Teams now have control over the look & feel of their TeamPage by customizing it with team logos and team photos. They’ve also improved the navigation to make it easier for users to find their favorite features fast. Most importantly TeamPages have simplified the sign-up process, so now anyone can create a website for their team in less than 4 minutes flat.

AdHack is giving away a pair of the Panasonic RP-SC500 noise-canceling headphones to the best “iPhone ad that Rogers should have used to launch and promote the iPhone in Canada”. This one by Dave Gibson caught my eye tonight.

TinyMassive scans the page the widget lives on similar to contextual Adsense ads and serves up relevant products directly. The widget pulls listings from multiple stores and pays out on a CPC model. The 3-step sign-up process is slick and worth a look.

While selling online, the all-female team were frustrated with the ROI from leads delivered to their online stores via shopping comparison engines and widget networks. Following the acquisition of their e-commerce business in 2007, the women created TinyMassive.com and began collaborating with merchants and publishers across North America. 

The launch of their shopping widget network is only the first step - look out for the launch of their comparison shopping marketplace later this summer. TinyMassive.com’s web development partner is Lightmaker Vancouver.

Via Raincity Studios blog, mixed media man Dave Olson has done a wrapup on recent Drupal Camps in Seattle, Alberta, and Portland. Kudos to Dave and the other organizers of DCV for contributing part of their budget surplus to the Seattle and Alberta events.

I had a chance to sit down over lunch today with Lightmaker Vancouver Managing Director Tom Rossiter. Nine months ago Rossiter set out for Vancouver to open Lightmaker’s seventh office, expanding their North American presence to complement offices in Orlando and San Francisco. As their first Canadian production pod, the Yaletown office has been super successful carving out a local niche.

Lightmaker’s portfolio includes many companies with offices in the Pacific Northwest, including Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Adobe - so the Vancouver location and time zone aims to strengthen those relationships. Lightmaker’s local skill-set has won them some significant work on a couple interesting web start-ups including TinyMassive.com - more on those in future blog posts.

Look for Lightmaker Vancouver to kick into recruiting mode again very soon.

Vancouver has two sizeable, back to back LAN parties coming up soon: Digital Storm LAN (~200 gamers) runs August 1 - 3, 2008, at the Croatian Cultural Centre in East Van, and VanLan (~500 gamers) runs August 4 - 6 in the UBC War Memorial Gym. 

Later in the summer, August 30 - September 1, 2008, Montreal will host the World Cyber Games Canadian Championships at La Ronde/Six Flags. Dubbing itself as an Olympics of gaming, the WCG has major sponsorship from the likes of Samsung and Microsoft, with multiple local rounds leading up to a world final and millions in total prize money. These events attract the top, most elite gamers, some of whom are playing professionally.

In the six years since attending my first Fragapalooza, I’ve seen these events gradually become better sponsored, and the tournaments becoming more competitive. Fragapalooza has $65,000 in prizes of hardware and accessories, not bad for a volunteer-run event. While PC gaming is frequently cited as becoming less popular as game consoles become mini-PCs in themselves, these events show a dedicated following of PC gamers. The sponsors realize the value of this enthusiast market that’s willing to spend thousands building their own super gaming machines. PC gamers that have stuck it out this long know, as I know, that first-person-shooter gaming was meant for a mouse and keyboard, not two nubby sticks.

At airG, we develop mobile communities and wireless social networking products that resonate with the hip and trend defining 18 – 30 demographic. We’re working with industry leaders such as Verizon, Sprint Nextel, AT&T, Bell Canada and T-Mobile to define an entirely new way of interacting on your mobile phone. In our ideally situated office on fashionable Robson Street in Vancouver, we’re creating products that enable millions of customers to experience a sense of being connected. Wirelessly.

airG has the fastest growing social network on mobile phones with more than 20 million unique users worldwide and is available on more than 100 mobile operators in over 40 countries, and growing! To further accelerate this rapid growth, we are in search of a talented and motivated QA Specialist to join our team!

Your Responsibilities:

• Develop basic test cases based on functional specifications and requirements
• Execute manual and automated tests
• Discover and explore defects leading to a complete defect report
• Review and provide feedback on product specifications and requirements
• Maintain task information and report progress and test results in compliance to established process
• Monitor, review and verify assigned defects in a timely and efficient manner
• Archive builds and project results, materials and outputs as required
• Provide qualitative quality assessments based on testing and usage of product
• Assure that developed products meet requirements and are within total quality management standards

Your Qualifications:

• Technical diploma or equivalent work experience
• Minimum 2 years experience in quality assurance and software testing with exposure to manual and scripted testing of computer software
• Computer hardware/software troubleshooting experience

In addition to having a flexible and relaxed work environment, we believe that our culture and values set us apart. We are young, vibrant and passionate about what we do. The values that we all share and look for in those we work with include being entrepreneurial, creative, accomplished, team oriented, motivated, hard working and professional. airG offers an attractive and competitive compensation package, a comprehensive benefits plan including a flexible wellness program and staff purchase plan for mobile devices.

Plug into the world‘s largest mobile community. Plug into airG. To apply now, check out our website.

British Columbia Discovery Fund (VCC) Inc.

“BC Discovery Fund is excited to be making its first investment in a Web 2.0 business. MovieSet has created a unique interactive social networking environment for the film industry and its fans,” said Charles Cook, Investment Manager of the Fund. “We expect that MovieSet can capture a substantial audience of unique visitors, enabling the Company to capitalize on the interest, and positive investment outcomes, that other successful social networking websites have generated.”

With this investment in MovieSet, the BC Discovery Fund has made investments totaling $9.3 million so far in 2008.

Electronic Arts (EA) announced today that it has signed on with Hollywood talent and literary agency United Talent Agency (UTA) for representation in motion pictures and television. UTA will help the company develop a comprehensive strategy for moving its intellectual property into the realm of large-budget motion pictures and television series.

EA’s portfolio of titles includes top-selling franchises such as Army of Two and Need for Speed as well as eagerly awaited new titles such as Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge. The relationship is expected to significantly ramp up EA’s film and television slate, which currently includes a feature version of the popular The Sims game in script development at 20th Century Fox with producer John Davis and a MySims animated television series in development at Film Roman. EA is also in production with Starz/Film Roman on an animated DVD feature version of its new title Dead Space to launch with the game.

Vancouver-based Gravity Factor Inc. launched a new marketing automation suite today that enables mid-market and B2B marketing professionals easily execute and rapidly improve the effectiveness of their demand generation activities.

From one easy-to-use dashboard, sales and marketing teams will be able to control online brand and messaging, generate more qualified leads, drive revenue, and evaluate and optimize their marketing activities within Salesforce.com, or another CRM, in order to make better business decisions.

Gravity Factor’s CEO is Rick Patri a former Marqui executive. Gravity Factor claims to be the first suite combining Content Management, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, eCommerce, CRM and Analytics.

Interesting side note - Marqui’s trademarked tagline is The Marketing Automation Company and Gravity Factor has adopted The Marketing Automation Experts as their brand-differentiating slogan. Nice.

Computer Science/Engineering students have grown with the idea of the Internet as a cloud, as commonly depicted in textbook flowcharts. Cloud computing modifies this metaphor slightly, referring to virtual machine or distributed services where you’re interacting with the service, a cluster of machines, as opposed to one particular server. Apple’s MobileMe service (formerly .Mac) openly embraces the concept and brings it further mainstream, with a logo that centers around a cloud.

This weekend, Amazon S3, one of the top cloud storage services, experienced an eight hour downtime that impacted many web apps that depend on the service. While cloud services are proving themselves as the most efficent and cost effective way to host modern web applications, these spots of downtime show that just like Ajax and Web 2.0, the cloud isn’t magic.

• AdHack - Vancouver
• dthree Inc. - Mississauga
• Octopz - Toronto
• Overlay.TV - Ottawa
• PlanetEye - Toronto
• Ramius Corporation - Ottawa
• SceneCaster - Richmond Hill
• Standout Jobs - Montreal
• Tomoye Corporation - Gatineau
• Tungle - Montreal

This IDC study profiles 10 relatively small Canadian-based companies offering Web 2.0 solutions that IDC believes are worthy of highlighting to the broader industry and have the potential to make an impact in the information and communication technology (ICT) market.

This study provides a review of each company’s technology and go-to-market strategy and a customer example. It concludes with some of the overarching trends IDC is seeing in this market, the strategies and characteristics these 10 companies share, and essential guidance and analysis. This study also provides valuable input for ICT vendors large and small, investors, government, and service providers to identify success factors employed by emerging Canadian vendors with Web 2.0 solutions.

The 30-page report was written by IDC Canadian ICT Innovation analyst Krista Collins and it’s available for $3,500. Ouch. Anybody have a copy?

Cybera

Summit Sessions:

Green IT / Clean Tech - It’s not that easy being green. In this session, we’ll look at the push for IT to go green. How can you ‘green up’ your IT operations? What are the cost benefits? Why is this important to your business?

Grassroots Innovation - DemoCampBanff - Where does innovation start? Demo Camp for one. These groups thrive on their ad-hoc organization and “no rules” rules. Talk about a fertile landscape for innovative ideas! Join us for a special Banff edition of Demo Camp.

Cloud Computing and Other Trends to Watch - The innovation landscape is constantly changing. In this session, we’ll focus on the top trends guiding this transition and what impacts these changes have on your business as well as your research and development activities.

Cyber-Venture Opportunities - Showing you the money. In this session, we’ll examine the business behind cyberinfrastructure – the venture capital and commercialization opportunities, as well as the new Alberta Action Plan: Bringing Technology to Market.

Disruptive Technologies - Blessing or bane? In this session, we’ll look at how disruptive technologies are changing the landscape, raising the bar and pushing the bounds of all that was possible in business and research.

Keynote Speakers:

• Bill Appelbe -Chief Executive Officer, Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
• Paul Strong - Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay
• Nora Young - Producer and Host of Spark, CBC Radio

Who Should Attend?

• IT managers and executives
• Business strategy senior management
• Industry Researchers
• Small business and startups
• Technology advisors, CIOs, project managers, government ministry staff, graduate students
• Research community

This Summit will cater to anyone affiliated with the private sector, research organizations or academia that’s interested in cyberinfrastructure. It will also cater to those who have questions like, “How can I do my work more efficiently?” “How can I improve my business’s bottom line?” and “How can technology help me expand the possibilities of what I can achieve?” The Summit should also appeal to people looking to tap into Alberta’s innovative, forward-thinking community.

For more information and to register, visit the Cybera Summit 08 website.

With these new entrants, each province should get at least two new choices for wireless service. Of course, I remember a time when there were 2 or 3 other wireless companies to choose from, before mergers and acquisitions led to the current cerberus of RoBellus (variations considered: Tellogers, Bellogus). Hopefully we don’t find ourselves back in a wireless oligopoly in ten or twenty years.

$4.25 billion is a nice chunk of revenue for the Canadian government, handy to pay for things like an indefinite occupation of a country that posed no real threat, and it seems they are wasting no time to do it again. Via Reuters, Industry Minister Jim Prentice has said that an auction of 700 MHz airwaves will happen in “about 18 months”. The US recently auctioned their 700 MHz spectrum and raised $19.592 billion.

A spectrum auction isn’t the kind of thing that gets a lot of mainstream media attention, as the idea of selling airwaves seems strange, if not impossible, and some might argue immoral. For some thoughts on this subject, I present an excerpt from an essay “The Property Status of Airwaves”, by author and philosopher Ayn Rand, published April 1964.

Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property - by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.

This is particularly true of broadcasting frequencies or waves, because they are produced by human action and do not exist without it. What exists in nature is only the potential and the medium through which those waves must travel. (That medium is not air; in legal discussions it is often referred to by the mythical term of “ether” - to indicate some element in space, at present unidentified.) Without the broadcasting station which generates the waves, that “ether” - on our present level of knowledge — is of no practical use or value to anyone.

 

Essay continues after the jump.

Just as two trains cannot travel on the same section of track at the same time, so two broadcasts cannot use the same frequency at the same time in the same area without “jamming” each other. There is no difference in principle between the ownership of land and the ownership of airways. The only issue is the task of defining the application of property rights to this particular sphere.

She goes on to rail against what the US government was doing at the time; granted licenses to who they approved of based on their judgement of what was “in the public interest”. Rand was a stanch defender of free market capitalism, recognizing the need to license the airwaves, but believed that the process should be by free market auction instead of government handpicking.

There is only one solution to this problem, and it has to start at the base; nothing less will do. The airways should be turned over to private ownership. The only way to do it now is to sell radio and television frequencies to the highest bidders (by an objectively defined, open, impartial process) — and thus put an end to the gruesome fiction of “public property.”…

…it took hundreds of centuries before primitive, nomadic tribes of savages reached the concept of private property — specifically, land property, which marked the beginning of civilization. It is a tragic irony that in the presence of a new realm opened by a gigantic achievement of science, our political and intellectual leaders reverted to the mentality of primitive nomads and, unable to conceive of property rights, declared the new realm to be a tribal hunting ground.

The breach between man’s scientific achievements and his ideological development is growing wider every day. It is time to realize that men cannot keep this up much longer if they continue to retrogress to ideological savagery with every step of scientific progress.

Half a century later, Rand’s concept has become reality. While Canada is far from being a textbook model of a free market, let’s hope it’s promise of competition becomes reality as well.

• Located in or around the specified city or area.
• Less than five years old
• Not a public company
• Is a tech company (either hardware, software, web application/service, or mobile)

We have been a little flexible with this criteria as the age of a company can be subject to interpretation depending on acquisitions, sell-outs, complete overhauls of a business model, etc. For instance, Techvibes the site/brand is six years old, but Techvibes Media Inc. is just over a year old. Even Wikipedia agrees that there is no definitive definition of “startup company”, and age isn’t really a valid measure. So, in the interest of more inclusive lists, we’re going to remove the “less than 5 years” requirement.

Going forward, we are looking to fold the start-up indexes into the functionality of the Techvibes company directory. Not only will this save me time producing them, but will allow for dynamic lists of varying criteria, supplying stats junkies with a greater fix. 

If you have been holding back on suggesting your company because it was older, now is the time to suggest it for inclusion into future lists. Please include where you are located.

We’re looking for something fun & simple that will get readers of this popular annual publication to visit Techvibes.com. We’re particularily interested in this issue as it comes out on August 26th which will be two short weeks after we launch the new & improved Techvibes site. If you’re interested in making $150 and getting some great exposure though the Techvibes blog, be sure to check out the requirements and submit your design by Thursday, July 24th at 11:59pm.

While this behaviour isn’t illegal, and certainly allowable under their Terms of Service, it is shady and creates unexpected results for folks that are used to getting a plain error message. This behaviour is not unique to Rogers, as various US ISPs have dabbled in similar “functionality”. The technique was brought to the forefront in 2003 when VeriSign, who isn’t an ISP but operates 2 of the 13 DNS root servers, began redirecting misspellings to their own page. This didn’t last very long before public outcry and ICANN’s wrist slapping put an end to it. 

Blamcast invites Rogers customers and domain owners alike to give Rogers a call and let them know how you feel about this bonus service: 1-888-764-3771. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Shaw for having provided me with eight years of reliable, fast, no-bullshit Internet service, and only nagging me once about pushing bandwidth limits.

Thanks to their controversial and frequently banned Super Bowl television ads, Canadians are very familar with GoDaddy.com and the company already have a strong and loyal customer base North of the border for .COM domains. Low-cost Canadian registrars should start to worry. 

GoDaddy.com will kick off its entry into the Canadian market by sponsoring the TSN television broadcast of the NASCAR Napa Auto Parts 200 on August 2nd in Montreal. Canadian driver Ron Fellows will race the #5 GoDaddy.com Chevrolet.

GoDaddy’s Toronto office currently has one employee, Adam Dicker, and Canadian customer support will be handled through their US call centres. Those who follow the domain industry will recognize Dicker’s name - he was recently called out for bidding against customers in GoDaddy.com domain auctions. I can’t imagine CIRA will put up with that behaviour for long.

It’s good to see some rumors that we might start seeing real competition in Canada’s wireless industry… in a few years. It was a little over a year ago that considerations of a Telus-Bell merger were floating headlines. This move does make the current Canadian spectrum auction more interesting, though it’s still dominated by the “big three” (or the one cartel, depending on your cynicism). Fun Fact: Rogers believes that the radio waves, vibrating through your head right now, are worth in upwards of $997M.

In the meantime, I have to find a tux for the wedding; Rogers and I are getting married for three years, didn’t you hear?

Last month Terapeak was tracking the iPhone market and this month they’re tracking the 2008 Presidential Election candidates by number of items sold on eBay. Not a big surprise that Barack Obama is more ‘marketable’ right now but there is still plenty of time for John McCain to rack up some serious bumper sticker sales.