This column began with a Rogers bill. I was paying $200 a month for cable and a PVR, and feeling gouged. I set about to explore alternatives. The term “cutting the cable” has become popular—a Google search nets 63.6 million results—and there are many alternatives for people frustrated with traditional cable providers.
Technology
2013: mobile continues its march, PCs still sell and no one wants UHD TVs
Two recent tech events highlighted a fascinating sea change in the global consumer electronics (CE) market. Only two categories in the market are experiencing growth: smartphones and tablets. They combine for 40 per cent of CE sales, worth one trillion dollars annually, but every other category is contracting. This trend was evident at both the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and Deloitte’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Predictions 2013. Here are the key insights:
Newspapers are suffering
It’s easy to blame craigslist, but the real culprit is economic short-sightedness
For newspapers it has been death by a thousand cuts: American readership has been falling by more than 700,000 a year since 2000, according to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), and revenue was already down when the recession came along and shot another body blow to advertising income.
Going green is expensive – myth or not?
Some executives believe the myth that going green is expensive—and I don’t blame them. When Conservative MP John Baird was Environment Minister, he told a 2007 Canadian Senate hearing that meeting our Kyoto goals would manufacture a recession. I ran into John in Toronto shortly thereafter and asked if he’d seen the just-released McKinsey & Company study showing that 40 per cent of the CO2 we have to cut in North America to meet our Kyoto goals would be highly profitable, and if society invested those profits in the next lowest-cost solutions, we’d get all the way to achieving the Kyoto targets at no cost to society.
He hadn’t seen the study and wasn’t interested when I offered to send it to him.
