Village Gamer

The Bell Aliant Pioneers are marking 100 years of volunteering and community support by the TelecomPioneers and awarding twelve SMART Boards to schools in Newfoundland and Labrador.

“Across North America the TelecomPioneers are celebrating 100 years of community volunteering and fundraising,” said Joan Neil, President of the local Pioneers Chapter. “In Newfoundland and Labrador the Bell Aliant Pioneers have been active since 1972 and to celebrate we are awarding twelve SMART Boards to schools in the province.”

Over the past two months students around the province have been participating in a contest and have submitted presentations that highlight their schools’ volunteer efforts, the history on the Bell Aliant Pioneers and what a SMART Board would mean to the school. In addition to the SMART Boards the Bell Aliant Pioneers will donate $500 to each of the schools who submitted a presentation. The total value of the donation by the Pioneers is $55,000.

“This donation reflects our commitment to funding programs that support literacy and education,” said Neil. “Last year alone we recorded over 33,000 volunteer hours and donated over $73,000 across the province.  In addition, among other projects, we delivered over 1,100 books for literacy and distributed 450 backpacks filled with school supplies donated by Bell Aliant employees and retirees to a variety of local community groups.”

The winning schools were notified in time for their year-end assemblies and the SMART Boards will be delivered in time for the new school year. SMART Boards are being awarded to:

• Queen of Peace Middle School, Happy Valley-Goose Bay
• Green Bay South Academy, Robert’s Arm
• E.A. Butler All Grade,  Mckay’s
• Xavier Junior High, Deer Lake
• Canon Richards Memorial Academy, Flower’s Cove
• Coley’s Point  Elementary, Coley’s Point
• Catalina Elementary, Catalina
• Random Island Academy, Random Island
• Ackerman Elementary, Green’s Harbour
• Newtown Elementary, Mount Pearl
• Morris Academy, Mount Pearl
• Roncalli Elementary, St. John’s

From risqué postings on the Facebook page of a South Carolina police officer to tweets in support of the recent riots in Vancouver, anti-social behaviour has left many individuals out of work, illuminating the issue of employer rights over workers’ private lives. In other words, how can off-duty conduct impact business reputation? Canadian legal firm Borden Ladner Gervais LLP has released five simple but important guidelines any employer should consider including in their company’s hiring (and firing) policies.

In the past, only certain employers with employees in high-profile roles or positions of trust, such as company spokespeople or teachers, had to be concerned with the public image of their employees. Now, the accessibility of online images and information can threaten an employer’s reputation in new and evolving ways, as the Vancouver riots illustrated. In fact, firings over postings on Facebook and Twitter have led to numerous lawsuits and complaints in both the US and Canada. A photograph or a tweet may have powerful and immediate ramifications for an employer’s business, no matter what the employee’s position is.

“The terminations arising out of the Stanley Cup riots have prompted a very important discussion for all North American employers,” says Peter Eastwood, partner in BLG’s Labour and Employment Group. “With new technology and the demands of the modern workplace, employees’ professional and private lives are becoming more intertwined, creating an increasingly grey area of when work starts and finishes. The wide-spread use of social and digital media makes employers particularly vulnerable to harm from employees’ inappropriate behaviour in their private lives.”

As businesses navigate these evolving risks and rights, BLG recommends the following five tips:

1. Create and clearly communicate policies around employees’ duties and obligations and any expectations for behaviour – both within and outside the workplace. Include detailed policies concerning standards of conduct, harassment, intellectual property, IT/computer use, conflicts of interest and privacy.
2. Remind employees that online communications can be read by anyone – their employer, their co-workers, and the company’s customers – and they should consider how their online activities could affect the company’s reputation.
3. Outline potential problems for employees in referring to the company name or other identifying information such as photos when using social media. If employees are encouraged to communicate for professional purposes online, the employee should include a disclaimer that their views are their own and not the employer’s.
4. Establish clear guidelines and policies for employee use of social media in the workplace and identify specific rules and expectations for the use of company assets such as laptops and smartphones. Negative comments made using these tools could make you liable to defamation lawsuits.
5. Clearly communicate these expectations to employees and identify the consequences of breaching these policies. Include this information in your employment contracts.

Sand Technology Inc., provider of an advanced column store database, has announced that Sand Analytics has passed MicroStrategy’s comprehensive test suite, certifying it as a supported database for the MicroStrategy platform.

“Sand and MicroStrategy are the ideal combination for enterprises that need to handle big data for big user populations,” said Richard Grondin, CTO and VP of R&D and Deployment at Sand. “Sand has worked with MicroStrategy for years, but official certification means even greater support for MicroStrategy’s large end-user BI community, and industry leading integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software. In return, Sand’s massive, concurrent user scalability and the ability to efficiently drill down to detail data and execute large summarization, perfectly fits MicroStrategy environments.”

“With social data, machine data, and structured data being an increasing competitive requirement for Enterprise, you need an analytic database that can support multiple new data types,” said Mike Pilcher, Chief Operating Officer of Sand. “Further, that database needs to scale to support everyone in the enterprise – thousands to tens of thousands of concurrent users – with tools to mine the data. Together, Sand and MicroStrategy customers get best-of-breed reporting and analytics, at lower cost, with less effort, and scalability unmatched by any other solution.”

“We are pleased with Sand’s official certification as a MicroStrategy partner,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy Chief Operating Officer. “MicroStrategy’s high performance BI platform helps companies with some of the largest data volumes in the world gain valuable insights and make informed business decisions.”

Fido and Evergreen have announced the launch of Fido Share Your Care™, a campaign to support local environmental and community projects. Canadians are invited to vote for their favourite project at Share Your Care . In total, Fido will share $100,000 among 20 different local projects across Canada. “We want to work together and encourage Canadians to make choices that will reduce their ecological impact and benefit their communities directly,” says Steven Sarfin, Senior Director, Marketing, Fido. “We believe in making our cities more liveable and we know that our customers want this too. We’re happy to give Canadians the opportunity to show their support.”

Each of the 20 projects involved with Share Your Care receive base support of $2,500 totaling $50,000. In addition, the remaining $50,000 will be distributed between the three projects which receive the most votes. From July 5th until August 14th, Facebook users can vote once per day for their favourite project. Votes will be gathered and ranked by popularity. The three community projects with the highest number of votes will be announced at the end of August.

Some of the organizations participating in Fido Share Your Care include the Gorge Waterway Initiative in Victoria, the Fletcher Wildlife Garden in Ottawa, Friends of the Coves Subwatershed in London, the Ann & Sandy Cross Conservation Area in Calgary, and Befriending the Mountain in Montreal.

“It’s often difficult to see how we can make a difference in the face of global environmental issues,” explains Geoff Cape, the Executive Director of Evergreen. “That’s why we are pleased to be working with Fido to help local champions take up the challenge in their own way and in their own community, by applying a local solution through the Share Your Care initiative.”

Partners since 2009, Fido and Evergreen have worked together to restore degraded public spaces, increase opportunities for outdoor recreation, education and enjoyment, as well as improve the health and biodiversity of natural habitats in urban communities. To date, Fido has helped Evergreen support more than 190 school ground greening projects, 800 public greening events and workshops, engage more than 20,000 volunteers and plant over 40,000 trees and shrubs across Canada.  In addition, Fido has saved over 3.62 tonnes of paper through its online billing initiative.

Imagine having your child’s immunization record at the click of a mouse, as well as email alerts when they need a vaccination. Or using your cell phone to track the care that you need during pregnancy, your due date, and your ultrasounds.  Or using an app to manage your diabetes, with helpful advice on how to improve your results. These are just a few of the winning ideas submitted to the ImagineNation Ideas Challenge, which asked Canadians how they would improve health and health care through innovation in information and communications technologies (ICT).

“Canadians are passionate about our health system, and we wanted their ideas on how digital solutions could strengthen health care,” said Richard Alvarez, President and CEO, Canada Health Infoway (Infoway).  “The calibre of entries we received surpassed our high expectations and the range of ideas on leveraging ICT to improve access, safety, and efficiency of care is inspiring.”

When the Ideas Challenge was launched in March 2011, Canadians were asked to submit their ideas online. An independent panel of judges selected the top five bold and innovative ideas through two rounds of judging.

The first place submission and winner of a $10,000 award is a web-based system to record and schedule immunizations, based on the latest recommendations from the Canadian Immunization Guide.  The idea comes from Dr. Christopher Clarke based on his experience as a family doctor in Puslinch, Ontario. “I imagined a website where each patient would open an account to contain their comprehensive immunization history. More important, the website would continuously update a personalized plan for each patient’s future immunizations, using the latest Canadian guidelines and including any new vaccines,” said Dr. Clarke. “Modern IT is ideal for communicating this sort of complex information to both patients and clinicians.”

The Canada’s Choice Award winner – determined through thousands of votes cast by Canadians – is “Mom2B”, a mobile telephone app for expectant mothers based on health guidance from Canadian experts. It would offer help at every stage, from fertility planning to tracking contractions. The “Mom2B” idea was submitted by Jeff Biletchi and colleagues at Niagara Region Public Health.

The following three submissions round out the top 5 winning ideas.  Each entry has earned a $5,000 award:

• “Empower persons with diabetes interactively with enhanced reporting on iPads,” including tracking their health condition, viewing information from their health team and lab results, and receiving personalized advice to reduce the risk of complications (submitted by Jonathan Lapointe, Montreal)
• “Head Home, Speak Up:  Empower patients and health care providers with an online voice at discharge” to improve the hand-off between hospital and home (submitted by Pamela Chan and Richard Norman, Toronto)
• “Connected health care…The whole life EHR” to track key health information for individuals with chronic conditions, such as vital signs or medications dispensed, and make it available to them and their health team (submitted by Donna Byrne and her team from Quebec)

“Innovation is a driving force behind what we do at Infoway – and is key to the future of health care,” added Dr. Jennifer Zelmer, Senior Vice-President of Clinical Adoption and Innovation, Infoway. “The ImagineNation Ideas Challenge identified some great ideas and helped to get Canadians thinking and talking about health care in the digital age.”

Blue Ice Film and Hot Docs are delighted to announce that they have entered into a partnership to operate the recently acquired Bloor Cinema, the landmark, century-old film house located in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. Currently undergoing renovation, the historic Bloor Cinema will reopen this fall under Hot Docs’ management, revitalized and ready to welcome Toronto’s film-loving public.

“Independent cinemas like the Bloor are vital to the city’s vibrant film culture,” says Chris McDonald, Hot Docs executive director. “Blue Ice Film and Hot Docs want to see them thrive.”

“It’s a dream come true,” says Carm Bordonaro, the now former owner of the Bloor Cinema. “The business model has completely changed and we need visionary investors and organizations like Hot Docs to protect these neighbourhood cinemas. I want to thank the community and our avid supporters who have kept the Bloor alive all these years.”

Bordonaro has been involved with the Bloor Cinema’s operations since 1979, when it was part of the Festival Cinemas chain. He had been managing the venue with his family since 1999, and they purchased it in June of 2010 in an effort to ensure its survival as a cinema. Since then, the family has held off selling the venue, turning away numerous property developers until a like-minded buyer could be secured.

Under a joint venture agreement, Hot Docs as lease holder will assume responsibility for managing and programming the Bloor Cinema year round, in addition to utilizing the venue for its annual Festival and monthly Doc Soup screening series. Documentary films will be predominantly featured, but the Bloor Cinema will continue to host many of Toronto’s popular film festivals and also offer programming of interest to the rep cinema’s loyal following. In addition to Hot Docs, the Bloor regularly hosts the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, the After Dark Film Festival and the Images Festival, among many others.

“It’s a remarkable opportunity, and we are ready for the challenge,” says McDonald. “The Bloor Cinema has been a cherished home to Hot Docs for the past 12 years and we’re excited to be a part of the revitalization of this much-loved venue. It’s fantastic for Hot Docs, film lovers and the entire neighbourhood, which will continue to enjoy its own independent film house. This new chapter wouldn’t have been possible without the unwavering dedication of Carm, Paul and their family, and the vision of Blue Ice.”

The current renovations will see upgrades to the cinema’s technical equipment and sound system, audience seating, façade and lobby areas. During this time, Hot Docs will be conducting industry stakeholder and community consultations around proposed plans for the cinema. A feedback address has been set up so that interested parties can begin sharing their feedback.

Taking note of the commercial and critical success of the Indie Game Uprising last winter, a Summer Indie Uprising has been declared. Several Xbox Live independent developers have banded together to again promote some of the most outstanding titles which best represent their platform. Immediately following Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade, gamers will have the opportunity to play some of the greatest titles to grace the platform.

The group’s goal is clear – just as the previous uprising had successfully done, they are raising consumer awareness of the platform by showcasing some of the most creatively diverse titles offered on XBLIG. There will be a total of 8 developer-voted titles released each business day beginning on  Monday, August 22^nd and ending on Wednesday, August 31^st.

Community input is requested, for  in addition to the developer selected titles, the gaming community will have the opportunity to vote for their two favorite candidates from the 70+ developer submissions on the IGSU Facebook page from August  1^st until August 15^th. The community favorites will be released at the tail end of the promotion on Thursday September 1^st and Friday September 2^nd. The winners will be announced at the IGSU Developer Twitter chat, which will occur the day after the polls close on Tuesday August 16^th – 8PM EST, using the hash tag #IGSU.  Moreover, the chat will offer the community a chance to communicate directly with all of the developers in a creative and immersive environment.

Indie Games Uprising Summer Schedule:

July 4th – July 18^th: Developer voting for 8 titles to represent the platform
August 1st – August 15^th: Community voting for 2 additional titles they would most like to play
August 16^th – 9PM EST: IGSU Developer Twitter chat, community winners announced
August 22nd – September 2^nd: Promotion and release of 8 developer and 2 community voted titles

Visit the new Indie Games Uprising web site for a full list of candidates, trailers, screenshots and more.