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8th June 2009

Applications Now Available for 2010 Canada’s Top 100 Employers Competition

Canada's Top 100TorontoApplications are now available for the 2010 Canada’s Top 100 Employers project. Now in its 10th year, the annual competition recognizes the companies and organizations across Canada that lead their industries in providing exceptional places to work.

The competition is open to all employers – large or small, public-sector or private – that offer innovative programs to attract and keep talented employees. Employers are compared to others in their industry and this year’s winners will be announced in a special issue of Maclean’s magazine on October 6, 2009. The competition is managed by Mediacorp Canada Inc., which publishes detailed reasons for each employer’s selection on its popular job search engine Eluta.ca. Publishing detailed Reasons for Selection is a distinguishing feature of the Canada’s Top 100 Employers project, providing transparency in the selection of winners and guidance to other employers on how they can become better places to work.
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8th June 2009

30th Annual Banff World Television Festival Award Winners Announced

Banff World Television FestivalBanff – Winners of the Banff World Television Awards (“The Rockies”), presented by Canwest, were announced tonight at the 30th edition of the Banff World Television Festival, taking place at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel until June 10, 2009.

“Featuring the prestigious Banff World Television Awards program competition on the first night of BANFF is a great way to kick off the Festival. All of the nominees this year represent outstanding television production and I wish to extend heartfelt congratulations to the winners of this year’s ‘Rockies,’” says Peter Vamos, BANFF Executive Director.

The 2009 ‘Rockies’ were redesigned and restructured by Georges Leclere, Director of the Program Competition. For the first time, there are two Banff World Television Awards ceremonies – the category awards announced tonight while the Grand Prize winners will be announced during the second ceremony on Monday June 8th.

“The exceptional quality of the 23 Categories winners, once again, shows the power of attraction of the Banff World TV Festival worldwide,” comments Georges Leclere. “We are honored to present winners with the ‘Rockie’ the trophy that truly inspires excellence in international television and represents a great generation of promising producers and directors.”
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7th June 2009

NEXTMedia Banff Wraps And Unveils New Innovation Week Coming To Toronto November 30 – December 2 09

nextmediaBanff – As nextMEDIA Banff wrapped its final day, Innovation Week was unveiled to an international delegation of digital media creators and social media mavens. Innovation Week is a ground-breaking event that merges nextMEDIA, the Canadian New Media Awards and Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX). Created to integrate the communities from Canada’s technology and digital media industries, key technology and media companies, entrepreneurs and investors, Innovation Week will take place November 30 to December 2, 2009 at the Design Exchange in Toronto.

“Canada is currently facing a critical challenge in transforming its economy in a time of global economic uncertainty and constrained investment. Innovation Week is both a rallying point and a platform to enable the individuals, companies and communities central to the innovation economy to come together and advance their respective agendas,” comments Robert Montgomery, CEO of Achilles Media who is also an investor and Co-Chair of CIX. “The three events which have combined in Innovation Week are only the beginning, as we reach out to include all the key communities in the coming weeks leading up to the big event.”
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6th June 2009

Gazing Into The Looking Glass At A New Media Future

Orby

Vancouver – As many of the nation’s top innovators get ready to meet at next week’s Canada 3.0 Conference in Stratford, I have been researching a variety of different sectors which make up our digital and interactive media industry. Canada has a very large and very diverse profile when it comes to the digital, interactive and new media arena. It is next to impossible to pigeon-hole any one aspect of our industry because there is so much overlap and inter-connectivity in almost every aspect – even game development is no longer possible to strictly isolate, as innovations gained in this field are often adapted for use in others and vice versa.

One of the most important aspects of Web 3.0 as discussed previously by Tom Jenkins, Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of  Open Text Corporation, is the type of media and bandwidth usage the internet population is moving towards. As web usage begins to be made up more and more of images and video, it becomes evident that bandwidth demand will grow exponentially. With many internet providers wanting to throttle their users, effectively limiting their access to these high bandwidth modes of communication, where will Canada find itself on the world scale of compatibility?

The CRTC, despite several hearings and decisions, has thus far failed to clearly define what the future of Canadian internet access and usage will look like, and has opted for a “wait and see” position. While there must be some type of balance between traditional media outlets and new media outlets, there must also be a way to balance the ability to develop Canadian content and get it to the masses. However – getting all of this content and communication to the masses goes back the issue of bandwidth throttling, plan usage charges and the importance of net neutrality. With the internet becoming such an integrated part of our everyday society in everything from personal to educational to corporate usage, will there be a movement to see a level playing in field in citizen access? How will the growing trend to wireless internet access play a part in citizen access? How will this effect issues such as privacy, identity theft and other security issues? Are we moving towards the world of tomorrow too soon, or will Canada be leading the pack?
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5th June 2009

G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra Looks Explosive

GI JoeVancouver – I saw the movie trailer for G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra for the first time today, and I have to say that it looks very impressive. This is a movie that we will be sure to catch on the big screen, because all of those visual and CG effects look incredible. I went and checked to see who was behind all of those great effects, and I wasn’t surprised to see a few Vancouver companies listed – with a few from that other movie place further south along the coast and some on the other side of the Atlantic.

It would appear that CIS Vancouver, Stan Winston Studio both contributed to those disintegrating buildings, massive traffic problems, huge explosions and more that we will get to experience this August when the film is released. Two other studios with Vancouver locations are also listed in the credits, but according to MPC’s site, it was the London studio which worked on Rise of Cobra. The Frantic Films web site does not list the movie at all, although they are heavily listed in the show’s info page on IMDB, so at the time of this writing I am unaware of which Frantic Films studio produced the assets.
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5th June 2009

The Week in Review

Canada Vancouver – It’s been a somewhat busy week as I’ve tried to keep up with all of the news from our Canadian developers and industry representatives down at E3 – and I have decided that next year I am going to the expo. Once everyone has returned from their E3 adventures, I hope to be able to sit down with them and get their views in a look back at this year’s event.

Tuesday evening we attended Launch Party 7, where we met up with a few friends and met a few new ones. It’s always interesting to find out what projects are being worked on in the city, as we have such a vibrant development community. I found out about this event when we attended the recent Digital Kung Fu event presented by MDM during Vancouver Digital Week, and I believe Launch Vancouver is an event which we will be attending more often. Some of the interesting people we met include the Twitter Boot Camp instructor Gregg Scott, who will be leading a soldout boot camp session tomorrow.

We also listened to a very interesting presentation by Nick Bouton about his site, Protaganize. This site is an interactive community for writers and aspiring writers, supporting “addventures” which is an “add-your-bit” style of story writing that the whole community can participate in. The site also supports linear story writing and allows authors to both give and get feedback on their writing efforts.

Tynt Tracer was the winner of the “Startup Most Likely To Succeed” presentations for this event, winning over both the judges and the attendees. Tynt Tracer is a Calgary-based referral tracker, which lets you know when and where your site’s content is being copied. Tynt has received funding from iNovia and AVAC to develop its product. Read the rest of this entry »

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5th June 2009

Intrinsyc Appoints Tracy Rees as President and Chief Executive Officer

IntrinsycVancouver – The Board of Directors of Intrinsyc Software International, Inc., a leading provider of software solutions for mobile devices, today announced that Mr. Tracy Rees was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company Tracy Reeseffective immediately. Mr. Rees has been serving as interim Chief ExecutiveOfficer since November 2008.

“Tracy has proven himself to be the right person to lead Intrinsyc into the future,” said Mr. Philip Ladouceur, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Intrinsyc. “Since his appointment as interim Chief Executive Officer, Tracy has led the significant improvement in the company’s bottom line performance; dramatically reducing operating expenses, and setting the stage for future growth with new major customer wins, and the development and launch of new product offerings for mobile device development, and navigation and location based services.”
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4th June 2009

VFS Grads Present Projects

VFSVancouver – Last evening, the GD12 students at Vancouver Film School presented their grad projects to an evaluation audience in the VFS Main Theatre. The students spend several weeks in pre-production developing their game concepts, and then an additional 12 weeks in production, bringing their concepts to life.

The first group up to the podium was Team LightSpeed, presenting their 2D Action Platformer game Travis’ Terror. The target audience for this imaginative and colourful game is children under 10, and to that end I feel that they came very close to making a product appropriate for the age group. Developed on Citrus

Lightning Speed

Light Speed

flash engine, the game’s environment is comprised of artwork which resembles colouring book drawings. The gameplay involves two modes: dreamtime and nightmare. In dreamtime mode, the environment is bright and colourful while nightmare mode has a darker colour palette. The premise of the game is to help Travis get through the game and defeat the boogeyman lurking in his closet. As the player advances through the levels, he is confronted by monsters such as dinosaurs and robots. In dreamtime mode, the monsters are small and easily defeatable. In nightmare mode the monsters are bigger and more challenging. Game progress can be saved at nightlight checkpoints, and there are toys and candies to collect along the way. The player can choose several different paths through the game, each path presenting different challenges. Travis’ Terror is a game which I feel showed hard work and attention to detail on the part of the development team, who overcame many challenges including losing a team member partway through the project.
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4th June 2009

ParetoLogic Launches Zheng a Free File Upload and Scan Service

Pareto LogicVictoriaParetoLogic has gone live with their newest in anti-spyware, the Zheng™ File Analysis service. Zheng™ allows people to upload and scan a specific file on their PC. The service will then automatically detect any malware and inform the user if the file is safe or infected. Along with a simple summary, the service also Zhengprovides detailed information for advanced users.

ParetoLogic’s Spyware Analysis Team (SWAT), recent finalists for VIATeC’s Team of the Year award, spearheaded the Zheng™ File Analysis service. Jerome Segura, Team Leader of SWAT, said of the project: “Zheng™ is a long term and expensive effort primarily oriented on pure research. It shows our commitment to develop new technologies and stay on the edge.”

Uploads are not limited to current ParetoLogic customers – anyone with an internet connection can have files scanned at no cost. By inviting all users to scan files, SWAT is better able to detect and remove threats. When each file is scanned, the characteristics of infected files are noted by Zheng™. These are then passed along to the Spyware Analysis Team for analysis, so they may further refine their anti-spyware technology. The more threats analyzed by Zheng™, the more fodder SWAT has for research and the better they are able to target spyware.
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3rd June 2009

FIFA 10 Being Developed With Fan Feedback In Mind

EA SportsBurnabyVia E3 – On the heels of winning 25 international gaming awards with FIFA Soccer 09, Electronic Arts Inc. today revealed the first features for its top-selling* soccer franchise from EA SPORTS™. Responding to consumer feedback from more than 275 FIFA 10million online games played**, FIFA Soccer 10 will deliver a new standard for authenticity with gameplay refinements and innovations that will make it the most complete and intelligent simulation of soccer.

On the pitch, critical gameplay fundamentals have been enhanced to ensure that FIFA Soccer 10 mirrors real-world soccer, providing more sophisticated ball control, and physical interaction between players. In addition, players now move, behave and position themselves more realistically. On attack, players analyze space more effectively, curve their runs in an attempt to stay onside, create passing lanes naturally, and drive for more variety in attacking options. On defense, new concepts like position priority enable defenders to multitask so dangerous spaces left open by teammates out of position are covered. Plus, slide tackle targeting, press marking, and better-urgency clearance logic provide new options that make defending a tactical skill in FIFA Soccer 10. In goal, a myriad of improvements and refinements to goalkeeper intelligence result in a more responsive and powerful rushing system and ultra-realistic saves.
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