Author Archives: info@worldline.ca

Worldline won’t “Tie” you down

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Tie DomiOur competitor, Comwave, announced this week that they have “teamed up with Maple Leaf legend, Tie Domi to help consumers “Stand Up” to the Big Phone and Cable Companies.”

First off, a Maple Leaf “Legend”? Seriously?

Second – wonder where they got that “Stand Up” idea?

Anyway, in this  “legendary” announcement they introduced a “new” product, a home phone and Internet bundle, for $49.95, something that we’ve offered for almost two years. Innovative they are not.

But what they won’t tell you is that when you sign up for this “new” bundle, you sign up for three years.

You have to sign a contract.

Worldline has no contracts, and there are big implications to that.

What No Contracts Means for You

The implications of having no contracts for Worldline Customers are basically huge.

They’ve got the power.

Let’s put it this way. Have you ever bought a lemon? A real clunker? A car that started to break down as soon as you got it, but since you bought it, all you could do is suffer through the consequences?

Wouldn’t it have been great if, at the first sign of trouble, you were able to drive that piece of junk back to where you got it and simply hand over the keys?

No muss. No fuss. No pressure.

That’s what Worldline is offering our customers the ability to do. They can cancel their service when they chose for whatever reason and they are free and clear of us.

Now, because of the quality of service and the value we offer, they don’t do that very often. We lose about 1% of our customers every month, but mostly that is due to them moving and things like that.

What No Contracts Means for Us

Simply put, every single day we have to continuously earn our customer’s business.

It’s what keeps us in business.

And so far, business is pretty good.

Hey Chris! We’re right here!

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Chris_Hadfield_Southern_Ontario

Col. Chris Hadfield’s shot of Southern Ontario for the International Space Station

The entire world has been captivated by Chris Hadfield and his ongoing social campaign from space. The Canadian now commanding the International Space Station has been orbiting the earth  since December, and ever since he’s been live-Tweeting his experiences to a rabid following of over 600,000 people, with thousands more joining daily.

Tweeting pictures of the planet from his unique perspective, he’s been praised around the globe for his thoughtful, provocative, fun and sometimes philosophical messages.

The astronaut has posted thousands of pictures of Canada like Victoria, Cape Breton and Ottawa, as well as locations around the world including Havana, Central Asia, Mt. Fuji, Belarus and Mt. Etna, an active volcano spewing smoke and ash into the sky in Italy.

On Easter at dawn he was flying over Southern, Ontario, and he took the picture on the top of this post.

It was our one dawn of the day, it was his 16th. As powerful as that image is for us to see, showing us where we work live and play, from his perspective, he’s sees things differently.

“The world just unrolls itself for you and you see it absolutely discreetly as one place.

“Yes, there are important territorial issues, there are important personal issues. But at the same time, with increased communication, with increased understanding, comes a more global perspective.

“This is a spaceship, but so is the world.”

Follow Canadian ISS Comander, Col. Chis Hadfield on his epic journey here.

 

 

She turned me into a NEWT™

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http://youtu.be/xzYO0joolR0

We have hundreds of thousands of Worldline customers across the country, but I bet no more than a handful of them have heard first, that Worldline is the residential brand of a company called Fibernetics, and second, Fibernetics has a business services division named NEWT™.

newt_box_cmNot the John Cleese version, but our little green guy is on the logo on our hardware, like this thing called the NEWT™ Managed PBX.

What this teeny little machine does (it’s about the size of a paperback) is get rid of business’s huge, clunky, outdated energy sucking, costly phone systems and instead provides them with an easily managed voice solution, that doesn’t require a team of IT guys to keep it running.

Cooler still, they run it from their desktops using a console application. Packed with over 60 features, the NEWT™ Managed PBX provides startup companies with a big company presence, and big companies with multiple locations a completely scalable system and one that saves them up to 80% on the telco bills.

Canadian green energy leader Bullfrog Power just switched over to the NEWT™ Managed PBX because of all of the above, and the power consumption for their install is about the same as running one 60 watt light bulb.

To give you an idea of what that means, an old style phone system, like Nortel’s Meridian with a similar configuration uses 26x the electricity to run.

80% savings on telco bills and 26 times less power. That’s the NEWT™ Managed PBX.

If you’re interested in outfitting your company with this cool little guy, you can get more details here.

 

 

 

Madame X & Surge

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Madame X

Madame X perched on the Worldline Falcon Cam

Next time you are in Hamilton, Ontario, and passing by the Sheraton Hotel, look up and you might be able to see a pair of Peregrine Falcons who are currently preparing a nest to lay their eggs.

Or, instead of breaking your neck trying to catch a glimpse, you can watch from your desktop using the Worldline Falcon Webcam.

The Hamilton Community Peregrine Project hosted by the Hamilton Falcon Watch and the Hamilton Naturalist Club reactivated the cameras last month and currently they are on the lookout for courting and nesting behaviour.

They expect to see eggs in early April – or basically right now!

In 2012 Madame X and Surge hatched three chicks, all boys – Beckett (682 grams), Felker (671 grams) and Tiffany, who weighed in at a trim 641 grams. All named for Hamilton waterfalls, all three birds flew strongly on their first flights, and quickly mastered the skies without need for any rescues.

Falcon_beam

Surge, perched on the Camera beam

Falcon Watch says Madame X was hatched on a bridge on Pennsylvania Route 309, the Cross-Valley Expressway in Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Banded as a hatchling on 7 June 1999, she was known to the falcon watchers in Northeast PA as ‘Runaround Sue’, a name suggested after she was found running along the expressway guide wall one morning.

Hatched and banded in Etobicoke in 2002, Surge spent at least part of the 2004-2005 seasons trying to establish a nest at the Burlington Lift Bridge. In 2006 he replaced the male at the Sheraton nest and has been in Hamilton since. This will be the nineteenth year the same nest site on the Sheraton Hamilton Hotel has been used.

Worldline is thrilled to be able to provide the webcam for the world to watch Madame X and Surge as they prepare for their new family.

Bookmark the site

The odds are amazing

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FB_200x200

I remember the first contest I ever ran on the Internet. Back then I was working for TSN, running their website, and one day, outta nowhere, a sales guy comes up to me and tells me he’s acquired a car, a real four-wheeled, four-door automobile to giveaway, and his client, it was Toyota, wanted to run the contest online.

I was stunned.

It was 1996. No one in Canada had ever done anything like that before.

Maybe no one anywhere for all we knew.

What to do? There wasn’t anything like rules and regulations for something like that. No software to get people to sign up or anything. What we had was a car, some keys, and a bunch of excited ad execs waiting to see what we came up with.

So, we dove in. We had legal cobble together some rules based on contests that ran on the network, we created a submit form, (which was a simple email capture – very swish for 1996!), did up some graphics and posted the thing thinking Canada would go absolutely nuts!

One problem though.

Probably the highest concentration of Internet users in Canada in 1996 was at TSN itself (they were serious early adopters).

The rest of the country? Not so much.

For days no one entered. You think people are wary of sharing their personal information over the Internet now? In 1996, they were petrified.

It was scheduled to run for a month. We had to stretch it to two. We would run promos on Sportsdesk, all to no avail. Jim Van Horne started to crack jokes about us every night when he was closing the 6:30 show.

In the end, out of a country of 25-million of so, we had about two-dozen entries.

Who won?

We threw all the entries into a (small) hat and pulled a name. It was my friend John.

Not that he knew he’d even entered or anything because I was the one who signed him up. I had signed up all my friends without their knowledge because the contest was such a colossal failure, we couldn’t tell the folks upstairs how everyone was too scared to play along.

See, on a whole, TV execs aren’t the most forward thinking of people, and they were already calling the Internet a “fad.” This staggering lack of participation would only reinforce that (hilariously blinkered) notion.

Anyway, we lied our butts off, told them thousands had entered and that this guy John won the  $20,000 car.

And we kept his chances of winning at 1-in-24 to ourselves.

That was in 1996 when we were making things up as we went along.

Now things have substantially changed. The Internet is ubiquitous. Online ad revenue has gone from about $200,000 in a year to billions. And online contests are run with a strict set of rules in place (thank goodness!). 

Oh, and Facebook actually exists now.

Which brings us to our little contest we’re running right now.

“Like” us on Facebook and enter in your information into The Great 50/50 Contest  and you could come away with a 50″ HD TV.

What are your chances? Despite having hundreds of thousands of customers across the country, not too many know about about our Facebook page because we just started the thing up in February.

So your odds are good. Not 24-1 good, but still good.

Good luck!

Like_Gate

 

Or use the Contest Canada link.