Canada's version of the high-tech Oscars was held yesterday with Iotum snagging an award in the emerging technology category. It has been quite a run for the Ottawa-based telecom start-up, highlighted by Demo God honours at the Demo show in Phoenix earlier this year. Now, all Iotum needs is a user-friendly VC so it can boost sales of its relevance engine. Aside from cool technology, another thing Iotum has going for it is PR savvy (it helps having Andy Abramson onboard). COO Howard Thaw's RedBerry was recently featured in a media report. Not content to accept a black Blackberry, Thaw went to an auto body shop for some custom work. Nice.

So Scott McNealy is finally handing over the reigns reins to Sun Microsystems after 24 years. I've only had the privilege to interview him once but can't say it was the best conversation I've ever had with a high-profile CEO. In contrast to the peppy, funny, irreverant person who puts on a laugh-a-minute show at high-tech conferences, McNealy was unenthusiastic, grumpy and far from newsworthy. It could have just been a bad day or it could have been he was less than thrilled about talking to a journalist from a newspaper he never knew existed. I guess part of being a CEO is you have a role to play - sometimes you're on, sometimes you're just not into it. McNealy must give dozens of interviews a year so it's not like each one will sizzle. Like a professional athlete, I'm sure he gets up for the "big games" when the Wall St. Journal or New York Times comes calling. For the rest of us, we have to hope he's having a good day. It should be pointed out McNealy is a bit of an anachronism these days given the disclosure restrictions that CEOs of publicly-traded companies face every time they're out and about. These rules do little to encourage a CEO to candid or straightforward. While McNealy will no longer be Sun's CEO,  I'm willing to be bet  he'll be as active and outspoken.

While the RIAA has been on a legal jihad in recent years, a growing number of consumers have been using allofMP3.com. The Russian-based service sells albums for $1 to $2.50 - depending on their popularity and the bitrate quality selected. Apparently, the company has been allowed to operate because of Russian copyright legislation, which lets "phonograms be performed publicly without the authorization of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission". If the music industry was pissed off with allofMP3 before, they'll be even more agitated with the release of alltunes - a desktop and mobile interface that makes it even easier to find and download music. TechCrunch has an overview on the new application.
  While allofMP3 can argue it's protected by Russian copyright rules, I wonder whether they protect consumers in North America? How do U.S. copyright rules, for example, apply to music downloaded from another country? In Canada - despite the claims of the music industry - downloading is still quasi-legal until the copyright rules over overhauled or clarified. A contentious issue in Canada is the levy regime, which slaps a "tax" on products used to record digital content such as hard drives, CD-Rs and audio cassette tapes. These fees, in theory, are supposed to compensate the music industry for loss sales but it doesn't work because music downloading is still wildly popular in the Great White North. For more on the controversial levy regime, IT Business ran a story on it earlier this month. You can also find a treasure trove of information on the issue on Michael Geist's blog.

The secret project that Larry Borsato has been working on recently is MusicIP - formerly known as Predixis. Billing itself as a global music relationship engine, MusicIP is software that analyzes your music collection and then makes it easy to find new music that you'll like. For musicians, MusicIP promises to help them find new fans who are looking for music with a particular sound. At first blush, it looks like technology that consumers, artists and the labels will embrace given one of the many challenges facing the music industry is exposing new stuff at a time when commercial radio is so uninspiring, generic and targeted at the lowest common denominator. It will be interesting to see what music aficionado Fred Wilson has to say given his public love affair with music. MusicIP, by the way, was discovered by Rick Segal, who stumbled upon their small booth deep in the bowels of a major trade show.

It's good see Iotum come home from Phoenix with a 2006 Demo God Award - a nice laurel for Alec Saunders and Howard Thaw, who have been toiling away trying to sell their innovative relevance-engine telecom software to carriers, ISPs and investors for the past year. Maybe   this will be what Iotum needs to attract VC support. I'm willing to bet they may even get some calls from Canada's conservative financing community now that Iotum has been given the official stamp of approval. Truth be told, there are simply a lack of Iotums in Canada. For all the talk that we're a world-class innovation country, there's a troubling lack of high-tech entrepreneurs, start-ups and financing to really make it happen. Even Web 2.0 services, which cost little to develop, are few are far between at a time when Silicon Valley is flush with interesting start-ups (even if few of them real business models.)