Graham Kingma, Head of Call Centre Operations at Wind Mobile has informed WIND Mobile customers in GTA and Calgary that a planned network outage to make the network better. This outage will happen between 1:00am to 3:00am on Wednesday morning.

WIND Mobile launched back in December in Toronto and Calgary and plan to offer their service in Ottawa and Edmonton by the end of February. They have hired well over 700 people and in an article in the Globe CEO Ken Campbell states “We have hired some ninja engineers from the competitors … I know for a fact that we have got some very sharp talent from the incumbents”.

Wind Mobile slipped into Canada’s wireless space determined to gain every strategic advantage it could over the country’s telecommunications titans. Through online social networking sites – “it was viral, totally viral” – the little startup spread the word that it was hiring. Within a year, the company had targeted and recruited more than 700 employees, most from under the noses of other employers.

Welcome! This is the first of a series of monthly mini-reports “from the front” of the media and communications battle for the hearts, minds and wallets of Canada’s younger citizen-consumers brought to us by our friends at Youthography. On a monthly basis Youthography will prompt its online community of youth and young adults to hit us back with opinion on products, campaigns and policies aimed squarely at their demographic. For this inaugural installment we take a look at Wind Mobile.

Back in January Graham Kingma, Head of Call Centre Operations at Wind Mobile wrote on the company blog that “the N900 and iPhone are hot topics within the community and other forums…and at WIND as well: I’m excited about these too! We obviously want to provide you with the phones that you want… As we expand, and as more and more operators evolve, too, more handsets will become available and we’ll carry them. Specifically for the N900 – which does work on our network – we hope to have the phone in early 2010“.

Canada’s Wind Mobile has joined a movement that includes global cellphone heavyweights NTT DoCoMo, O2, Vodafone and about 20 others in an alliance capable of challenging Apple’s dominance in the booming market for mobile applications. The coalition, called Wholesale Application Community, is an attempt by mobile operators to collect a bigger share of the $6.2-billion U.S. market for programs and games for smart phones, known as “apps,” short for software applications.

WIND Mobile has recently joined hands with 23 other wireless carriers from all around the world and formally announced its participation in the ‘Wholesale Applications Community‘. The objective of this community is to take on the monopoly of Apple’s App Store by developing its own store. The community will work closely with developers to help them create applications faster and it will also offer a streamlined distribution mechanism for these apps regardless of device or carrier used.

WIND Mobile is the only Canadian carrier and one of 24 around the world that have joined to be a part of the “Wholesale Applications Community”. The purpose is for them to work with developers and make it simpler to create and distribute their apps regardless of carrier or device

When Industry Minister Tony Clement clarified Canadian ownership rules for wireless carriers in December 2009, allowing Globalive’s WIND Mobile to enter the market despite a majority owner from Egypt, the company was quick to get to market: within five days the carrier was launched in Toronto. It was the first mobile carrier to join the market alongside Telus, Bell and Rogers in more than 10 years

The federal government has refused to release documents that may reveal how it came to its controversial decision on Globalive Wireless Management Corp., court filings show. That decision, which came in an Order in Council dated Dec. 10, 2009, is now the subject of a request for judicial review by one of Globalive Wireless’s competitors.