Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"This growing list of backwards policies is already creating a sense of digital isolation: Canadians can’t stream the videos Americans stream, download the files Americans download, remix the media Americans remix, or tweet the way Americans tweet. With the election of Barack Obama, digital culture in the U.S. hit a tipping point, where a robust online public sphere proved itself capable of changing the world. Meanwhile, here in Canada we’re approaching our own tipping point, where a series of ignorances and capitulations threaten to turn our country into a digital ghetto."

Living in Canada, the digital climate has a direct impact on me and my concerns echo a lot of what Jesse Brown has posted. Internet access, both wired and wireless, in Canada is relatively expensive and slower than our friends south of the border. This in combintion with a growing effort on DRM restrictions makes Canada a less inviting atmosphere for innovation. One case in point mentioned in the article is Twitter recently shutting down outbound SMS messages in Canada. Canadians, well, anyone, needs to make an effort to make sure that their country strives to keep its Internet access as cheap and open as possible. With the impact that a pervasive Internet can have on our lives, it's worth that effort.

This is a watershed moment: in the span of several months, both NewEgg and Amazon have started selling electronics in Canada. I don't think people outside Canada understand how limited our options were for online ordering, especially as it related to having a big selection. Quit often the Best Buy and Future Shop Web sites carried the same number of products as the local stores, so there wasn't a lot to be gained from ordering online. Unfortunately, bredth of product selection is something that both NewEgg and Amazon.ca are lacking, though NewEgg is far in advance of Amazon.ca. For instance, Amazon.ca's digital camera selection consists of 20 camera models total, and not a Nikon in sight. NewEgg has 171 in comparison. I'm sure Amazon's collection will grow - I'm just glad that I have more options when it comes to buying electronics!

I've been a member of DVD-rental service Zip.ca for a few years now, and generally like their service - with a few exceptions, mostly around their deeply skewed ship-ranking system (I have six months worth of data to process and eventually write up into an article) and their horrendously Web site (which usually comes from slow servers). Going to Zip.ca, finding a movie, and adding it to my account should be a fast process, right? Since day one as a Zip.ca customer, I've found their servers to be slow - it wouldn't be uncommon for me to wait 10 to 20 seconds for a search result to come back, then another 10 to 20 seconds for the movie page to be displayed - thank goodness they use an AJAX-type solution for adding movies to the cart so that part of the process was quick. The server slowness was consistent: it didn't matter if I visited at 9am or 11pm, a week-day or a weekend, from home or from a different country. It was always slow. I did the usual things a geek would do: tracerts, pings, etc. It always came back to the same thing: the Zip.ca servers were sluggish. I stared at this message frequently:

Every couple of months I'd send an email to Zip.ca customer service, complaining about the issue and asking them to invest in a better server infrastructure to make using their site more pleasant. I'd get the usual service drone responses promoting their "continued improvement" but nothing ever changed. I decided to kick things up a notch: I wrote separate letters to Rick Anderson, President & CEO of Zip.ca, and Kelvin Osborn, Director of Product Design. In these letters I detailed my complaints with Zip.ca related to their slow servers, informing them both that after several years of putting up with their poor level of service I was placing my account on hold as my way of protesting their lack of improvements in this specific area. I'm just one of thousands of Zip.ca customers, but my hope was that if I made my voice heard they'd realize that I likely wasn't the only one unhappy with their Web site speed. I also submitted my complaint to Zip.ca customer service. Read more...

"Dear Valued Future Photo Customer, On May 31, 2008, the Future Photo site will be closing – but that doesn’t mean your photos will be lost! We’ve partnered with KODAK Gallery, the recognized leader in online imaging. They’ve just launched Kodakgallery.ca for the Canadian market, and we’ve made it easy for you to transfer your photos. You will continue to receive a full range of high quality photo products with KODAK Gallery and have the convenience of FREE in store pick-up at all Future Shop stores."



Future Shop is one of Canada's largest electronics chains, and when they got bought out by Best Buy a couple of years ago, the two of them became an even bigger juggernaut. Like almost every other electronics store, Future Shop had its own online photo store. And like many of them, it wasn't particularly good. All markets start out broad with many players, then converge into a handful of market leaders, so it's not terribly surprising to see Future Shop giving up and handing the reigns over to Kodak Gallery (which in reality is Ofoto, a photo company that Kodak purchased).

Future Photo customers have a little over one month to migrate their photos over to Kodak Gallery, and if they do so, they'll get 100 free prints. But, bizarrely, Future Shop's migration process assumes that the email address you used to register with their service will be identical to the one you used if you already have Kodak Gallery account. Mine isn't, so I can't migrate my photos without creating a brand new Kodak Gallery account - which is idiotic. Future Shop always manages to leave me unimpressed, and this process was no different.