Village Gamer

Vancouver – I saw the movie trailer for G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra for the first time today, and I have to say that it looks very impressive. This is a movie that we will be sure to catch on the big screen, because all of those visual and CG effects look incredible. I went and checked to see who was behind all of those great effects, and I wasn’t surprised to see a few Vancouver companies listed – with a few from that other movie place further south along the coast and some on the other side of the Atlantic.

It would appear that CIS Vancouver, Stan Winston Studio both contributed to those disintegrating buildings, massive traffic problems, huge explosions and more that we will get to experience this August when the film is released. Two other studios with Vancouver locations are also listed in the credits, but according to MPC’s site, it was the London studio which worked on Rise of Cobra. The Frantic Films web site does not list the movie at all, although they are heavily listed in the show’s info page on IMDB, so at the time of this writing I am unaware of which Frantic Films studio produced the assets.
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Vancouver – It’s been a somewhat busy week as I’ve tried to keep up with all of the news from our Canadian developers and industry representatives down at E3 – and I have decided that next year I am going to the expo. Once everyone has returned from their E3 adventures, I hope to be able to sit down with them and get their views in a look back at this year’s event.

Tuesday evening we attended Launch Party 7, where we met up with a few friends and met a few new ones. It’s always interesting to find out what projects are being worked on in the city, as we have such a vibrant development community. I found out about this event when we attended the recent Digital Kung Fu event presented by MDM during Vancouver Digital Week, and I believe Launch Vancouver is an event which we will be attending more often. Some of the interesting people we met include the Twitter Boot Camp instructor Gregg Scott, who will be leading a soldout boot camp session tomorrow.

We also listened to a very interesting presentation by Nick Bouton about his site, Protaganize. This site is an interactive community for writers and aspiring writers, supporting “addventures” which is an “add-your-bit” style of story writing that the whole community can participate in. The site also supports linear story writing and allows authors to both give and get feedback on their writing efforts.

Tynt Tracer was the winner of the “Startup Most Likely To Succeed” presentations for this event, winning over both the judges and the attendees. Tynt Tracer is a Calgary-based referral tracker, which lets you know when and where your site’s content is being copied. Tynt has received funding from iNovia and AVAC to develop its product. Read the rest of this entry »

Vancouver – The Board of Directors of Intrinsyc Software International, Inc., a leading provider of software solutions for mobile devices, today announced that Mr. Tracy Rees was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company effective immediately. Mr. Rees has been serving as interim Chief ExecutiveOfficer since November 2008.

“Tracy has proven himself to be the right person to lead Intrinsyc into the future,” said Mr. Philip Ladouceur, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Intrinsyc. “Since his appointment as interim Chief Executive Officer, Tracy has led the significant improvement in the company’s bottom line performance; dramatically reducing operating expenses, and setting the stage for future growth with new major customer wins, and the development and launch of new product offerings for mobile device development, and navigation and location based services.”
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Vancouver – Last evening, the GD12 students at Vancouver Film School presented their grad projects to an evaluation audience in the VFS Main Theatre. The students spend several weeks in pre-production developing their game concepts, and then an additional 12 weeks in production, bringing their concepts to life.

The first group up to the podium was Team LightSpeed, presenting their 2D Action Platformer game Travis’ Terror. The target audience for this imaginative and colourful game is children under 10, and to that end I feel that they came very close to making a product appropriate for the age group. Developed on Citrus

Light Speed

flash engine, the game’s environment is comprised of artwork which resembles colouring book drawings. The gameplay involves two modes: dreamtime and nightmare. In dreamtime mode, the environment is bright and colourful while nightmare mode has a darker colour palette. The premise of the game is to help Travis get through the game and defeat the boogeyman lurking in his closet. As the player advances through the levels, he is confronted by monsters such as dinosaurs and robots. In dreamtime mode, the monsters are small and easily defeatable. In nightmare mode the monsters are bigger and more challenging. Game progress can be saved at nightlight checkpoints, and there are toys and candies to collect along the way. The player can choose several different paths through the game, each path presenting different challenges. Travis’ Terror is a game which I feel showed hard work and attention to detail on the part of the development team, who overcame many challenges including losing a team member partway through the project.
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Victoria – ParetoLogic has gone live with their newest in anti-spyware, the Zheng™ File Analysis service. Zheng™ allows people to upload and scan a specific file on their PC. The service will then automatically detect any malware and inform the user if the file is safe or infected. Along with a simple summary, the service also provides detailed information for advanced users.

ParetoLogic’s Spyware Analysis Team (SWAT), recent finalists for VIATeC’s Team of the Year award, spearheaded the Zheng™ File Analysis service. Jerome Segura, Team Leader of SWAT, said of the project: “Zheng™ is a long term and expensive effort primarily oriented on pure research. It shows our commitment to develop new technologies and stay on the edge.”

Uploads are not limited to current ParetoLogic customers – anyone with an internet connection can have files scanned at no cost. By inviting all users to scan files, SWAT is better able to detect and remove threats. When each file is scanned, the characteristics of infected files are noted by Zheng™. These are then passed along to the Spyware Analysis Team for analysis, so they may further refine their anti-spyware technology. The more threats analyzed by Zheng™, the more fodder SWAT has for research and the better they are able to target spyware.
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Burnaby – Via E3 – On the heels of winning 25 international gaming awards with FIFA Soccer 09, Electronic Arts Inc. today revealed the first features for its top-selling* soccer franchise from EA SPORTS™. Responding to consumer feedback from more than 275 million online games played**, FIFA Soccer 10 will deliver a new standard for authenticity with gameplay refinements and innovations that will make it the most complete and intelligent simulation of soccer.

On the pitch, critical gameplay fundamentals have been enhanced to ensure that FIFA Soccer 10 mirrors real-world soccer, providing more sophisticated ball control, and physical interaction between players. In addition, players now move, behave and position themselves more realistically. On attack, players analyze space more effectively, curve their runs in an attempt to stay onside, create passing lanes naturally, and drive for more variety in attacking options. On defense, new concepts like position priority enable defenders to multitask so dangerous spaces left open by teammates out of position are covered. Plus, slide tackle targeting, press marking, and better-urgency clearance logic provide new options that make defending a tactical skill in FIFA Soccer 10. In goal, a myriad of improvements and refinements to goalkeeper intelligence result in a more responsive and powerful rushing system and ultra-realistic saves.
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Mansonville – Small and medium sized businesses across all industries and operating within Canada are invited to apply for a research project aimed to help generate higher customer conversion rates, increase revenues and jump-start local economies.

WSI (We Simplify the Internet) is a world leader in Internet marketing with over 1,500 offices in 87 countries. Select WSI offices around the globe are conducting global research on Internet marketing conversion strategies and are currently seeking qualified small and medium sized businesses in Canada to participate in this traffic conversion study.

“Our goal is to help businesses generate more revenue, despite the economic down-turn, while collecting statistical data to get a sense of how we measure up compared to the rest of the province, the country as a whole, and North America in general,” says Kimberly Nichols, owner of the local WSI office in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
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Vancouver – MosaStore, founded by Samer Al-Kiswany (PhD, Computer Engineering) and Awaneesh Shatmanyu (MBA, Sauder), is an economical storage system that provides high performance, secure and reliable storage service. It adopts innovative techniques to build an efficient storage system by utilizing the unused disk space from commodity desktop machines and network resources of the enterprise, and in turn, reduces capital and operational IT expenditures.

MosaStore provides an attractive alternative to existing storage solutions in terms of cost and performance. Especially for small and medium-size businesses and post-secondary institutes that, in the midst of electronic data explosion, need to provide a low cost, yet high performance storage system for their applications. The company recently found its first customer. The company will target SMEs throughout North America and will generate more than $2 mn in revenue in the first year.

Vancouver – Intrinsyc Software International, Inc., a leading provider of software solutions for mobile devices, today announced the general availability of Destinator 9, a leader in cross-platform GPS navigation software. The newest version of Destinator delivers the mobile industry’s highest quality user experience in navigation devices, with a host of new capabilities and features designed to get people to their destinations easily, quickly and safely. Destinator 9 is available for Android mobile phones, Microsoft Windows Mobile smart phones, Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) and connected PNDs based on Microsoft Windows Embedded CE.

“Destinator 9 is the culmination of months of research and development directed towards one goal: making the user’s navigation experience the very best in the world, whether you are driving in your car or walking around a city,” said Souheil Gallouzi, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mobile Products Development, Intrinsyc. “In addition to the new UI, we focused on connected navigation features, making it easier to seamlessly look up, find, and call businesses directly from the map screen, as well as to discover and display local POIs from Internet search engines.”

Destinator 9 includes a host of new features and functions:
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Toronto – Search Engine Strategies (SES) is offering search engine marketing (SEM) training workshops following next week’s conference and expo in Toronto. The largest search engine marketing conference and expo in Canada will be held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto June 8-10, 2009.

According to comScore, there were 3.5 billion expanded searches in Canada during March 2009. Google Sites had an 80.7 percent share, Microsoft Sites had 4.9 percent, and Yahoo! Sites 4.5 percent. During the same month, there were 21.0 billion expanded searches in the United States. Google Sites had a 58.8 percent share, Yahoo! Sites had a 14.7 percent share, and Microsoft Sites a 5.9 percent share.

Now in its sixth year, SES Toronto is considered the definitive digital event for marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketers (SEMs), including pay per click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals. The event is organized and programmed in cooperation with the SES Advisory Board, Search Engine Watch and Andrew Goodman, the founder and president of Toronto-based Page Zero Media.
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