Entries tagged as “Canada post”

Canada Post and the War on Open Data, Innovation & Common Sense (continued, sadly)

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog post on Canada Post’s War on the 21st Century, Innovation & Productivity. In it I highlighted how Canada Post launched a lawsuit against a company – Geocoder.ca – that recreates the postal code database via crowdsourcing. Canada Posts case was never strong, but then, that was [...]

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Open Postal Codes: A Public Response to Canada Post on how they undermine the public good

Earlier this week the Ottawa Citizen ran a story in which I’m quoted about a fight between Treasury Board and Canada Post officials over making postal code data open. Treasury Board officials would love to add it to data.gc.ca while Canada post officials are, to put it mildly, deeply opposed. This is of course, unsurprising [...]

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Canada Post’s War on the 21st Century, Innovation & Productivity

The other week Canada Post announced it was suing Geocoder.ca – an alternative provider of postal code data. It’s a depressing statement on the status of the digital economy in Canada for a variety of reasons. The three that stand out are: 1) The Canadian Government has launched an open government initiative which includes a [...]

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Why is Finding a Post Box so Hard?

Sometimes it is the small things that show how government just gets it all so wrong. Last Thursday The Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac has a little bit on the US Post Office and its declining fortunes as people move away from mail. There is no doubt that the post offices days are numbered, but that [...]

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Two Questions on Canadian Postal Codes

I find it interesting that Postal Codes in Canada are not freely available. No our postal service charges a nasty license fee to get them. This means that people who want to explore creating interest apps that might use postal codes to locate services… don’t. As one would expect, zip codes in the US are [...]

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