Category: News

  • Another way to count the vote

    Canada isn’t the only nation hav­ing an elec­tion in May. Folks in the United King­dom go to the polls on May 5th — and when they do, they’ll not only be select­ing their lead­ers, they’ll be vot­ing on a ref­er­en­dum to change they way votes are coun­ted. And this has the chance to really make…

  • More Gagarin Goodness…

    Earli­er today I noticed the Google Doodle point­ing to resources about Yuri Gagar­in’s (and man­kind’s) first orbit of the Earth. A few moments ago @mynameiskate poin­ted me at the You­Tube logo — mod­i­fied too — and links to First Orbit a free fea­ture-length movie about Gagar­in’s flight: A real time recre­ation of Yuri Gagar­in’s pion­eer­ing…

  • Emerging Tech: This magazine app knows what you like

    You’ve got an iPad and all the pop­u­lar magazine, con­tent, read­ing apps like Reed­er, Flip­board, Pulse, and FLUD. Well now there’s a new one using tech­no­logy from the Uni­ver­sity of Brit­ish Columbi­a’s Labor­at­ory for Com­pu­ta­tion­al Intelligence. It’s called Zite, and is it ever cool. But first, the video. Why I like it It’s a learn­ing app. Log…

  • Canuck going to South by South West (SXSW)?

    If you’re going to South by South West (SXSW) in March, then con­sider check­ing in to the Maple Leaf Digit­al Lounge — a new concept that helps pro­mote and high­light Cana­dian tech­no­logy to SXSW attendees. We are cre­at­ing a cluster of Cana­dian tech­no­logy that will be pro­moted at this event.  This is a unique concept…

  • The gauntlet has been thrown: HP’s webOS TouchPad

    Yes­ter­day Earli­er today in San Fran­cisco, HP revealed a few new products; the new Veer, the Pre 3, and the new Touch­Pad — a dir­ect com­pet­it­or to the Apple iPad. And the Touch­Pad is going to be a very cool device. My thoughts: Same weight as an iPad — I was hop­ing for lighter Cool…

  • Woot! New Canon Rebel T3 cameras

    Last year around this time, Can­on intro­duced the Rebel T2i (also known as the EOS 550D). An awe­somely speced-out cam­era, as all the Rebel’s are, aimed squarely at the con­sumer Digit­al SLR and home video mar­ket — yes, the Rebel T2i was a true hybrid. Well, today Can­on reprised that tune with the announce­ment of…

  • Commerce in a post-Wikileaks economy

    You’ve likely seen the news that Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others are under distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks by folk who feel that WikiLeaks headman Julian Assange is being persecuted for distributing sensitive information he...

  • Emotionally gaming your Twitter stream?

    I’ve been watch­ing the devel­op­ment of Little­cosm, a new Twit­ter cli­ent with excite­ment as it’s one of a new breed that is apply­ing sen­ti­ment ana­lys­is to derive a res­ult — in this case your dis­pos­i­tion in a game. Emo­tion plays a huge part in Little­cosm.  Little­cosm ana­lyzes your tweets and fig­ures out if you’re in a…

  • I read the news today (oh boy)

    If you’ve been without power and not heard the news today, The Beatles music lib­rary is now avail­able from Apple’s iTunes store for down­load. Joy. No, I’m not overly enthused by this, as I already own digit­al cop­ies of all the Beatles music that I’m inter­ested in. I bought them on CD years ago, and…

  • The Steve Jobs Way

    Tomor­row Apple will likely announce a new look and feel for the Mac­Book Air and an update (per­haps sig­ni­fic­ant) to their flag­ship oper­at­ing sys­tem, OSX. And once again, the real­ity dis­tor­tion field sur­round­ing Steve Jobs’ present­a­tions will be set to full power. It’ll be an inter­est­ing day, I’m sure. Espe­cially since Steve ripped into Google,…

  • World’s workforce suffers huge productivity loss due to Google

    Earli­er today Google decided to see how much it could influ­ence the eco­nomy and pro­ductiv­ity of first and second world nations by unleash­ing a vir­al online attack against Inter­net-con­nec­ted office work­ers world wide. Ostens­ibly pro­moted as a 30 year anniversary of a clas­sic video game, Google is, in real­ity, bring­ing work­place activ­ity to a crawl. In Canada,…

  • Journalism and Big Media challenges for the future

    Last night I happened to catch the CBC Radio pro­gram Ideas. They were play­ing the 2009 Dalton Camp Lec­ture in Journ­al­ism delivered by ex CBC Journ­al­ist and cur­rent Wiki­me­dia Exec­ut­ive Dir­ect­or Sue Gardner. After a bit of an intro­duc­tion, she gets to the real meat of the mat­ter — how the busi­ness mod­els are work­ing…