I’ve been quite busy with work during the holidays. I had a huge mandate to complete for January 4th. This doesn’t mean I’m always at the office. I’m always looking for new way to make my office more mobile.

This is why I’ve been using an IP Telephony service (from Ubity in Montreal) for a year now. With such a service, you can plug your phones anywhere there’s an Ethernet jack.

Location, location

The location where I’m at doesn’t matter. I could be in Mexico, in Europe, wherever and when I use my phone, it’s my office phone calling locally from Montreal.

So, I have a phone plugged in at my office, I have one at home and I have another one at my cottage. When the phone rings these 3 phones will all ring at the same time and I can answer like I was at the office. When I call someone, I always look as if I was at the office. I can be at my cottage and answer as if I was at the office after a day of skiing.

Not only that, I also have software phone support. So, when travelling, I can use my laptop at the hotel to make calls: I just plug in my iPhone headphones (which as a microphone) and I still appear as being in the office when returning calls from clients!

I’ve also installed a VoIP application on my iPhone called iSip. Unfortunately, it does not allow to make calls over the 3G network yet. It only supports Wi-Fi. The cool thing is I can be having a glass of port and smoking a cigar on my terrace and use the phone to call back clients or partners while still looking as if I’m at the office!

The day I’ll move my office, I just need to plug the phone somewhere else and I’m instantly ready to make and answer calls.

Features

This kind of service has all the usual telephony and corporate voicemail features for an affordable price. Calls in North America are free (1000 minutes per months) and calls to countries the other side of the Ocean are ridiculously cheap. On top of that I have features such as “find me” where in my corporate voicemail, people can press a button in my inbox to find me. They get to speak their names while the service calls my cell phone. Then, when receiving the call on my cell phone, after listening to who’s calling, I can press a button to accept or ignore the call.

The downside is I’m extremely reachable. But I often need to be.

The upside is that I can enjoy the pleasures of life a bit more and work where it’s more practical and enjoyable while looking like I’m never leaving my office and even sleeping there!

My cats just love their MTV!

Posted via email from Jerome’s posterous

My friend Michelle, the most famous blogger in Quebec, recently re-opened the Pandora box (text in French) about content piracy. Her case is simple: as an avid Lost fan, she simply has no legal means to watch the first 4 episodes of this season to catch up to her recorded episodes.

Another friend, Philippe Martin, tweeted about an article from France that talks about the 3 strikes law they are looking to adopt in France. In France, some suggested an amendment that propose to intervene only when the downloaded content is already available on the Internet. Interesting idea. In another tweet, Philippe points me to “Quebecor Opens Door to Canadian Three Strikes Policy”.

With the CRTC currently investigating net neutrality and being lobbied by companies such as Quebecor for a law similarly abusive than what a few countries like France want, I decided to play the role of a legislator and ask myself:

What would be the perfect anti-piracy law?

I don’t know if it’s perfect, but I think I came up with a damn good one.

Please note that to simplify the language I loosely use the term content owner. I am targeting the music and movie industry when referring to content owners.

Here’s the draft of my perfect anti-piracy law:

• An individual can download and share digital content from any source unless:
• the content has already been made available for download by the content owner
• the content was never released for personal listening or viewing by the content owner
• the content made available by the content owner is not copy protected

I haven’t talked about any coercive measures. That wasn’t the point. I wouldn’t wish for ISPs to spy on individuals. The point is that if you make content available for download through purchase (or freely with advertising), you are answering the needs of the consumer. You wouldn’t have any excuse to pirate and it would be easier to go against real pirates (those who profit from piracy).

Such a law would be progressive because it forces the music and movie industry to rethink their business model.

For example, no more region locking. If Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie available for download in Canada but would in the USA, it would be fare game for Canadians to download and share freely. It would force them to review global licensing issues.

It would also incite Canadian content owners to offer their content for download across the globe. I think it would benefit artists and everyone involved. I am confident artists would increase their royalties through increased sales.

It’s also important to allow individuals to be able to play the content the way they want to play it. To simplify things for consumers, content should not be copy protected. If I want to play my purchased movie through an iPod, the computer, an XBox, whatever, I should be able to. If I want to play a digital movie I purchased on the TV screen instead of the computer, I should be able to. Hollywood is just realizing, though the Hulu/Boxee saga that digital content can be played on the TV and want to control how users play Hulu’s content. It’s laughable since it is technologically easy to have a browser control play content on any screen, including the TV.

I also think we should force download availability as a prerequisite of content availability. Streaming-only technology put limits on the way we can play content (we need an Internet link). So, if a content is only made available through streaming, downloadable copies should be fare game to individuals.

What do you think?

What would be your perfect anti-piracy law?

I recently went for a week to Los Angeles. I did some geeky stuff like going to the BSGCast Frak party. Plus, at the same time there was an auction for Battlestar Galactica props. So, I had to tweet and make my Facebook friends salivate and stay in touch.

The iPhone is the perfect companion for such events, but you need to be careful with the data usage.

For example, the default data roaming fee for Rogers in the United States is 6$ per MB. Since I use maybe a MB or two per day (or even more), it can add up really fast. I was glad to learn Rogers has a new data roaming plan for the iPhone which costs:

• 10$ per month
• 1$ per MB

As far as I could see, this plan is not yet advertised on Roger’s Web site. When I called Rogers a week ago, I was told this data roaming plan was just recently added.

This means if you think you will be using more than 2MB during a stay in the United States, the plan begins to make sense. You can remove the plan when you come back so you don’t pay 10$ each month.

During my trip I must have used about near 25MB of data. With the 10$ monthly fee and data usage fees, this amounts to 35$ of data roaming fees. It does not come cheap, but it would have cost me 150$ without the plan.

To further monitor and control your data roaming usage, here are must-follow tips for your next trip in the United States.

1. Don’t forget to call Rogers about voice roaming packages if you plan to make or receive many phone calls
2. Call Rogers to enable the iPhone United States data roaming plan
3. Before the plane takes off from Canada, when asked to shut down cell phones, you can activate Airplane mode in Settings
   
4. To minimize unforeseen bandwidth usage while abroad, go in Settings/Fetch New Data and set Push to “Off” then Fetch to “Manually”. This way, you will only download new emails when going to look at your emails.
   
5. In Settings/General/Network, set Data Roaming to “Off”. If you plan to use only Wi-Fi you would leave that there always when abroad. However, even if you plan to use data roaming, it’s a good idea to disable it before arriving at your destination.
6. Clear your usage statistics. Go in Settings/General/Usage and press the “Reset Statistics” button. You need to scroll down the Usage page to see this button. This will clear your Cellular Network data usage.
   
7. When arriving at destination, leave the Airplane mode and put back data roaming to “On”.
8. During your stay, you can monitor your usage statistics to keep track of how much you will be paying for your stay.
9. When coming back to Canada, put back your Data Roaming to “Off” to be sure it’s off if you ever go to Europe or another country where data roaming rates would cost you a pension.
10. Don’t forget to call Rogers again to remove your data roaming plan from your account.
11. Remember that browsing Web sites can consume a lot of data. Refrain from visiting too many graphics-heavy Web sites. Try to browse iPhone optimized Web pages or use specialized applications. You will consume a lot less data and it will reduce the extra fees that will appear on your invoice.

EDIT 2009-01-22 23:34

1. Funny thing! A few hours after my post, my wife, Kim Vallée, independently posted on the same subject here. We didn’t even knew about each of our similar posts! Of course, we had extensively discussed the subject, which explains the eerie similarity of our posts.
2. Highlighted some key words and the title after some tweets. Seems the new US data roaming plan is news to some.

English

The webcom-Montreal conference arrives soon. I had to pick winners to the contest. To make it fair, I used a proven technology that you can inspect in the photos below. And the winners are.

• Geneviève Lefebvre
• Nathalie Rivard

Congratulations! See you at webcom! I will email the winners get their contact information so that the organizers can prepare their passes. Unless I can’t contact one of them, these are the final winners!

Français

La conférence webcom-Montréal arrive à grand pas. Il fallait choisir les 2 gagnants au concours. Pour choisir les gagnants j’ai opté une technologie éprouvée. Voir les photos qui suivent. Et les gagnants sont.

• Geneviève Lefebvre
• Nathalie Rivard

Félicitations! Je vais envoyer un courriel aux gagnants pour leur demander leurs informations de contact pour les organisateurs préparent leurs passes. À moins que je ne puisse contacter un des gagnants, ce sont les gagnants finaux!