Village Gamer

Tim Hortons helped make history today, playing host to the first Canadian mobile credit card transaction. Canadian Olympic Triathlete Simon Whitfield purchased a Tim Hortons coffee at a downtown Toronto restaurant using a Rogers BlackBerry smartphone and CIBC credit card account. Now Tim Hortons guests, who are clients of CIBC and Rogers, will be able to pay for their favourite coffee, breakfast or lunch without ever opening their wallet. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last year, people within the US and across the globe have taken to social media to express their opinions and arguments regarding the two American presidential candidates. Never before has this online medium played such a decisive role in an election, as made evident by the social media spending of both the Obama and Romney campaigns. The team at HootSuite wants to bring you live updates from what are quickly becoming the most influential political battlegrounds: Twitter and Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »

Gener8 Digital Media Corp., a visual effects studio that is redefining the landscape of 3D film production, is launching a new business division devoted to cloud-based data management: Cumul8. Developed to address Gener8’s own digital production needs, Cumul8 turns data into knowledge by aggregating various data streams involved in a production and using these to drive valuable, real-time metrics to a project’s decision makers. Read the rest of this entry »

HootSuite social media management system has further expanded its social reach with another wave of #SocialApps. reddit, StumbleUpon, Scoop.it, Nexalogy and CMP.LY have been added to the company’s ever-expanding App Directory. HootSuite is known for helping power users and social businesses engage with audiences and analyze campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. The App Directory now hosts a collection of 35 tools and applications built by third-party developers that empower users to customize their dashboards. These five new apps, available immediately to the company’s five million Free, Pro, and Enterprise clients, make exploring, curating, and supporting social media campaigns easier than ever before. Read the rest of this entry »

Pearson Canada is helping students power up to learn with new iBooks textbooks.  Three of Pearson’s bestselling textbooks, re-imagined for the iPad and brought to life with engaging video, audio, assessment, interactive images and 3D animations, are now available in Canada.  Education Technology Leaders will have an opportunity to preview the new Pearson Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Science interactive textbooks at the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario (ECOO) annual conference. Read the rest of this entry »

McGraw-Hill Ryerson announced yesterday that it is bringing its leading curricula and instructional expertise to Apple’s iPad® by making two of its popular high school titles available on the iBookstore. The initial list of McGraw-Hill Ryerson titles that can be downloaded from the iBookstore includes Remix, A Revolution in Text Forms – a title from the acclaimed Canadian English iLit series – and Biology 12. Students, teachers and schools wishing to purchase Biology 12 will be able to do so on a unit-by-unit basis. The launch of these titles builds upon McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s reputation as a leading developer of digital solutions for today’s classrooms. Read the rest of this entry »

The recently released iPhone 5 and iOS6 operating system highlighted Apple Passbook as an innovative new feature, promising to relieve users from “searching through your email or fumbling with paper printouts” at checkouts while clicking on the Passbook icon often left you at a landing page where there wasn’t much to do – until now. Toronto-based CardSwap, an online gift card marketplace where consumers earn cash-back and gift card rewards when purchasing gift cards on everything from gas and groceries to clothing and electronics, has announced it has integrated its delivery platform directly with Apple’s Passbook.  Read the rest of this entry »

Montreal startup Sky Motion Research Inc. has launched their new app, which gives minute by minute weather predictions on your Android and iOS devices as well as online in your browser. SkyMotion uses a proprietary 2-hour precipitation forecasting technology developed by Sky Motion Research called Nowcasting that automatically tracks and predicts all precipitation in the United States and Canada in real-time using Doppler weather radars and many other real-time weather observations. Read the rest of this entry »

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solutions provider OpenText has announced the immediate availability of a new set of services that leverage the company’s recently acquired EasyLink cloud infrastructure to facilitate secure information exchange in the OpenText cloud. Read the rest of this entry »

HootSuite has announced Command Centre, which is designed to help organizations get the most value from their social media management. The HootSuite Command Centre is an offering that will let companies, especially large enterprises, command and control all of their social activity. Command Centre gives social media teams the ability to monitor, measure and react to all online activity in real-time.  Think of it as the “Situation Room” of a company, or if you prefer, as the command bridge of a company’s USS Enterprise. Read the rest of this entry »