B. Mann Consulting

I met Avi over 2 years ago when I had just come back to Vancouver, at Roland's Geek Dinner (yes, where I met Roland for the first time in person). Avi promptly moved off to Amsterdam so I didn't see much of him for quite some time.

Then he and Andrew were back in Vancouver, getting interested in the Innovation Commons, hanging out at our local "third place", Take 5 Cafe, and generally being part of the very interesting Vancouver scene that continues to build.

Avi wowed the computer science nerds at the Open Source CMS Summit talking about Smalltalk/Seaside (see the video by Roland), and then thanks to coming out to Northern Voice's MooseCamp, landed a spot on Under the Radar. And then winning best in show at UTR, showing that made-in-Canada can easily go down to the Valley and kick butt.

I'm currently still in Torino, Italy, although I'm heading out to Milan, then Bologna tomorrow, and will be in Brussels by the end of the week in time for FOSDEM.

I'm writing a bit about mobile technologies here in Italy over on 2010.dailyvancouver.com (check the Tech Talk section). I've got a Vodaphone SIM for my Nokia 6630 with UMTS-based 3G service (around 350kbps) and the experience has been fantastic.

So, while we had our symposium, the relative maturity of the European vs. Canadian mobile technologies certainly did come up. One example I used was how there is a mobile data plan here that gives you 9GB of transfer for 40EU. On Fido, which is my provider back home, this would cost $270,000 based on the listed per MB charges of $30. Actually, I did the calculation in my head initially and everyone was shocked/amused by the figure of $27,000...and then we figured out we were still an order of magnitude off!