I have no idea if WIND Mobile is going to be able to deliver what they promise – a mobile phone company that listens to its customers and provides better service than the sad players in the Canadian mobile phone oligarchy – but they’ve got the right ideas and some rather funny videos that perfectly illustrate what the Canadian mobile customer has to contend with.
What if Toronto’s hot dog vendors had a pricing model like Canadian mobile phone companies? Buying a hot dog would be like this:
Canada is the only country in the world where mobile companies lock you into three-year contracts for mobile service, and this situation is illustrated in the video titled Bike Lock:
I always look at the service packages offered by U.S. mobile companies with envy. Here, the mobile companies love nickel-and-diming you:
WIND is a new entrant into the Canadian mobile phone market and a branch of Globalive Communications, who already have a presence in Canada in the form of Yak Communications, an alternative phone and internet provider. They seem to be taking a very “social media” approach to their marketing, what with the “viral” YouTube videos and a “conversational” website in which readers are encourage to actively participate in online discussions.
They look like an interesting company to watch, and hey, if they can get me a better deal than Rogers, I’ll switch.
As the health insurance debate in the United States heats up, we need to remember who the real victims are: health insurance executives. Will Ferrell, John Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Linda Cardellini and other Hollywood celebrities step up to defend health insurance companies in this video from FunnyOrDie.com…
Here’s a post for you readers who either program on the .NET framework, sysadmin Microsoft-based systems or have been thinking about doing either…
Today is your last chance to register for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver (September 14 – 15) and Toronto (September 29 – 30) conferences at the early bird price of CDN$299. Tomorrow, the price doubles to CDN$599 – that’s the price for procrastination!
I’ve written a lot aboutTechDaysCanada2009lately, so I think I’ll close with this video shot by the folks at TechVibes on the last leg of the TechDays Canada 2008 tour: Vancouver. It features my coworkers Rick Claus (IT Pro Evangelist) and Qixing Zheng (User Experience Evangelist) as well as Yours Truly (Developer Evangelist) talking about TechDays:
With the work we’re putting into TechDays, we think it’ll be the conference that offers you the most conference for your hard-earned dollars. It features big-league sessions delivered by local people plus great resources for you to take home (and to work) and supercharge the way you work with technology. You really should register today, while the early bird price is still in effect.
At the Mesh Conference held earlier this year, I was asked at the last minute to play an opening number for the big panel discussion on using social media for marketing. I decided to get cheeky and played AC/DC’s Big Balls, since having them is a quality that you need to really use social media and social networking to advantage. As I played, Kaz Ehara shot these photos:
Photos by Kaz Ehara. Click the photos to see them on their Flickr pages.
For those of you unfamiliar with the song, here it is, synced to clips from Spongebob Squarepants:
Chances are, as a reader of this blog, people ask you to explain Twitter to them. If that’s the case you might find this video in which Ben Stiller explains Twitter to Mickey Rooney amusing:
The Toronto Garbage Strike of 2009 may be over (as might be David Miller’s reign come election time next year) and garbage collection is resuming today, but that’s no reason not have a song about it. The Toronto Star posted a story today about The Toronto Garbage Song (a.k.a. Flush Your Garbage), which was written [...]
I love Jim Hance’s painting that adds a little Star Wars to the Hitchcock classic North by Northwest, titled Force by Northwest:
Click the painting to see it at full size.
On the painting’s page on the Artbreak site, it says “Acrylic on wood board painting, scanned and digitally manipulated.” Signed prints are available!
In case you [...]
Here’s a great scene from a Judge Judy case (never thought I’d write those words) in which a high school student learns about rhetorical questions the hard way: in front of millions of viewers!
And technically speaking, it’s astronomers and cosmologists who find out things about space, and what we think of as “rocket science” is [...]
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
Another internet meme made the big time today – today’s edition of CNN’s “American Morning” ended with anchor Kiran Chetry announcing that they would be “played out” by “Keyboard Cat”. In case you haven’t yet seen them, Keyboard Cat videos all follow the same formula:
When using your company-assigned laptop to make presentations, remember to disable your pornographically-themed screensaver (and yes, the video below is not safe for work):
In an earlier article, Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today, I posted a video in which jazz.funk sax man Branford Marsalis talked about his music students. His first lines in the interview are:
What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.
That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much [...]
The folks who said that Sarah Palin’s performance at last Thursday’s vice presidential debate didn’t leave Tina Fey any material were wrong — she killed in the opening skit, turning Palin’s perky but content-free non-answers into pure comedy gold. If you missed Saturday Night Live this weekend, you can enjoy the skit by clicking on [...]
Back in high school, after reading Space-Time and Beyond for the umpteenth time and drinking one too many zombies with my friend Henry, we came up with a theory:
In the infinite set of universes, there had to exist a particular universe in which the events in our lives were being watched as a TV show.
We then made a solemn vow to live the kind of life that got high ratings.
