ORIC - The Okanagan Research & Innovation Centre invited me to Kelowna to talk about early exits. The event was co-sponsored by Axel Partners.

The talk was titled: "Early Exits - Your Golden Opportunity".

It's online in full high definition video. This is my first full HD video (1280x720 - I tried 1980 x 1080 but even my connection wasn't quite fast enough.)

Ben and the team at Riiplay.tv did brilliant editing on this in full HD. This is the best video presentation I've seen of a talk with PowerPoint. I am also grateful to Jody and his crew at Ezekiel Video in Kelowna who did a great job on the shoot.

This is a link to the full post with the HD video. Please let me know if you have any problems with this video or if you see any reason not to post video at this resolution in the future.

And now, in no particular order, here's what's new in Vancouver's game industry this week:

Casual Connect Seattle has Vancouver Connections
Seattle's Casual Connect conference, July 21-23rd, is a must-attend for anyone not in core games. The conference caters to everything from casual online games (Puzzle Pirates, Kongregate's stuff, etc) to iPhone to trial-to-purchase casual downloadables. Added for this year is a Leadership Forum on July 20th, hosted by Women in Games International.

Between the main conference and the Leadership forum, there are a few notable Vancouver game companies speaking at the event. Fitbrains (Mark Baxter, Michael Cole), Big Park (Charmie Kim), Deep Fried (Brenda Bailey), Hothead (Dierdra Kiai), A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. (Sandy Spangler), Hellbent (Lee Pederson), No Robots Interactive (Paige Meekison) and my own consulting business, eponymously named Adrian Crook, will all be presenting in the main conference or the Leadership Forum.

The Bigs 2 On Store Shelves
Blue Castle-developed The Bigs 2 was released on July 7th of this week, as tweeted first to me by Tami Quiring of Village Gamer. The Bigs 2 is available on Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP and Wii.

Congrats, Blue Castle!

Sherwood Dungeon, Local Virtual Goods Business
Gene Endrody's North Vancouver-based Maid Marian, developer of Shockwave based virtual worlds such as Sherwood Dungeon (nearly 2M unique users/month), continues to expand its microtransactional revenue stream. Last month, Sherwood Dungeon saw the addition of Lion and Unicorn pets and we're told the company will soon release Allies, Minions and Henchmen (human-style "pets" you can equip with weapons). This will give Sherwood Dungeon a total of 12 pets for sale in the game to players for $5 a year.

Up until last year, Sherwood Dungeon had subsisted entirely on revenue from Google Ads placed around the game's frame, which while substantial (some estimates put that revenue alone at over $500K), did not exploit the full potential fo the popular product. Adding user purchaseable pets late last year diversified Sherwood Dungeon's revenue stream, which came at an ideal time because ad revenue declined sharply after Chrismas. While online ad revenue is now recovering for Maid Marian, pets already comprise about one third of revenue.

Vancouver Unity 3D Events
Cross platform (Flash, iPhone, Wii) game development tool Unity 3D (in partnership with Overactive's dimerocker) is hosting two signicant Vancouver events in the near future for those interested in learning more about the toolset. Unity's most recognized game to date would probably be the Cartoon Network's Fusion Fall MMO, built in Flash with the Unity engine.

Friday, July 24th, District 319
The Unity Networking Event

• 5:30pm - 6:30pm Reception, drinks and appetizers.
• 6:30pm - 7:30pm Key Note followed by Q

Saturday, July 25th, Centre for Digital Media
Intro to Unity 3D Workshop

• 9:30am - 5:30pm

Adrian Crook is a game consultant based in North Vancouver. With over 14 years experience, Adrian designs and produces social, casual and AAA games for a variety of clients. He has spoken on the subject of free-to-play games at GDC and SXSW and writes articles for trade publications.

Many believe the lack of competition is holding back wireless growth in Canada, where mobile phone use rates are lower than our North America neighbours to the south. About 65% of Canada's population had a mobile phone last year compared with 88% in the US, and 70% in Mexico.

With Canada's three largest mobile carriers, Rogers, Bell and Telus account for 95% of the Canadian market, Public Mobile's aggressive plans couldn't come at a better time.

Public Mobile will initially operate later this year in Toronto and Montreal. According to Krstajic, for $40 customers will get unlimited local calls and text messaging. And Public Mobile customers won't be tied to minimum contracts in order to subsidize the cost of their handset - instead, they will have to buy phones at full price. What a novel idea.

The Public Mobile brand is a result of the Canadian wireless spectrum auction last July that raised $4.25 Billion. While the auction was dominated by the big three, 40% of the licenses were set aside for new entrants. Among the new entrants was the unglamorously named, US equity-backed 6934579 Canada Inc. which quietly spent $52M on spectrum.

6934579 Canada Inc. came out of the woodwork as BMV Holdings in October and which then launched the Public Mobile brand in February.

Remember in high school when being mean to people made you more popular? Fortunately the internet was built by people who weren’t at all popular in high school so the same rules don’t apply. To build up your social media reputation you’ll need to be accountable, genuine and nice to people.

Why? Well, because the Internet isn’t a zero sum game. Collective intelligence, collaborative projects, sharing tools – the more people cooperate the more everyone benefits. Also, have you seen how much there is on the internet? You aren’t the only show in town. If you’re a jerk people won’t waste their valuable time on you.

Google is the new resume. That stuff on the internet? Yeah, it stays around forever. You want to start an online brawl with someone? Sure, maybe it’ll get you a spike in traffic, but people will be able to search it for years to come. Do you really want to be known for throwing a tantrum? Leave that to celebrities who can’t spell.

Pack some serious Whuffie. Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The currency of choice on the Internet isn’t money it’s social capital. To earn it you need to put in some serious interaction time with people. Throwing more money at social media doesn’t usually work; you have to walk the talk. Want to know more about this? Tara Hunt wrote a book, and you can pre-order it RIGHT HERE.

Give more than you take. This is different than giving away your product for free. This is being a part of a community, bringing something to the table and sharing it without expecting anything in return. Amber Naslund gets it and shares ten ways to give it away on her blog.

Be authentic (or what’s with the “almost everyone” part). Being nice is cool. Being fake-PR-ish is not. A part of being awesome is being honest. If you don’t like something, you can say so, just don’t be rude about it. Authenticity is one of the things that helps people really connect with you. While you are aspiring to be the nicest person ever make sure your personality is still shining through.

LexPublica is building an online community to create simple, plain language contract templates that are available free of charge for anyone to use. LexPublica is a venture of 8.5x14 Media Corp., a Bootup Labs company whose mission is to re-invent legal services. LexPublica presented at this week's DemoCamp07 in Vancouver to much fanfare and their Alpha is scheduled for August.

Today Paradigm Shift Solutions launched FiredWithoutCause.com - a very niche online legal service to help everyday Canadians who have been fired or laid off to get what they are rightfully entitled from their employer. FiredWithoutCause.com offers education on employment law, negotiation tips, severance pay calculators and customized negotiation tools for less than $60.

FiredWithoutCause.com was developed by an employment lawyer Chilwin Cheng and web entrepreneur Jim Hamlin.

1. Bring on a technical co-founder
2. Hire a contractor.

The first option might seem attractive because building a startup is a large and difficult task, and you'll probably need all the help you can get. The second option might seem better because it leaves you with full control of both the idea and the company. So what's the right answer?

If you'vebuilt a web service in the past, or plan on building one in the future, we want to hear from you on this question. A quick 3 minute survey should tell us your thoughts on the matter, and since filling out surveys suck, you'll be automatically entered to win a $30 iTunes gift certificate (hey, its not much but what do you expect for 3 min of your time?)

The online survey is here.

Butterfield sent out a tweet last night announcing that he is hiring in Vancouver for his new startup called Tiny Speck.

The job description for the Creative Production Team Lead position includes an intro which still keeps the Tiny Speck project suitably vague - “We’re a new company, founded by four core members of the original team behind Flickr.”

The folks over at TechCrunch are throwing out guesses but nobody seems to know much.

So what is Tiny Speck all about? That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is “We are working on something huge and fun and we need help.”

And the main page doesn’t offer much help either. On it you’ll find the words, “O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!” For the non-English majors, that’s a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is also the passage that inspired the title of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World.

Since Butterfield has choosen Vancouver for Tiny Speck's launch pad, there has got to be a few people sorung town chatting about Tiny Speck's plans.  so, has anybody heard anything - what is Tiny Speck?

• Director Engineering Operations - Wavefront
• Manager - Projects & Service Delivery - Central 1 Credit Union
• Marketing Generalist - Cryptolex Trust Systems
• Manager, Operations & Client Services - Cyberscribe Solutions
• President - New Media BC

If you're hiring and would like your job opportunities profiled here, add them to our Job Board and we'll see what we can do.

Despite not having the slickest design, the site is functional, providing a tag cloud of government departments who seem to be given prominence based on how much money the department has awarded in contracts.

For example, clicking on "Public Works" (by far, the biggest spender, according to the site) shows that they recently awarded a $31,500 contract to Madison Paving. Clicking on the company name from that list shows me that they also received additional contracts in 2008 and one more in 2007.

Links are also provided to view the actual contract.

Overall, it makes a good companion to Stimuluswatch.ca as a way to keep tabs on where tax dollars are going.

But as the hearings continue, there's one theme that has been really sticking out to me: the need for competition. 

A lot of focus has been put on consumers who don't Internet service providers slowing down their preferred applications like BitTorrent but would regulations to stop the practice really be necessary if there was true competition?

As it stands right now, a few large companies have control over the infrastructure that makes up the Internet and smaller ISPs have to buy wholesale access from them.

For example, in Ontario, most small DSL providers are buying wholesale bandwidth from Bell. Now Bell has admitted to using traffic-shaping and throttling, even at the wholesale level.

So even  if a consumer feels they're not getting the Internet service they're paying for because their ISP is intentionally slowing down online video, it doesn't matter if they switch. The smaller competitor's service is still throttled, regardless of whether the smaller company wants it to be or not.

Preventing traffic shaping at the wholesale level would allow smaller ISPs to decide on their own what kind of controls should be in place and even offer a completely open network with no restrictions.

Consumers would then have a real choice and if neutral networks truly are important, most would abandon the ISPs who are throttling and implementing bandwidth caps for the competition, which would in theory force the larger providers to reassess their policies.

Of course, for this to happen, the CRTC would need to step in and stop the practice of applying traffic shaping to wholesale customers. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers has tried in the past to get the CRTC to do just that but were unsuccessful.

Time will tell the current round of hearings will change any minds.

Thoughts?