Village Gamer

Digital Storm is very pleased to welcome Nexon and Combat Arms to this weekend’s event. Nexon will be sponsoring the Combat Arms Last Man Standing Tournament, which will be taking place at 1:00pm on Saturday, August 2, with preliminaries taking place on the evening of Friday, August 1. The final battle will be open to 16 finalists, all of whom will receive a Special Press Edition DVD of Combat Arms, with the tournament winners receiving Nexon Cash, which can be used for game upgrades in any Nexon game product.

Also in attendance at Digital Storm will be representatives from Nexon’s Vancouver studio, Humanature. They will be observing the tournament finals as well as discussing working in the Vancouver game development industry with event attendees.

Digital Storm LAN takes place this weekend, August 1st and 2nd at the Croatian Cultural Centre, located at 3250 Commercial Drive in Vancouver. Doors open at 4:00pm Friday, when several game tournaments and ladder scrims will begin. All World Cyber Games qualifying tournaments will take place on Saturday, August 2, and the UK rock group Mendella will be giving a 45 minute live performance at 8:00pm. Tickets for Digital Storm and Mendella’s performance will be available at the door. Tickets for Friday and Saturday are $35.00, Saturday-only tickets are $25.00, concert-only tickets are $7.50.

Press Release – TORONTO – July 30, 2008 – If you’ve ever returned from a getaway feeling that it didn’t live up to your expectations, you’ll appreciate the value of PlanetEye, a travel-planning Web site with a difference. The site offers geotagged photographs, insight from other travelers and local experts, and extensive travel metadata, all of which can be accessed from an interactive map — a geographic browser, in technical parlance. Because users can explore travel options and easily and quickly research, reserve, organize and share their trips, the result is smarter travel planning.

Part of what makes this Toronto-based startup unique is its use of a technology fresh from Microsoft’s research labs, which PlanetEye licensed through Microsoft’s intellectual property (IP) licensing program. Called World Wide Media eXchange (WWMX), the technology enables the indexing of a large volume of geotagged photographs and provides the tools to access them via the geographic browser. WWMX was invented in 2002 by Kentaro Toyama, then with the Interactive Visual Media group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., and currently assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India in Bangalore.

PressPass recently spoke with Butch Langlois, CEO of PlanetEye, and Bob Tenczar, director of marketing for Microsoft’s Intellectual Property Licensing division, to learn more about how an idea goes from the lab to commercialization.

Read the rest of this entry »