Village Gamer

Mississauga – There’s a new texting champion in Canada and her name is Kathy Spence. Today LG Electronics Canada crowned the winner of its 2nd Annual LG Canadian Texting Championship at the competition’s finals, held earlier this afternoon at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square. Kathy, who is from Scarborough, received $25,000 in cash and prizes from LG’s Pat Button.

Kathy Spence

Today’s event marked the culmination of over three and a half months of preliminary trials across the country, as well as online competitions and Facebook challenges, which saw the participation of more than 20,000 Canadians. A final group of 12 texters participated in today’s finals, with
Kathy coming out on top.

The event, hosted by Nicole Arbour, and featuring a performance by chart-topping band, The New Cities, attracted over 1,500 spectators over the noon hour. Contestants competed on a variety of LG’s QWERTY phones including the LG Dare, LG Keybo, LG Reveal, LG Rumour and LG Voyager as well as new phones, the LG Rumour 2, LG Neon and LG Xenon.
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Burnaby – This past Saturday we took in the Vancouver leg of the annual Canary Foundation’s soapbox derby, the Canary Derby. We sponsored Brenda Bailey of Deep Fried Entertainment, who was representing Women In GamesVancouver as part of the Wired Woman team. While the Wired Woman team did finish in the top ten, they didn’t make the trophy round. That said, the whole team had a great time and raised a total of $2,355.00 for the Foundation. Many thanks to our “Silk Spectre” driver, Sanaz Jahanbakhsh. You can check out our photos of the race in our Gallery. In total, over $ 113 000.00 was raised at the Vancouver version of the Canary Derby. I have not yet found a total for the Victoria race which ran yesterday.

Burnaby’s Acting Mayor presented the speed award to Aquatic Informatics, whose cart managed to hit speeds of up to 46km per hour (in a 30km zone), with a final run time of 16.50 seconds from the upper starting line. Finishing in second place was the Rogers Wireless cart, followed by Webnames.ca and BCTIA. Other teams we saw still in the race included Wired Woman, SalesXperts Closers, ACL Systems Ltd., Clearly Contacts, FinCAD, and 6S Marketing. At least three other teams unfortunately succumbed to accidents in the earlier trial runs. Cisco Human Network received the Bent Wheel Award for their crash – hopefully their driver is recovering from his dislocated shoulder.

6S Marketing took home the Style Award with their very stylish and musical Mario Kart – driven in Saturday’s race by Princess Peach herself, while Mario helped out on the crew. The Princess’ royal kart managed to hit speeds of 32km per hour, despite those who tried to sabotage her run by throwing banana peels in her path.

Congratulations are also in order to the Webnames.ca team for winning the Top Fundraiser Award. Canary Foundation Chairman and Founder Don Listwin presented the trophy to Cybele Negris, COO and a co-founder of Webnames.ca for raising $11,476.10. Cybele was also the winner of the event’s Volunteer Award.

The Canary Derby is an outstanding and fun event, raising funds for research in early cancer detection, something which will undoubtedly save countless lives in the future. Congratulations to all of the organizers, volunteers, sponsors and participants for an exciting day at the races.

Village Gamer is already planning to participate next year with the Women In Games Vancouver – Wired Woman team, and we challenge all of our local associations, game, VFX-CGI and software developers to get involved – along with all of the post-secondary schools and peripheral corporations who support the digital and new media industry.