Pirate Bay Deal Might Be Dead…. Again

Good grief. Microsoft/Yahoo had less plot twists than this mess.

After falling off the rails, then getting back on the rails, it seems The Pirate Bay deal has fallen off the rails again. First, the chairman of Global Gaming Factory (the people who want to buy The Pirate Bay) has resigned:

Magnus Bergman submitted his resignation to the Swedish Companies Registration Office (Bolagsverket) on Friday, according to a report in Svenska Dagbladet (SvD).

Bergman’s resignation is the latest in a series of setbacks to befall GGF after the previous departures of board member Johan Sällström and adviser Wayne Rosso.

This resignation comes after an announcement that they’re also facing some sort of criminal investigation:

“I have received a complaint about Global Gaming Factory but I can’t say more than that because the preliminary investigation is classified,” the head of the investigation, Anne-Marie Helander of the Swedish Economic Crime Authority, told AFP.

Lovely. And to top it off, trading in Global Gaming Factory stock has been suspended for the second time since this sleigh ride has started:

Trading was suspended a second time last Friday, after Aktietorget said it had received insufficient information from Global Gaming Factory about how it planned to finance the 60-million kronor ($ 8.5 million) purchase of The Pirate Bay, Gönczi said.

Swedish media have suggested that the acquisition announcement was merely a bluff to boost Global Gaming Factory’s share price.

That’s just awesome.

My thoughts? Stick a fork in it, this deal is done. I really don’t see how it can recover from all of this.

Bell TV Rep Confesses All?

Digital Home Canada has a story on their front page that is sure to upset customers of Bell TV. Someone claiming to be a Bell TV Rep has posted to the Digital Home Canada message board about what really goes on inside their call centers:

First of all, if you call in to downgrade your programming, most of the time you’ll notice people try and talk you out of it. Why? Because Bell gives us a bonus based on “Stopping the Downgrade”. There is information all over the office on how to stop people form removing programming, and we’re given a bonus based on it. If our downgrades are too high then our bonus that we receive is cut in half. Please don’t take it personally as we’re not paid very much to begin with, some of us need this bonus to live. But it doesn’t it make it right, especially when I have someone calling in because they lost their job and just want to save some money.

And:

Tech Support? In all honesty, most agents don’t care about solving your issue for the long term. They only care about making you comfortable with them so they can sell you something. Ever notice how you’ll be having a huge technical problem but for some reason everything reverts back to sales at the end of the call? It’s part of Bell’s “quality grid”. Upsell the customer, avoid the downgrade, OVERCOME OBJECTIONS. That’s the one that really bothers me. I hate bothering people for the sale because at the end of the day, they’re just spending more money when they don’t necessarily want to. All I hear all day around the office is how much money he or she got from the customer, I never, ever hear about how happy a customer was or how quickly an issue was resolved. It’s all about money for Bell, remember this if anything.

I’ll let you read the rest for yourself. Now the question is, could this be true? Based on my experiences in call centers, I can offer the following observations:

• Something that is drilled into every person who has ever worked in a call center is that they have to overcome objections when dealing with customers followed by increasing the amount of business the company in question gets from the customer.
• Once upon a time, I was one of the managers in a call center that paid bonuses for keeping a customer who was going to cancel or reduce their services.

The rest of this post has other examples of things that I have seen in call centers as well. So in short, I am inclined to believe that this post is genuine. The question is, will Bell respond to this with spin, a denial, a commitment to enhance their customer service, or just ignore it and continue with business as usual?

Oh, I hope this Bell rep has started mass e-mailing their resume as I suspect that if Bell can identify them, they won’t be working for Bell (or whatever call center company) for much longer.

Snow Leopard To Ship This Friday [UPDATED]

If you’re an Apple Fanboi, you’ll going to love the news that Apple is shipping their Snow Leopard operating system this Friday unless you have a Power PC based Mac:

“Snow Leopard builds on our most successful operating system ever and we’re happy to get it to users earlier than expected,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “For just $29, Leopard users get a smooth upgrade to the world’s most advanced operating system and the only system with built in Exchange support.”

I pre-ordered a copy when I got my replacement MacBook Pro this June and when I check my order status via the Apple Online Store, it still slated to ship in October. Perhaps that will change in the next few days? In any case, as soon as I get it, I’ll likely do a backup of my existing install and try it out. If anyone out there gets their hands on a copy of Snow Leopard, feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.

UPDATE: According to the Apple Online Store, my order is due to ship by August 28th. I should note that I only paid $13 CDN for this as I bought a Mac after June 8th. So if you just bought a Mac, make sure to click here so that you can get Snow Leopard for less. You should note that your order has to be in within 90 days of the purchase of your Mac, or December 26th 2009 whichever is earlier.

Surviving The Big Storm In Toronto

The Greater Toronto Area got hit by a storm that generated tornadoes that caused large amounts of damage and killed one person. There was lots of lighting about and that usually generates lots of dead electronics. So, how do you survive something like this? In my condo, I have the following on my electronics:

• All my computer equipment are on UPSes. They not only allow me to have the computers safely shut down in the event of an extended power outage, but they provide stable power at all times.
• My A/V equipment is hooked up to a APC power conditioner. Specifically this one which acts like a UPS without the battery backup functions. It simply provides stable power at all times.
• Everything else such as my phones and answering machines are on power bars.

Now I have to say that if you rely only on power bars to protect your electronics, that is a major risk as most power bars do not provide sufficient protection for electronic gear. So if you use them, you have to be willing to accept that you might lose the gear that’s plugged into power bars. But I have one other thing that covers me. I added a surge protector at my main service panel. That way I don’t have to have a surge protector plugged into everything and in the event of a lightning strike it takes the hit rather than all my electronic gear. That way I have multiple layers of surge suppression protecting everything in my condo. Adding a surge protector at the main service panel is something I STRONGLY recommend that you do if you can. It cost me $650 including labor for a qualified electrician to do it.

So how did my electronics and computers deal with this massive storm? All my computers shut down when power was cut. One of the computers didn’t start when power was restored 36 hours later (which is a ridiculous amount of time for Toronto Hydro to get service restored to my condo IMHO…But I digress) due to a dead power supply. I keep a few new power supplies lying around for customers who have power supply issues, and you can find them at your local computer store for $30 to $70. The computer had been running 24/7 for 3.5 years so the failure of the power supply was likely not storm related. My other electronic gear survived just fine. So basically I came out okay.

Now I have to deal with many of my customers who were not as lucky. I’m now off to a customer who appears to have taken a direct hit from a lightning strike. From the sounds of it, anything electronic in his house is dead. It sucks to be him and I wouldn’t want to be his insurance company.

Microsoft To Get “Speedy” Appeal… Get Ready To Rumble!

Microsoft is going to get its day in court to try and overturn their stunning court defeat from earlier this month:

An appeals court in Washington said this week it will hear arguments Sept. 23 on Microsoft’s request to delay an earlier order that awarded $290 million to Toronto company i4i and also imposed a permanent injunction on selling Word in the U.S. effective Oct. 10.

You can fully expect that Microsoft will show up with a army of lawyers and patent experts in order to shoot i4i out of the sky. Otherwise, the distraction of having to either pull Microsoft Word off shelves (which won’t happen IMHO) or come out with some sort of patch that avoids the i4i patent (which is much more likely if they lose IMHO) will be a major one in the lead up to their Windows 7 launch.

It will be interesting to see what i4i rolls into court with. After all, their pockets are not as deep as Microsoft’s, and that my tip the scales in the favor of Microsoft.

Rogers Announces TV Call Display [UPDATED]

I received a tip from my “new best friends at Rogers” that they’re going to roll out a new service called TV Call Display. In a nutshell, if you are a Rogers Home Phone customer as well as a Rogers Digital TV customer, you will be able to see the name and number of incoming calls on your television screen. They’ll be no extra charge for this feature if you already subscribe to Rogers Home Phone customer as well as Rogers Digital TV. Sounds interesting. I haven’t got the full details on this just yet because I have no power at home due to a wicked storm that rolled through Toronto yesterday, but I’ll post more info when I can.

UPDATE: Now that I have power (it took you long enough Toronto Hydro… WTF? 36 hours to restore power?) I can post a picture of what this service will look like on your TV. Photo provided by Rogers.

Bell Launches Palm Pre Ad…. Looks Like An iPhone Ad…

You have to wonder exactly who works in Bell’s creative department. Following on the heels of some rather “interesting” advertising for their Internet service, comes the following advertisement for the Palm Pre which is due to launch later this month. It seems like a rather blatant ripoff of an Apple iPhone ad to me. But you can judge for yourself if Bell needs to find staff for their creative department who are actually creative.

Online Petition Calls For The Death Of The CRTC…. ABOUT TIME!

From the “why the hell didn’t someone think of this sooner” department, comes the news that a online petition has been started to demand that the CRTC be dissolved:

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was created for the purpose of ensuring broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public and ensure that Canadians have a wide variety of options to create and view works of media or communicate across the country and the entire world.

We, the undersigned, believe that the CRTC has become a burden on the Canadian public and are failing to perform their duties in the interest of the Canadian public and that of a fair and unbiased telecom policy.

In the last 3 years, we have seen the CRTC give undue preference in the interest of commercial entities and their preference for traditional business models over competing models that would create competition and help ensure that new business models can be created to entice and prosper original Canadian productions.

Given some of the recent decisions that the CRTC has made, such as their tax Local Television Improvement Fee, and giving Bell Canada the ability to do usage based billing on their wholesale DSL customers, it’s hard to argue for keeping them around.

As I write this there are 1419 signatures on this petition and according to this CBC story, the goal is to get to at least 10,000. According to the creator of this petition, this is what needs to happen:

[Mike] Lerner told CBC News the government needs to replace the current regulator with a body that is staffed by people who are in touch with the new technology and competition models being introduced by the internet.

“You need some people who have experience with telecom but you also need some people who understand the new types of competition. They just don’t have any experience in that field,” he says.

I couldn’t agree more. Plus the fact that the CRTC is staffed with ex-telco execs who rubber stamp everything that Bell Canada wants likely doesn’t help matters much either.

So if you’re Canadian, sign this petition. It’s the only way that Canada will get out of the technological backwater that it finds itself in when it comes to Internet access. Plus while you’re at it, you should do the following as well:

1. Find your local MP and tell them why the CRTC sucks.
2. Then go to the Heritage Minister (The CRTC reports to this ministry) and the Industry Minister (The CRTC also reports here) and tell them why the CRTC sucks
3. Tell your friends about this petition via blogs, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, e-mail, smoke signal.

It’s time for some change. Real change. Change we can believe in. It’s time for the CRTC to go and be replaced with something a lot more forward thinking and arms length from the telecommunications industry.

Rogers REDUCING Visual Voicemail Storage For iPhone Users…. WTF?

This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Rogers has announced that as of October 1st, the amount of space that Visual Voicemail users (meaning iPhone users) get is going to be reduced.

Currently this is what you get if you subscribe to Visual Voicemail:

Storage of unheard messages: 30 Days

Storage of heard messages: 30 Days

Number of messages stored: Up to 50 Voice Messages at 5 minutes each.

As of October 1st, this is what you’ll get:

Storage of unheard messages: 10 Days

Storage of heard messages: 10 Days

Number of messages stored: Up to 35 Voice Messages at 5 minutes each.

If you do the math, the amount of time that you’ll get to keep messages has been cut by two thirds and the amount of space has been cut by about a third. I’m also going to take a wild guess that you’ll still be charged the same dollar amount for having Visual Voicemail. Oh yeah, with apologies to Steve Jobs, there’s one more thing:

On the day the changes take effect, any message that has been deposited in your voicemail box more than 20 days prior, will be deleted. Messages beyond the maximum number of 35 allowable, but less than 20 days old, will remain, but you will need to delete messages to allow for any new additional messages.

Lovely.

Here’s why I don’t get this:

1. As far as I can tell regular and enhanced voicemail services haven’t been changed. Meaning if you don’t have an iPhone, you have nothing to worry about. That somehow doesn’t seem quite fair. Perhaps there’s a really logical reason for this that someone can explain to me.
2. Why would Rogers risk ticking off the Apple fanboi community in Canada with a move like this? Once the news starts to spread, you know that it will start a major PR nightmare for Rogers. They’ve been through this once before. Why even go there again?

I’m just going to sit back and watch the “fun” from a distance as this is going to get very interesting in a hurry.

The Pirate Bay’s Plan To Make Itself Legal Is Doomed To Fail

Torrentfreak has a story that details how Global Gaming Factory who are the new owners of The Pirate Bay plan on making the site legal:

“The holder will be able to leave the file and obtain compensation or ask for removal of the file. GGF will also pay any penalties that may arise,” the GGF board announced. There are no licensing agreements in place with the entertainment industry yet, but GGF hopes to partner with most of the major movie studios and record labels within a year.

Four words come to mind when I read the above statement: Good luck with that. Why do I feel that way? Simple. The business model is to take away the things that people are  interested in, and start charging for whatever is left. On top of that they will pay for any copyright issues that arise out of their own pockets. Meanwhile other torrent sites will have the stuff that people are interested in for free (although it would be just as illegal as The Pirate Bay used to be. Not that people who use torrents care about details like the law). The end result is that The Pirate Bay will be dead very quickly.

This is the worst business model I have ever seen.

It amazes me how Global Gaming Factory can believe that they would have a viable business after they do all of this. Perhaps it’s the cheap drugs they’re smoking?