As at least some of you already knew, I recently moved to Toronto, Canada. For the last couple of weeks I obviously haven’t had as much time to surf through new online services as usually. However, I’ve still managed to check some, and I’ve paid attention on how few and far between many mobile services that have been widespread in Europe for years still are in North America.

In most places in Europe, people can do a number of things by sending an SMS text message, like order a public transit ticket to the phone, pay for a car wash or a can of pop, or use telephone directory services and order a taxi simply by sending and receiving SMS. It’s quick, easy and cheap.

Here it seems like people are still not very familiar with “texting” (as it’s called here, and the acronym SMS is used very rarely, which is in fact a very smart move – I don’t know why both service operators and cell phone manufacturers in Europe are so fixated to using those acronyms instead of just explaining the consumer what it really means when you have GPRS or send an MMS), and the few “more advanced” mobile services that there are here are usually dubbed as BlackBerry services using e-mail messages instead of SMS or MMS sent to the phone.

But in June a company called AskMeNow launched a new SMS service bringing stuff like directory services, weather forecasts, etc. to cell phones across Canada. The American-based company has got an office also in The Philippines, but not in Canada – I’m wondering if that will change once the SMS service gains popularity here?

Now that both Rogers and Bell Canada have slowly started building and expanding 3G/HSDPA networks in some parts of Canada, mobile video and Internet access are also being introduced here. A Toronto-based company called QuickPlay Media has been the first to launch a mobile video service to the Canadian market, and I’m sure that others will follow suit soon. Let’s see how quickly these more advanced mobile services will be able to gain wider popularity here where consumers hadn’t got the chance to familiarize themselves with much simpler and cheaper SMS-based services first. Perhaps Canadian consumers will jump right on the 3G train? But I think first local operators will still need to change the pricing of their network services quite drastically in order to attract more users to to do more than just telephoning with their cell phones.

Another world of services that seems to be lagging behind here is online banking, and not just online, but all banking services in general. Here banks haven’t built the same kind of centralized, fully electronic systems like in Europe, and that makes even the simplest things, like sending money from one bank to another, using any ATM on the street or making an electronic payment to, say, your landlord, weirdly complicated.

While many of the bigger problems in banking services here can’t be solved in an instant and probably not without new government policies and bigger investments in modernizing the system, some things would be easy to develop, I think, if only banks here would have the sense to do that. The security of the banks’ online services is one of those easier-to-solve issues. Just take a look at the login page to Royal Bank’s, Bank of Montreal’s, or any other Canadian bank’s online banking system, and you’ll notice that the login is as simple as using a bank/client card number and one user-defined password. No need to use random access codes or electronic password code devices like in Europe. While that may be more convenient to the average user, it weakens the security and makes phishers’ work much easier.

Karri Ojanen