Alex Reid

A billboard for Shaw caught my eye the other day. I noticed the font had changed and there was a broken parentheses. I thought to myself, ‘I hope that’s not their new branding’.

Sure enough, it is.

Founded in 1971, Shaw provides broadband cable television, Internet, VoIP phone service, and satellite direct-to-home services. They have 3.4 million customers and is the fourth in the telecom business in Canada behind giants Bell, Rogers, and Telus.

Their logo was last designed in 1998 and the new logo is supposed to be a reboot of the iconic Shaw elements; the font is intended to be friendlier and softer, and the swoosh replaced by a bracket which, the company says, is to resemble a pipe , as well as a happy face ala SMS interpretation. The pipe reference is something Shaw has been trying to identity with for over a decade; their business services arm was called Big Pipe until 2006, when they simplified it to just Shaw Business.

Logos and design work should be revisited at least once a decade, so this is fine.

However, Shaw wasn’t content with just changing their font and replacing a swoosh with a bracket. They wanted mascots.

Upon last week’s relaunch of their branding, Shaw introduced two new mascots; Bud (who represents “the 40-year cable veteran” like the company itself) and Bit (the newbie who is introduced to the company’s offerings, along with the viewer). The mascots is just the beginning. Shaw plans on introducing a series of other characters, each relating to one of their service offerings; a sort of product characterization.

The new creative strategy was handled by Vancouver-based agency Rethink.

Many popular web services went down last night due to a massive thunderstorm that knocked out power to most of the East Coast, including Amazon Web Services, which hosts much of the data for some of the big social media heavyweights.

Instagram, the photo-sharing service recently bought by Facebook, said on Twitter, “Due to severe electrical storms, our host had a power outage, no data is lost – we’ve been working through the night to restore service.”

Netflix and Pinterest, which were both completely offline for most of the evening, also took to Twitter to tell users the status of the failure. Foursquare was partly affected and updated its own status blog to tell customers.

Amazon was tight-lipped about the situation, beyond admitting that the failure had happened at a server facility in Virginia and it was because of the lighting storm in the area. It wasn’t until this morning, before lunch, that the company said it had managed to get some services back online.

Things happen, most people agree, however the question remains why didn’t Amazon have a backup plan or have a better redundant network setup. Despite the company being quiet on their data centre setup, this electrical engineer says that over 70% of their servers are housed in the Virginia data centre, where the storm hit.

~ Source and notes from NY Times Blog

It’s been a busy season for Facebook.

They bought Instagram, they introduced their own app store (for both Android and iPhone), they went public, and last week, they introduced their own camera app. Now Facebook says they may be ready to take on Google and Apple in the mobile phone market.

For the past few months, they have been quietly preparing to enter the mobile phone market. Facebook has already hired former Apple software and hardware engineers, and one engineer who worked on the iPad, the New York Times reported yesterday. They have an open working alliance with HTC and it is expected the phone operating system will be a customized version of Android. The project name is Buffy, named after the vampire slayer TV series.

The rumour is that Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg believes that they need to enter the mobile phone market to ensure they aren’t left behind as just a web site that makes money from ad revenues. Owning the hardware to show the software is a key step to their survival.

Apple has never been welcoming to alliances, so they will be a natural competitor, while Google has been making their own moves to not only create their own phone set, but are pinning hopes on being an ISP operator in years ahead.

Meanwhile, Microsoft – which owns a tiny share of Facebook – has already integrated many features of Facebook. Motorola and HTC have already made phones with a Facebook button built in. There’s also a chance that Facebook could purchase struggling handset RIM down the road.

I believe photography sharing will be at the core of this media challenge.

Chinese telecommunications provider ZTE have announced today that they held a field demonstration of an optical network capable of transmitting 1.726 Tbps. They used Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) to separate data into different wavelengths (8 different channels, each transmitting 216.4Gbps) and transmitted those wavelengths over the same standard fiber-optic cable over 1750 KM in China.

While the company has no plans to provide a terabit-network, they say the purpose of their experiment was to prove that “a seamless upgrade from a 100G transmission system to a 200G system is possible.”

Pretty interesting stuff.

Rick Mercer says it true: