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5th May 2010

Who Will Take Home The Hardware At The Canadian Videogame Awards

Canadian Video Game AwardsTonight’s the night when we will all find out which game has been chosen as the Canadian Game of the Year as the Canadian Videogame Awards kicks of its inaugural celebration at the Vancouver Convention Centre. Finalists for Game of the Year are: Assassin’s Creed II; Dawn of War II; Dragon Age: Origins; FIFA 10 and Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. As you can imagine, making a choice in this category was extremely difficult, and now we’re wondering which Village Gamer resident picked the winner.

Welcome to Vancouver, Canon! Canon Canada has expanded its Vancouver presence, and will be celebrating the opening of its new Business Division Western Regional Sales Office on May 11th. According to a report on Business In Vancouver, Mayor Robertson and Olympic Gold Medalist Maelle Ricker will be in attendance at the official opening ceremonies.

SES 2010Ever wanted to have a professional review of your website, landing page, or paid campaign? Then you’re in luck, because Search Engine Strategies Toronto has announced the inclusion of site clinics to their programme. In these two 1-hour, hands on, classroom style sessions top consultants will deconstruct and reconstruct your website offering critiques – free of charge. SES Toronto takes place this June 9 -11. Be sure to get there early, because the clinics are first-come first-served sessions with limited attendance.

Audiokinetic has announced bundle discount pricing for their wide range of production software. Purchasing two products will net you a 5% discount, three will get you 10%, four earns 15% and the Power Bundle of five or more products will get you a 20% discount.

Autodesk has announced their 2011 Education Suites. Need help getting started? Are you a teacher with students who are interested in digital design careers? Check out the Autodesk Education Community to see how you can help someone get started. If you’re a commercial designer, please visit our friends over at AnnexPro (a major sponsor of Women in Games Vancouver) to see how they can help you with all of your Autodesk software needs.

National Film BoardFrom May 4 to 17, you can vote online for your favourite short among the finalists of the 6th NFB Short Film Contest – Cannes 2010. Now in its sixth year, the contest is organized by the National Film Board of Canada in collaboration with the Cannes Short Film Corner and in association with YouTube. It features ten short films from Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Iran, the United States, the Czech Republic, Algeria and Italy, selected from the numerous Short Film Corner entries. The Short Film Corner is the meeting place for young creators at the Cannes Film Festival, attracting entries from around the world. The ten films from last year’s contest were viewed close to 180,000 times on the NFB’s English and French YouTube channels.

The NFB contest is your chance to join in the fun and frenzy of Cannes by voting online for your favourite short. The winning film – determined by the number of Likes chalked up on YouTube – will be announced during the Short Film Corner Happy Hour, in Cannes, on May 20. The winning filmmaker will receive a digital camera/HD video camera and a laptop computer.

Short film expert Danny Lennon has assembled a fascinating selection this year. The finalists are The Technician, by Simon-Olivier Fecteau (Canada), Love & Theft, by Andreas Hykade (Germany), The Story of My Life, by Pierre Ferrière (France), Crash! Bang! Wallow?, by Jon Dunleavy (United Kingdom), Crash! Bang! Wallow?, by Emma Lazenby (United Kingdom), Forbidden Tree, by Banafsheh Modaressi (Iran), Annie Goes Boating, by Noel Paul (United States), Awake, by Thaid Dhi (Czech Republic), The Last Passenger, by Mounes Khammar (Algeria), and The Report Card, by Alessandro Celli (Italy).

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is also honouring the memory of André Lamy, former NFB commissioner and independent producer, who passed away at the age of 77.

Lamy served as Government Film Commissioner and NFB Chairperson from 1975 to 1979, following a term as Assistant Commissioner under Sydney Newman from 1970 to 1975.

Only the second francophone NFB Commissioner, Lamy played a key role in strengthening the NFB’s ties to the Quebec film sector. He also ensured the release of the then-controversial NFB French program films On est au coton, 24 heures ou plus and Cap d’espoir. He was Commissioner during the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics and was involved in the creation of the official Olympics film, Games of the XXI Olympiad.

“I was fortunate enough to be able to get to know André Lamy better during the filming of The Commissioners, a short documentary by Philippe Baylaucq created to mark the NFB’s 70th anniversary. It was clear that André Lamy was not well during the filming, but he was determined to take part, and his commitment to the NFB, to filmmaking and, in particular, Quebec cinema, was undiminished. Everyone at the NFB is deeply saddened by his passing,” said Tom Perlmutter, Government Film Commissioner and Chairperson of the NFB.

After his term as NFB Commissioner, Lamy served as head of the Canadian Film Development Corporation, now Telefilm Canada, from 1980 to 1985, before moving to the private sector as an award-winning producer with Galafilm.

Prior to joining the NFB, Lamy was a producer at Onyx Films from 1964 to 1970, during which time he was involved in several major feature productions. During this period, he also produced television commercials and industrial films for a wide variety of companies. From 1962 to 1964, he was the director of sales and a producer with Niagara Films of Montreal. Born in Montreal on July 19, 1932, Lamy was educated at the Université de Montréal and McGill University.

OMDCOMDC is now accepting applications for 2010/11cycle of the OMDC Export Fund – Interactive Digital Media. This program provides eligible Ontario interactive digital media content producers with funding to participate in export development activities that correspond to a strategy for company growth. Primary activities supported are market event attendance and targeted sales trips that relate to the strategy.

For the 2010/11 cycle of this program, applications must be submitted via the OMDC Online Application Portal (OAP). This is a new application process and all applicants are strongly encouraged to commence their applications early to allow for enough time should technical difficulties arise and/or assistance be required. Prior to commencing an application, your company’s corporate information must be registered. If this has not already been done, you should register as soon as possible. There will also be an OAP information session, following the program information session that interested applicants are encouraged to attend. Complete Guidelines are posted on the OMDC website.

Information Session Details:

Date: May 26, 2010
Time: 10:30 am – 12:30 pm (10:30 am – 11:30 am Program Information Session; followed by an OAP Information Session 11:30 am – 12:30 pm with time available for questions)
Location: Conference Centre – 175 Bloor Street East, North Tower, Third Floor, Toronto

If you are interested in attending this session please sign up. Registration will close at 5:00pm on May 25, 2010. Unregistered guests will only be accepted if space permits.

Tungle.meTungle Corp. has announced a new version of its Tungle.me meeting scheduling application, designed to put Tungle into the social graph and simplify the process of finding and connecting with friends and colleagues. Tungle.me 2.0 extends the application’s social networking features with the addition of a public directory, search functionality, and group meeting capabilities.

“Since the launch of Tungle.me in June of 2009, we’ve added personalization and integration with many social networking applications, such as Plancast and LinkedIn,” said Marc Gingras, CEO and founder of Tungle Corporation. “By allowing users to easily find who they want to meet, we are opening up our service and evolving into the last mile in connecting with your social graph, tying together intention, location, and groups to connect business professionals and friends in the real world.”

Tungle.me users can now opt-in to be included in a public directory, making it easier for others to find their personal scheduling page, view their availability and schedule meetings with them without signing up. Visitors can search for users by name or company name, either from the new Tungle.me home page or from within meeting invitations—without needing to upload contacts or create new friend lists.

“Since we’ve built the Tungle.me directory, we are seeing 85% participation by Tungle.me users,” said Jonathan Levitt, Tungle’s vice president of marketing. “It’s a staggering figure and we’re attributing this high conversion to both people’s interest in making themselves more available to meet, but also on account of our stringent and flexible privacy settings. We’re opening up while still providing users with control over their data. In today’s open world, this is something that we (and users) take very seriously.”

The new Group functionality for Tungle.me allows users to create and name private or public groups, browse public groups in the directory, and save group aliases to contact lists. Non-users can also schedule meetings with public groups without having to register for accounts. Scheduling meetings with large groups has been made even simpler with the ability to overlay calendars of group members to see common availability. Groups can be created for associations, organizations, committees, departments, conferences, and more; making it easier to view others’ availability and schedule meetings between members.

PickupPalA new mobile transportation dispatcher now becomes a reality for millions of commuters, carpoolers, ridesharers and casual hitch-hikers around the world. Today, PickupPal Inc., operators of the very popular and growing rideshare service, announce the release of their free iPhone® app.

This new app will immediately allow members to use PickupPal on their iPhone and iPod touch® devices. This release incorporates many of the features of PickupPal’s wired site and leverages Pickup Palthe iPhone’s GPS, mapping and texting capabilities through an intuitive user interface. Users can now find instantaneous matches based on their current location and trip request while on the go.

“This iPhone app is fundamentally going to change the immediacy of ridesharing and unleash PickupPal’s full matching potential,” comments John Stewart, CEO of PickupPal. “By its very nature, PickupPal needs to be able to provide instant matching based on a dynamic and ever changing mobile location and offer immediate communication between members – with the iPhone it’s all here and more,” adds Stewart.

“With so many music fans using smartphones on a daily basis, it is essential that services like ridesharing be offered, with ease, through a mobile platform,” comments Adam Gardner, long-time PickupPal partner and co-director of Reverb, an organization dedicated to greening music tours and conducting grassroots environmental outreach. “We’re psyched that fans can connect with each other for these large-scale events and be empowered to reduce CO2 by finding a matched ride with PickupPal’s mobile app,” adds Mr. Gardner.

intelliwarePickupPal has been able to deliver this app to the market quickly through a key technology partnership with Intelliware Development based in Toronto. “We created this partnership because of PickupPal’s leadership position in the social networking, eco-friendly ridesharing space,” comments Glen Johnson, SVP Intelliware. “We knew we could make a significant impact on their business by quickly building them a high quality mobile app. We’ve invested in PickupPal through our Product Ventures business as part of this effort, which speaks to our excitement and commitment to this green project.”

In the future, PickupPal plans to add several other popular mobile platforms to its roster of supported devices – with the iPad™, Blackberry® and Android™ next on the list.

Open TextOpen Text Corporation has announced Rights Management Services (RMS) for the Open Text ECM Suite which allows enterprises to safeguard confidential and sensitive information from unauthorized uses for content even after it leaves the secure vault of the content repository.

High-profile public and private sector cases of information misuse, IP theft and privacy leaks over the past few years have been due in part to the ease of distributing electronic information via email, flash drives and other means. Even though the content may be stored in a secure repository, once users have the right to read a document and save it on their local drives, the content becomes vulnerable. Open Text Rights Management Services lets organizations augment their security strategies by providing persistent protection that remains with information no matter where it goes. Rights Management Services gives users control over who accesses their content and how, and ensures that the right version is being used.

“With the speed that information travels, it’s all too easy for sensitive documents to get forwarded or downloaded to a USB drive and land in the wrong hands,” said Lubor Ptacek, Vice President of Product Marketing at Open Text. “Permissions-based security in an enterprise repository alone is not sufficient. By integrating Rights Management Services into the ECM Suite we are making it easy for customers to layer persistent content-based security on top of their current protection policies and procedures.”

Rights Management Services works by enforcing content protection constraints for documents and other content based on business rules such as “do not email,” “do not print” or “do not save locally.” The application then encrypts the content and the publishing license together. The content and rights remain encrypted during transport, extending security to wherever the content travels. When a recipient opens rights-protected content, a request goes to a rights management server to validate the user’s credentials and usage rights. Round-trip scenarios are also supported allowing editing and uploading of new versions that retain the rights management constraints.

Full integration with the Open Text ECM Suite allows organizations to quickly deploy Rights Management Services and easily protect any content asset stored in the Open Text Enterprise Library, or map file access policies to existing security levels. As a shared service in the ECM Suite, Rights Management Services are also available to any content application in the organization.

Protection spans Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 applications as well as virtually all other file formats, including PDF, HTML, engineering drawing file formats, image files, ZIP, archives and more. Users can also read and protect content viewed on BlackBerry smartphones. As a result, organizations can secure and control their content no matter where it resides and more fully comply with regulatory requirements that mandate information protection, such as the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and similar regulations around the world.

The Open Text RMS solution takes advantage of the widely used Active Directory Rights Management Service from Microsoft, the industry’s leading technology platform for rights management available with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

“More and more organizations are seeing rights management as a critical part of their information protection strategies to protect against leaks and theft of confidential information. That’s why we build this capability directly into our server platform,” said John Chirapurath, Senior Director in the Identity and Security Business Group at Microsoft. “Open Text is providing advanced solutions on top of Active Directory Rights Management Services to help customers build what we call Business Ready Security into their enterprise content management and collaboration initiatives.”

Open Text is also partnering with both GigaTrust and Liquid Machines, leaders in extending the Microsoft RMS platform, to add support for specialty content types such as computer-aided design (CAD) files, Visio, Adobe PDF, graphic files, and many other file formats, plus rights management support for documents available via BlackBerry devices.

“With the addition of GigaTrust’s Protector for the Open Text platform, information control can be applied and managed in a variety of ways to meet the needs of different industries or different business functions that use varied file formats no matter where the content travels,” said Darryl Worsham, Vice President of Business Development and Partner Products at GigaTrust.

“Liquid Machines and Open Text are providing customers with a solution that covers the majority of file types in an enterprise. With the integrated solution, our joint customers can persistently protect their most critical intellectual property in electronic form, regardless of where it travels. Rights management policies can be applied automatically and consistently to all types of enterprise content throughout its lifecycle,” said Ed Gaudet, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Marketing of Liquid Machines, Inc.

Open Text Rights Management Services for the Open Text ECM Suite is available now. Partner offerings are also available now directly through the partners.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 9:44 am and is filed under Animation, Associations, Awards, Business News, Careers, Contests, Digital Products, Education, Events, Game Dev, Government, National News, New Releases, Social Media, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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