO has a maximum advertised speed of 700kbs (downstream). Assuming I remember how computers work, this is 700bits/8bits perByte, 1024kBytes/MB or 0.0854 MB/s. and there are 3600seconds in an hour. So bell “recommends” that you get the 100/month plan with EVDO. What you get for $100/month? Say you want to download a large file (gasp) or (god forbid) watch some streaming video or something. At maximum speed your 250MB monthly allowance would last you exactly less than 49 minutes*. And after that, at 3/MB, Bell will let you surf the Internet for the low low incremental price of only $923/hour (or $15/minute). And you thought printer ink was expensive.

And wait for it, do the math on their “lite plan” and at $12/mb that works out to a theoretical maximum charge of $29,531/hr. wow, great! where do I sign up?

Of course another local carrier Telus also offers EVO. It’s funny because, in what must be a truly remarkable coincidence of free-market capitalism, Telus is also advertising the *exact same* prices and pricing structure as Bell Canada.

not that it matters for switching anyway, our country seems to be the last in the civilized world to offer number portability.

Oh Canadian telecom regulators, what have you done for me recently?

*assuming that maximum speed is attainable, assuming you pay for actual and not just effective bandwidth used including packet overhead and such, but not even counting corresponding upstream bandwidth used which would jack up the cost even further

update: just for fun, lets say you signed up for the lite plan and left a bit torrent (for example) running and they allowed you to saturate your bandwidth for the entire month. What is the maximum bill you could theoretically see on your monthly statement? $3691/hr x (up to) 744 hrs in a month = that would be a 2.746 Million dollar phone bill.