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The next generation of connected entertainment continues with the launch of the Shaw Gateway experience for Edmonton customers, who join  Shaw Gateway customers in Calgary, where the new program was launched; other Canadian markets will have access to Gateway soon.

The Gateway brings customers a shared PVR experience and more than 1,200 HD Video On Demand titles. The PVR supports the recording of up to six programs at once, while playing back up to three previously recorded programs – all in HD.

“The Gateway is the first product of its kind in Canada and brings customers a totally new way of experiencing technology and connectivity,” said Peter Bissonnette, President, Shaw Communications Inc. “We’re excited to launch the product to our Edmonton customers and provide them with the ultimate in entertainment with the Shaw Gateway.”

Customers can seamlessly pick up recordings on another TV and resume playback without missing a beat. The Gateway also enables customers to maximize HD/SD recordings with Shaw’s PVR expanders. An enriched Program Guide with content filters and enhanced search is one of the Gateway’s key features. Customers can access VOD titles through a live TV storefront, along with on-screen video games and live Shaw Pay Per View events.

In the coming months more features will be available on the Shaw Gateway, including:

• Integration of web content, providing customer access to Internet content through their TVs
• Remote PVR scheduling that allows customers to set up program recordings online and on their handheld devices
• Global Content Search of live TV, recorded TV, VOD and PPV content, and PC files on PCs and laptops
• Home sharing allowing customers to share pictures and content from their computer onto their television

The Shaw Gateway brings together broadband and HD technology with DLNA (Digital Life Network Alliance) standards to deliver the industry’s best in-home entertainment. The product launched in Calgary on May 3, and will be available in Vancouver and throughout the country during summer 2011.

The Gateway is available with the Shaw Easy Own program for $17 per month over 36 months or $598.

With the pairing of two unique talents and backgrounds, best selling author Stephen Joyce and pioneer software engineer Doug Oucharek have launched theLocBox, providing users with the opportunity to take security of their data into their own hands.

While encrypted file sharing isn’t a new concept, this add-on to existing cloud systems provides users with a new tool. theLocBox enables users to create a key that allows them the opportunity to protect their stored data and maintain control over who has access to that data. Users create their own individual keys, stored locally, to share and access encrypted files. The concept is simple; theLocBox creates a “vault” folder in Dropbox and any documents dragged to theLocBox window are encrypted and copied to this vault folder. Only the key the user creates will be able to access the files, protecting your personal data.

Doug Oucharek states, “Trusting third parties with your encryption keys is unacceptable, especially if you are a business. End-to-end encryption, where only the end users have the ability to decrypt the files, is the safest way to use cloud storage.”

Co-creator, Stephen Joyce added, “Today, more work than ever is conducted in a virtual space and as a result, it’s more important than ever to have confidence in your privacy when sharing and storing files and other personal data.”

theLocBox comes at a critical time when reports of personal data security breaches are rampant in the media and security is on everyone’s mind. Recently, Sony disclosed that nearly 77 million Playstation users were affected by a breach in data security – This information was stored in what Sony said was an “outdated database from 2007.”

Rypple© has launched Loops, a disruptive new social performance summary application available as part of Rypple’s Phenomenal Plan for just $9-per-user-per month. It includes hundreds of feature enhancements of Rypple’s social performance platform, and plugs securely and seamlessly into existing work systems.. Loops makes it quick and easy for managers to pull together all the relevant information about employee performance already captured in Rypple’s existing applications—continuous feedback, social goals, one-on-one coaching, and meaningful recognition—into helpful, actionable performance summaries.

Everything is already in one place and easy to find so there’s no need to dig through old emails, notes, or spreadsheets and managers can run Loops whenever they choose—at the end of a goal, a project, or a quarter. They can invite anyone to contribute feedback, whether inside or outside their teams. And they can draft a series of customized questions to get the answers they need to accelerate performance. Greater visibility means no surprises when it comes to discussing promotions or compensation.

“The workplace has changed,” said Daniel Debow, co-CEO of Rypple. “But performance management hasn’t changed with it. Traditional reviews have become disconnected from real performance, and they’re slowing us down. With the help of our customers—creative, innovative companies devoted to nurturing and developing their people—we’ve built a social performance management platform for the way we work today: in real-time.”

Hundreds of innovative companies already use Rypple to set key priorities, recognize meaningful accomplishments, and get ongoing feedback and coaching. Rypple worked closely with a select group of customers to build and refine Loops, including Facebook, Gilt Groupe, RichRelevance, PhotoBucket, Bazaarvoice, EventBright, Kobo, Nexj Systems, Pivotal Labs, and Insomniac Games. Now, with Rypple Loops, managers and their teams can collect everything in one place—in real time—finally making performance management both effective and painless.

“Rypple built a performance platform that supports Facebook’s social, collaborative, and fast-moving culture,” said Bob Trahan, the company’s Director of Engineering and Head of Culture & Engagement. “Working with Rypple means our performance summaries are more real-time and our people get the feedback they want and need.”

Rypple’s easy to use privacy controls allow managers and their teams choose how much to share—and how much to keep private: employees can recognize one another publicly for their accomplishments on a company-wide feed everyone can see; hold private one-on-ones with their manager in a private, shared space; or request anonymous feedback from anyone at the company.

Ivey School of Business case studies are now available anywhere, anytime through Apple’s iBookstore. One of the world’s leading business case publishers, the Richard Ivey School of Business is the first publisher to make business case studies available on the iBookstore. Starting today over 500 cases from Ivey’s inventory are available to download for $3.99 each. The iBookstore is available through the free iBooks app for iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

Since the Ivey Business School’s inception in 1922 the case method has been the keystone of its highly regarded approach to teaching general management. Students and executives at universities around the world use Ivey cases to learn by doing. Business students, executives or anyone can now benefit from enhanced convenience, quicker delivery, and more flexibility in accessing published cases.

“Making Ivey cases available through the iBookstore provides an opportunity to reach a new and wider audience that may not have been exposed to business case studies previously,” said Paul Beamish, Director of Ivey Publishing. “It supports our emphasis on making Ivey cases easily accessible to everyone.”

Each case provides readers with an opportunity to stand in the shoes of the decision-maker, analyzing the business issue presented, making judgments and determining a course of action. Ivey is the second largest producer and distributor of business case studies in the world.

Over 500 cases are currently available, with newer cases to be added regularly.  More than 200 new cases are created each year from business faculty at Ivey and from other partnered universities. Articles from the Ivey Business Journal will also be available through the iBookstore.

Richard Ivey School of Business, the world’s largest producer of Asian cases, will continue to offer its inventory in printed or digital PDF form through its network of 18 traditional academic publishing partners including Harvard Business Publishing and the European Case Clearing House.

The remarkable effort of Vancouverites to show the world that the raucous actions of a select few by no means defines the city they love has garnered widespread attention, both locally and abroad.

Now, with the aid of a sophisticated online platform that aggregates comments, photos, and video content from the far reaches of the internet, online users can delve into the profound outpouring of affection for Vancouver that has dominated the social sphere in recent days.

The site, affectionately named ‘This Is Our Vancouver‘, makes use of the latest digital technology to pull content into one space that would ordinarily require days of surfing to unearth. This Is Our Vancouver permits even novice users to access the overwhelming content generated by those who are passionate about Vancouver on a single, intuitive platform.

“In recent days we’ve seen an outpouring of emotion and love for Vancouver from our citizens, who spontaneously shared their thoughts on the temporary plywood storefronts downtown,” said Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson. “This opportunity will continue through This Is Our Vancouver, a new site that is supported by 100% donated services from our community. It provides one more way for everyone to express their love for our city as we collectively move forward and show the world what kind of city Vancouver truly is.”

Developed by creative agency DDB Canada, in partnership with Tourism Vancouver, the online platform scours the web for compelling content from diverse sources such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

“Last Wednesday Vancouver was reeling from a blindside,” said Tourism Vancouver President & CEO Rick Antonson. “Today, Vancouver’s integrity shines again. This is a testament to the commitment of this city’s citizens to set things right if they have gone wrong. ‘This Is Our Vancouver.com’ is our way of helping the world know that Vancouver’s greatest asset is its people.”

In addition to creating a one-stop portal for existing Vancouver content, This Is Our Vancouver is a user-friendly platform that encourages all Canadians to contribute their take on what best defines the city.

Says Greg Klassen, the Canadian Tourism Commission’s Senior Vice President, Marketing Strategy,  “The mindless destruction we witnessed last week has been eclipsed by a collective effort of Canadians of all ages that is truly extraordinary. We applaud the citizens who mobilized so quickly to remind the world what Canada is really all about.”

The ease of making an online contribution paired with the inspiration that comes from browsing the diverse and heartfelt content of fellow Canadians puts this new platform in prime position to continue generating testimonials that will help restore the nation’s image.

Lance Saunders, Executive Vice President & Managing Director of DDB Canada’s Vancouver office, said, “As a creative agency, our world is about harnessing emotion. We mobilize people around sentiments that hold real meaning for them. Vancouver is our national headquarters; it’s a natural time for us to put our experience into practice for a vital cause. This is about celebrating Vancouver and restoring its image to where it deserves to be.”

Since the website has gone live, many local businesses and media outlets have volunteered their services to generate awareness about the new platform and encourage widespread participation.  Project partners The Vancouver Sun and The Province have generously contributed significant ad space to promote the site with a view to helping citizens reclaim their city and shape its future.

In response to the growing consumer and merchant demand for mobile payment technologies in Canada, Vancouver’s Payfirma Corporation has launched its proprietary iPhone Mobile Payment app, also compatible with iPod Touch and iPad.

Developed in Vancouver by the Company’s Fintech Innovation Team, the app is available as a free download from Apple’s iTunes App Store. It can be activated remotely by any merchant account customer of Payfirma’s, and the optional card swiper can be purchased directly from the Company.

“Canadian consumers and businesses are extremely technology literate and savvy,” says Michael Gokturk, Founder & CEO of Payfirma, Canada’s leading innovator of payment processing technologies & services. “They are always seeking efficient and secure means of transacting financially with one another, and our mobile payment app enables them to do just that.”

Payfirma’s proprietary app lets any business or consumer accept all major credit cards securely on an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Users can swipe or manually input a credit card, capture a digital signature on the screen, and authorize the transaction within 10 seconds. A customizable receipt can then be emailed directly to the customer from within the app.

“We developed the this product with Canadians in mind,” continues Gokturk. “While there are other apps similar to Payfirma’s out there, none are designed with the needs and culture of Canadian merchants or consumers in mind.”

The app is offered for free, but users must have a valid Canadian merchant account to process live transactions. Opening a merchant account with Payfirma is easy, and can be opened directly within the app itself, or on the Company’s website.

Edmonton’s Amos Studios has launched Scam Detector, a new iPhone application that reveals in detail over 350 of the most common scams in the world. The scams are separated into nine categories: auto, face to face, telephone, travel, and internet, which is broken down into five areas: social networking, financial, employment, housing, and online auctions.

“People need to be aware there are others out there, who given the opportunity, will not hesitate to victimize them”, says the application’s developer, Sorin Mihailovici. “This has been made easier through advancements in technology, as crooks are finding new ways to ply their trade around the world. It took almost a year to re¬search the content and it is now at the point where I am confident Scam Detector can save people from becom¬ing victims. The Pro version of Scam Detector provides ongoing protection with free updates.”

While users can easily navigate the menus learning about scams, they can also launch a search to see if they are about to be victimized. The search feature is optimized to find words within the scam descriptions. So if some¬one is approached by a con artist, who has a proposal that seems too good to be true, saying for instance, “you can earn more money working at home”. All the user of the app has to do is input a keyword or two fitting the situation and it will find the Work at Home scam, and all related scams.

Scam Detector for iPhone is available for $1.99US with a limited Lite free version of the app also available, but lists fewer scams. Scam Detector versions for iPad and Android platforms are in the works and will be available soon.

Independent Nova Scotian publishing imprint AIM Comics has released its first book, “The Brutal Blade of Bruno the Bandit”.  The book collects stories from the archives of the long-running web comic Bruno The Bandit. In using digital distribution methods, including formatting the book for Amazon’s popular Kindle reader, AIM Comics is breathing new life into once popular but lately overlooked web comics, while at the same time helping to close the gap that still exists between traditional web comics and the new trend of portable readiing devices.

“Bruno the Bandit” is a web comic that ran for over 10 years from July, 1998 to October, 1999 that was  created, written and drawn by Newfoundland cartoonist Ian McDonald. The comic was hosted by web comics publisher Keenspot and was nominated in 2002 for best fantasy comic by the Web Cartoonists Choice Awards.  It is a sword and sorcery parody strip that lampoons current events and trends as much as it does the tropes of its own genre. Previously collected by Plan 9 Publishing, the collections were available in print only and no move was made to package any sort of digital collections of the work.

In 2011, AIM Comics was started by independent artist Mike Dominic as an imprint for self-published, creator owned works.  The flagship title for this imprint is a new collection of Bruno the Bandit strips, “The Brutal Blade of Bruno the Bandit”, a 72-page magazine-sized book collecting the first 13 stories from the strip’s archives.

Although small and new, AIM Comics has already achieved global distribution by using the best of the new publishing channels for the comics format, including print on demand from Amazon’s Createspace service, as well as digital distribution through Wowio, DriveThru Comics and MyDigitalComics.com.

While the book has been available through those channels since February, AIM Comics’s latest move allows them to embrace the portable reader platform by making the book and any future offerings available via Amazon’s Kindle reader.  Although this means many hours of reformatting the material to fit the new device, the rewards are seen to be worth the effort as this opens up the book to a huge potential audience who may no longer be looking to their browsers or their desktop systems for reading material.

As the ubiquity of portable devices increases, more readers will stock their libraries from the wireless connection built into their device of choice, which means they will be spending less time exploring those kinds of materials through browser based interfaces.  In order for webcomics creators to enjoy the audiences they’ve held for the last decade, they’re going to need to start making their work available in collected versions aimed at the portable market.

In addressing the portable market, comics publishers have focused their efforts on the iOS-based devices from Apple, but have not yet made a strong move to embrace the wide variety of other portable devices currently available.  In releasing their first book for the Kindle, AIM Comics is exploring the portable market for comics and hoping to show that distribution to these devices will be feasible and rewarding.The second volume of “The Brutal Blade of Bruno the Bandit” is slated for August, 2011 release through all channels, including the Kindle.  Also, AIM Comics will be releasing a second title, “The Journals of Simon Pariah”, adapted from the web comic by Mike Dominic, in Fall of 2011.

Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, and Kim Cameron, a leading digital identity expert, have released a new joint publication called “Wi-Fi Positioning Systems: Beware of Unintended Consequences – Issues Involving the Unforeseen Uses of Pre-existing Architecture.” In this white paper, launched at the SC Congress Canada 2011 Conference in Toronto today, Cavoukian and Cameron call for the use of Privacy by Design to protect the privacy of mobile device users.

Mobile devices are becoming more crucial in our daily lives, with people now carrying them and using them practically everywhere. Whenever an individual uses location-based services on his or her mobile device, a unique identifier of nearby traceable Wi-Fi access points called a Media Access Control (MAC) address is relayed. This raises privacy concerns because this location information may be compiled into a profile of an individual over time, such as where they have travelled to, shopped, eaten or banked.

In addition, potential unintended consequences stem from the intrinsic nature of MAC addresses that are at the core of current networked communications. For instance, with minimal time and resources, one may be able to associate MAC addresses of mobile devices to physical addresses, and then to a specific individual.  Furthermore, depending on future developments, it may even be possible that individuals using geolocation services could inadvertently report the MAC address (and, simultaneously, location) of mobile devices belonging to friends, family or co-workers – creating an unintended ‘unknowing informant’ model of data collection.”

“Privacy must be designed into Wi-Fi positioning systems to prevent unintended consequences,” says Commissioner Ann Cavoukian. “I’ll repeat the message I gave about the Apple and Sony controversies – don’t practice privacy by chance. Companies should practice Privacy by Design – they should address privacy proactively and put control squarely in the hands of the users, where it belongs.”

“What companies, government departments, people and systems will be able to follow our physical movements and activities, five or ten years from now?  How will what they see change the way we are treated? Will individuals have any protections?  That is what location technology is about,” says Kim Cameron, co-author of the paper. “When you look into this, it becomes clear that location technology must embrace our human need for privacy.  In this paper we try to point to ways that can come about.”

The authors caution that when designing an architecture (e.g. wireless networks), the question of unintended uses, inadvertently introduced through the existence of that architecture, should form part of a privacy threat risk analysis. In no case, should the MAC address of end-user devices be collected or tracked without the consent of the owners of such devices.

Strangeloop has announced that it is the first company in the world to provide a commercial product that automatically offers the benefits of Google’s experimental SPDY protocol without requiring changes to the site owner’s code or servers. The release, which is available immediately to all Strangeloop customers, comes after months of close collaboration between Strangeloop and the Chromium Project team at Google.

“Our goal is to make the web faster for everyone,” said Mike Belshe, Lead Software Engineer at Google. “Strangeloop engineers embraced SPDY from the beginning and provided key data and feedback about their experience. They then integrated SPDY with their Site Optimizer product and moved rapidly from concept to code to product, demonstrating an impressive speed-up in their customers’ site performance.”

Strangeloop’s integration of SPDY within its Site Optimizer suite of products and services have resulted in:

• At least 50% reduction in page load time.
• Minimizing the complexity of deployment. Site Optimizer automates Web Content Optimization (WCO), delivering the benefits of SPDY to customers without making changes to their servers or code.
• Bringing together like-minded people interested in using the power of open-source collaboration to explore protocols as a way of solving latency problems.

“At Strangeloop, we’re passionate about pushing the performance envelope, and we’re always looking for opportunities to collaborate with other industry leaders to do this,” said Strangeloop CEO Jonathan Bixby. “This is just the first phase of our SPDY integration work.” Read the rest of this entry »