Blog Posts by Shane Schick

I am that person. The one who holds up the line during “coffee rush hour” between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m. at various Starbucks in the financial district, who fumbles in my wallet, finds nothing and ends up paying my $2.57 with my debit card. The process probably takes less than a minute but I can feel the glares behind my back, and I don’t blame them. Until we’re all living in a world of NFC mobile payments, however, that’s the way it’s going to be.

This week at the Canada 3.0 conference I had an opportunity to lead a session that looked at what near-field communications (NFC) technology will mean for all kinds of transactions between banks, retail stores, independent merchants at fairgrounds and, of course, consumers. The timing seemed right: CIBC launched an NFC payment system with Rogers late last year. RBC and Bell announced they would enter the fray later this summer. And yet Apple’s Tim Cook has dismissed NFC as being in its very early days. The resignation of a key exec responsible

If you’re happy and you know it, you’re probably a Canadian holding a smartphone.

OK, that may be stretching it just a little bit, but amid all the grumbling about high rates for wireless plans, frustrations with lack of carrier competition and increased calls for codes of conduct and new consumer protection laws, data released by Toronto-based J.D. Power and Associates this week was almost shockingly positive.

The firm’s annual rankings of wireless carriers showed that, despite seeing an average increase of 13 per cent on their monthly wireless phone bill between last year and now, Canadians’ overall satisfaction with their mobile phone services actually grew.

J.D. Power surveyed some 13,300 Canadians and looked at seven different factors to determine its satisfaction rankings, which are organized in an index that tallies up points. For example, there was a 46-point increase in the way consumers rated their satisfaction with buying products and services online from the carriers, and a

To me, the decision by Microsoft to release an updated version of its Windows 8 operating system is just another example of what we might call The Ribbon Problem.

For years, software designers at the Redmond-based technology giant were frustrated when consumers and business users would request various new features and functionality in Microsoft Word. Not because they weren’t willing to offer new things, but because in many cases (I’ve heard as high as 90 per cent of the time) the features and functionality were already there.

That’s why the company eventually built what was known as the ribbon, which tried to make those various tools and buttons more easy to discover by organizing them in a new way. Some people loved these changes. Some found them even more confusing. In the end, though, people kept using Word, the same way they’ll probably keep using Windows.

Of course, Windows 8, with its tile-based design, is a sea change in user interface compared to the ribbon, which is why the

There was a story earlier this week that prison inmates in the U.S. are using the online recommendation service Yelp to rate their jail cells. Is this … useful? Funny? Cool?

Those three options appear next to every review that appears on Yelp, which are written by everyday people rather than professional critics. Clicking on one of the useful/funny/cool buttons is a way to offer a user-generated review of a user-generated review, which may sound a little meta for those who aren’t well versed in social media. The point is that Yelp may be the one of the best examples of an organization that thinks globally but truly acts locally, creating a platform whereby people who may never speak to their next-door neighbours consider the opinions about nearby restaurants, dentists or beauty parlours. Investors can’t seem to get enough of it.

Although the company posted a first-quarter loss on Wednesday, shares spiked more than 27 per cent and closed at an all-time high of $32.22 on Thursday, perhaps

It has long been the key to BlackBerry’s popularity with core audience, but as far as explaining why, even Andrew MacLeod can’t quite put his finger on it.

“I’ve talked to some who are in their 50s, 60s and 70s who love it, but I’ve also talked to teens and college kids who prefer it too,” says BlackBerry’s managing director for Canada. “I haven’t really found a particular demographic.”

He is referring, of course, to the BlackBerry keyboard, which gets a new lease on life Wednesday with the launch of the BlackBerry Q10. Whereas the release of the Z10 was intended to show BlackBerry could keep pace with the likes of iOS and Android-based touchscreen smartphones from Apple and Samsung, the Q10 is the former Research In Motion’s way of reassuring customers it hasn’t walked away from its history. That’s certainly how MacLeod positions it.

“I think what we’re really doing here is giving back to that ardent group of BlackBerry fans who really love that QWERTY keyboard,” he says.

Despite all the

Like many Canadians, I occasionally have the urge (like today) to throw my mobile phone out the window, but I know that would do about as much good as counting on the government to protect my interests.

As I write these words a technician at a store for one of the big wireless carriers – who I won’t name out of fear of retribution – is trying to figure out why, for the third time, I’ve had to bring in a device I have owned for less than a year. Yes, it’s incredibly frustrating, but no more frustrating than watching the province of Ontario try and provide some false assurance to citizens that its proposed consumer protection legislation will have the slightest impact.

Instead of looking at what the new bill might change, let’s look first at what it won’t. Three-year contracts are probably here to stay. The contracts themselves, most likely, will continue to go unread, even if Ontario demands they be written in “plain language,” whatever that is. Confusion around accountability is also

It’s hard to know what’s shrinking faster: Apple’s ability to come up with new ideas, or the value of its shares. Either way, it’s not a race that inspires a lot of investor cheerleading.

As expected, Apple on Tuesday reported record sales but lower profit for the first time in a decade. This comes after a quarter in which iPhone shipments were lower, though sales of its iPad tablet have never been better.

“We know we didn’t meet everyone’s expectations,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a conference call to discuss the firm’s quarterly results. “We acknowledge our growth has slowed and the market has decreased.”

What’s worse is the sense that, unlike last year’s launch of the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini, there may not be many other blockbusters on the horizon for the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant in the months ahead. I have argued in this space before that Apple has matured enough as a business that it doesn’t necessarily need to come up with new tricks. That doesn’t mean there aren’t

After about 15 or 20 minutes, only two of the marshmallow towers were still standing in an Edmonton hotel ballroom. They rested atop a series of uncooked spaghetti pieces, bound with a little bit of masking tape and some string. They represented the ability of seasoned technology executives to successfully work together – many cases, their failure.

The marshmallow challenge has become a popular management training technique whereby groups of business people are given a short period to do something simple. Here, at national gathering of chief information officers this week, it was used to help attendees understand why innovation seems so hard to cultivate in Canada.

Evan Hu, co-founder of Toronto-based consulting firm Ideaca, explained that even the brightest IT gurus sometimes struggle with the marshmallow challenge because they lack the “experimental mindset” of children, who perhaps don’t take it as seriously and are more ready to make mistakes.

“IT people love to plan,” he said.