Village Gamer

When Blockbuster in the USA announced its insolvency last year, I knew that the future would not bode well for its Canadian counterpart. As the video and game rentals market continues to take hits from the expansion of the digital market, Blockbuster Canada Co.‘s Receiver, Grant Thornton Limited, has been authourized to initiate a process to identify parties interested in purchasing Blockbuster Canada’s assets and operations.

On May 3, 2011, Grant Thornton Limited was appointed as Receiver of Blockbuster Canada Co. pursuant to a Court Order made by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice which made a further Order on May 20, 2011 approving a sale process recommended by the Receiver. While Blockbuster Canada will be consolidating certain stores in the next few weeks, the majority of its stores are continuing to operate in the ordinary course during the process.

“We appreciate the ongoing support of Blockbuster Canada’s customers, employees, suppliers and other stakeholders during this period” said Michael Creber on behalf of Grant Thornton Limited. “We are hopeful that the process approved last Friday will result in resolution of the issues currently facing Blockbuster Canada Co.”

We have a Blockbuster here in Aldergrove, but we’ve watched as rental store after rental store has closed. The local Movie Gallery outlet closed about two years ago, leaving behind a storefront that has been vacant ever since. Prior to that, two other smaller, privately owned stores closed up shop. If our local Blockbuster outlet also closes, that will leave one privately owned rental service in town, and it recently decreased its floorspace.

PowerSearch Software, a developer of affordable and accessible search technologies based in Toronto, has launched its eponymous application that enables users to cull their data prior to collection and to quickly find all files while reducing collection time and costs by 80 percent or more.

With PowerSearch, users simply point the software to their local drive or network repository to quickly generate a snapshot of all available files. PowerSearch is the only product on the market today that allows users to extract, process, search and cull documents before collecting them at no cost. PowerSearch has:

• Built in pre-processing – PowerSearch identifies files that require pre-processing, including .pst and .nsf email formats, as well as zipped and image files.
• Ability to index and analyze files – PowerSearch indexes files for searching and generates exception reports.
• Fast and powerful search capabilities – PowerSearch gives almost instantaneous search results, even on massive amounts of data. Complex searches are easy to construct using drill down technology and the onboard dictionary that shows all the words that exist in the identified files.
• Informative dashboards – PowerSearch includes charts and graphs to show status of the data and project.

“PowerSearch is a great addition to my e-discovery tool set,” stated Marty Musters, director of forensics at Computer Forensics, Inc. and a PowerSearch beta-tester. “It has an easy-to-navigate user interface making it simple to get search results. In addition, the company’s many technical support options ensure there is someone available if I need help.”

“As a records manager, attorney or service provider, knowing what data you have is the foundation of delivering value to your organization or client,” stated Girts Jansons, founder and CEO of PowerSearch. “We wanted to give the legal and records management industries an easy way to access data without large costs involved. We are proud to bring the capabilities of PowerSearch to the market at-large and have received very positive responses from beta testers.”

PowerSearch uses proprietary technology to locate and search files on local drives and network repositories. PowerSearch extracts email repositories and zipped files, indexing the content of emails and electronic documents making them fully searchable. Search results can be saved in folders and if necessary, exported into current tools for further processing.

Unlike other collection and culling products, with PowerSearch there is no charge for deploying the software or for searching or culling. Users only pay for final results, files they ultimately deem relevant and decide to save, by using a system of tokens purchased via PayPal at a fraction of a cent per token. PowerSearch ships with 1,500 tokens.

ConceptWave Software Inc., provider of Customer, Product, and Order Lifecycle Management solutions for the global communications service provider market, announced today that it has contracted with TM Forum to undergo further assessment of its products through the TM Forum Frameworx Product Conformance Certification program.

ConceptWave is continuing its efforts to increase Frameworx conformance for its communications service provider products. The current multi-phase ConceptWave product conformance assessment covers Information Framework (SID) and Business Process Framework (eTOM) for ConceptWave Order Care® and Rapid CRM products. ConceptWave has already submitted the phase 1 self-assessment for TM Forum review.

“ConceptWave is fully committed to TM Forum Frameworx as a way for service providers to constantly reduce costs through operational efficiency, to accelerate delivery of new services, and to reduce risk, while having the agility to meet market and technology changes,” said Dr. Ivan Chochlekov, ConceptWave’s CTO. “Frameworx conformance has enabled ConceptWave to reduce its R&D costs, speed its development effort, and provide faster time-to-market while reducing ongoing support costs.”

ConceptWave led the industry by being one of the first companies to obtain TM Forum Frameworx Product Conformance Certification, granted in May 2010 for its Catalog Management version 5.0 product offering.

“Service providers are following standards-based processes themselves and also expecting their suppliers to provide standards-based products by default,” said George Greenlee, TM Forum Senior VP Product Management. “ConceptWave’s pioneering and continuing involvement in the Frameworx Conformance Certification program continuously raises the bar in the market.”

Frameworx, the communications industry’s only integrated business and IT architecture, provides end-to-end service management by integrating common business processes, enterprise information, and applications into one unified solution.

Toronto-based IT Service Management Best Practices educator Pink Elephant has announced that the addition of social media to its roster of education topics. The course, Social Media Essentials For ITSM Professionals, introduces IT professionals to the growing and ever-evolving world of social networking.

With its 2010 acquisition of ServiceSphere, Pink Elephant is leveraging the resources of the IT market leader and innovator in the area of social networking. ServiceSphere founder Chris Dancy, who has moved into the role of Digital Engagement Director at Pink Elephant, has created a unique course exclusive to Pink Elephant. As one of the IT support industry’s most respected social networking experts, this course is an outlet for Dancy to share his wealth of knowledge and experience.

“As information technology departments of the world’s leading enterprises evolve, a growing void is taking place with the skill sets of today’s professionals to focus on working with Information Systems,” said Dancy, “Social Media has established itself as the democratization of the information custodian. I look forward to helping our customers transform the way they do business through a better understanding of social media”.

Today, there are numerous social media tools available to organizations. Many experts hold a common view that social media has the power to transform business as much as the Internet did in the 1990s. This course allows IT professionals to walk away with an understanding of how exactly IT can use social media to create business advantages. Read the rest of this entry »

PEI developer Timeless Technologies (2007) Inc. has announced the beta release of a new online tool called DomainHole which is designed to help people find great domain names. During the beta release, Timeless hopes to test the stability of servers and ensure DomainHole can scale properly. Timeless is also looking to get feedback on the user interface and effectiveness of the current tools.

DomainHole provides a set of web based tools to help eliminate the pain of not being able to find an available domain. One of the flagship tools that DomainHole offers is the Expired Domain Search. There are approximately 60,000+ new domains that expire every day, and DomainHole maintains this full list of expired domains in a searchable database. Using this search tool, you are able to find keyword rich and high Search Engine Optimization value domains by entering just a few search values.

“We are very excited to announce our public beta testing launch of DomainHole,” stated Brad Pineau, CTO of Timeless Technologies. “Over the past few years, we’ve been developing internal tools to help us find great domain names, so we’re excited to finally share these tools with everyone. We’ll be rolling out several more tools over the next few months.”

DomainHole provides users with additional domain related tools. These tools currently include: a name spinner, instant availability check, and name generator. The name spinner combines a keyword search with hundreds of words to get domain name ideas. The instant availability check tool checks the availability of domains in real time to quickly find a domain name. The name generator tool generates random, unique, brandable and pronounceable domain names. The DomainHole team is currently working on several other tools to help people in their search for a great domain.

The automated business process discovery industry took a giant leap forward this week with the formal recognition of StereoLOGIC as a cool vendor in Business Process Management from Gartner Research. This is the third time in ten years that a company founded by business process luminary Sofia Passova has been awarded the coveted cool vendor status.

“Discovery Analyst™ is a genuine breakthrough in business process analysis,” said Dr Sofia Passova, president and CEO of StereoLOGIC. “In a nutshell, Discovery Analyst eliminates the need for lengthy and expensive stakeholder interviews and manual process documentation, and replaces it with a more accurate automated recognition of business processes in real time.”

Sofia Passova

As business transactions are executed by an employee, Discovery Analyst automatically recognizes and maps these processes using a proprietary semantic recognition engine that provides an accurate picture of what is going on. The current industry statistics for process documentation has an accuracy rating of approximately 30 per cent. Discovery Analyst increases the accuracy of process mapping to more than 90 per cent while dramatically reducing the cost. Process discovery results are available in a matter of days instead of months.

When executing or planning a major IT project, Discovery Analyst essentially creates a level playing field by capturing process information provided by employees at every point of interaction. This approach limits the risk associated with big budget IT projects getting off-track in the early stages and leads to a much higher project success rate and reduced costs. Shorter time spent on process discovery creates project efficiencies of 80 per cent or more in the development lifecycle. Read the rest of this entry »

Uk-based emuse and Toronto’s ES3 have announced the establishment of an exclusive partnership that will see emuse’ Raven Advanced Advertising System pre-integrated into ES3’s award-winning suite of TV applications for Microsoft’s Mediaroom IPTV platform.

“We are very excited about this partnership,” said Douglas Edwards, Chief Executive Officer, ES3. “emuse and ES3 are the two leading developers in our respective areas, coming together to drive a powerful offering that accelerates revenue opportunities to TV operators via their TV apps and 3-screen strategy. As the two original “Global Premier Partners” on the Microsoft Mediaroom applications platform, we’ve always worked closely and now feel that our combined knowledge, experience and access to our respective markets will be advantageous to both companies and our customers.”

Raven provides digital television platform operators and content owners with an end-to-end advertising decision, delivery and reporting solution, and has been deployed globally in many major markets. ES3 has developed the world’s largest catalog of turnkey IPTV applications for the Microsoft Mediaroom platform. Under the new partnership, the companies will continue to collaborate and initiate a program to pre-integrate the Raven ad delivery and decisioning capabilities into ES3’s current and future products. This native integration will provide operators with the ability to drive targeted advertising to the TV applications under a seamless model.

“We are tremendously excited about the partnership between emuse and ES3,” commented Patrick Rainsford, Chief Executive Officer, emuse. “We have consistently maintained that two essential elements in any successful digital TV offering are a broad range of compelling apps coupled with the ability to monetize these through advertising support. Bringing together ES3’s app portfolio and Raven’s advanced advertising capabilities now allows operators to launch apps which are immediately revenue generating. This is a hugely positive development for subscribers, operators, advertisers and agencies.”

The partnership will focus on the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform. Mediaroom is currently the world’s most broadly deployed IPTV platform and is available on over 14 million devices through TV services delivered by 36 operators including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and TELUS. As the most widely deployed existing Mediaroom developers, the emuse and ES3 partnership is intended to provide a business model for the deployment by operators of increasing numbers of consumer apps and in particular to support new developments like app stores.

“This partnership between emuse and ES3 represents an important milestone in the evolution of applications on the Mediaroom platform,” said Andreas Mueller-Schubert, general manager, Interactive Entertainment Business, Microsoft Corp. Combining emuse’s capabilities to pair targeted ads globally with ES3’s proven creative applications is a win-win for advertisers, and adds another important dimension to our Mediaroom end to end IPTV platform for operators.”

Calgary’s Print Audit®, the print management company, has followed through on its promise to provide great products and support to its customers with the enhancements made in the recent releases of Print Audit Facilities Manager and ICE.

Facilities Manager is a powerful, easy to use tool designed to remotely collect meter reads, automate supplies fulfillment and report service information for managing fleets of copiers, printers, fax machines, and MFPs. The Facilities Manager release has enhanced many of the program’s core features including faster and more accurate reporting capabilities.

ICE gathers information for Facilities Manager by tracking and scanning print devices from all major manufacturers and when incorporated with Print Audit 6, it can accurately track local devices. With the newest release, ICE enhancements include better detection of Kyocera Mita devices and improved integration with Print Audit 6.

The Facilities Manager web portal is updated automatically so all changes are already implemented. Through ICE’s automatic update function, the program will periodically check for a new version and will automatically download and install the update.  Print Audit invites you to try a free demo today.

After months of consultative planning with customers, Toronto’s Monitor 24-7 Inc., creators of the award winning IncidentMonitor service desk software solution, are ready to announce the launch of IncidentMonitor version 9.2, featuring the same famous flexibility and functionality, but with new user interfaces and other user-identified features.

Monitor 24-7’s Marketing and Sales Director Riaz Mohammed says: “The new interfaces were designed directly from customer input. We received input from a wide cross-section of current and potential customers including general usability issues to “cool” features that will greatly simplify user interactions.”

IncidentMonitor has been chosen by customer-centric companies worldwide for its functionality, flexibility and price. The company also welcomes suggestions on how to make its product even better – which, in large part, guided the launch of the new release, notes Mohammed, “one of the biggest concerns was around request submission. The feedback we received showed that most vendors have not done a good job at simplifying the request submission interface. We listened to the feedback and provided a new request interface that provides a very simple yet powerful contact search, and built-in intelligence to automatically present possible resolutions from Knowledgebase (KB) articles and existing requests. Service Level Agreements and service policies are automatically linked and visible, and the customer has easy access to view all service policy details.”

In addition, IncidentMonitor’s technician view has been improved in the area of searches and sorting to quickly access requests. Request updates, assignment, resolution and approvals are all accessible by a single-click without losing advanced task-based updates. A configurable dashboard presents information required (such as team requests, category trends, project summary and My Open Requests) when the technician logs in. Performance improvements have also been implemented in the web interface, which now operates more like a Windows application. Multiple forms can be minimized and easily accessed within one browser window.

Features for End Users:

• Single-click functionality allows screen captures, files copied to the clipboard and attachments to be easily linked to a new or existing request
• Advanced web navigation features, which provide the flexibility of a Windows interface within the browser
• Integrated chat that is accessed via predefined service items

Features for Technicians: Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago I had the unique chance to sit down with Inspirado Games CEO Rick Davidson and chat about his company’s latest game, Gardenmind.

Gardenmind is a Facebook social game in which players grow plants in their virtual garden, with each plant being associated to a different game mode. Some plants are word games while others are perception games, with more games and plants offered as the player continues to play through Gardenmind. People who enjoy challenging their brains and playing puzzles will enjoy this game.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zz25LK1jjI]

The other awesome thing about Gardenmind is that it is a meaningful game; besides learning and challenging their brains players can also contribute to a cause they would like to support. One example of this is with trees like the New Zealand silver fern. If players buy the tree a percentage of the cost goes to support quake relief in Christchurch and players are rewarded with a kiwi to walk around their garden.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XThRc07hXE]

Inspirado Games works with the World Wildlife Fund to support the organization’s causes around the world and Gardenmind was recently nominated for a Canadian Video Game Award for best social game.

When we sat down we talked about how long Inspirado has been around, why they are doing what they are and why they thought they would make this game. We also chat about gaming and the growth of the industry in Vancouver. It was a great chatting with Rick and I hope you enjoy the videos.

Twisted Majic