Village Gamer

Mississauga – NEEZO Animation has completed the show introduction to Positive Living in time for the show’s launch January 2009.

Executive Producer Aida Memisevic has created Positive Living to inspire and educate viewers to achieve fulfillment and happiness in their lives.  It is essentially about the science behind success, and each half hour episode will feature internationally acclaimed authorities who will discuss these principles.

NEEZO has created the complete broadcast design for Positive Living, as well as an animated character that will be used within the show for various purposes.

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Montreal – HMS Software, a leading provider of project management and enterprise timesheet systems is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The Montreal-based company continues to specialize in project-oriented products and services and has expanded operations this year.

“It’s a remarkable milestone in the history of the company,” said Chris Vandersluis, President and founder of HMS. “When we got started in 1984, we’d never have imagined a company that would have had such a worldwide impact and that we’d still be here, thriving, 25 years later.”

HMS has established a reputation as a world class provider of enterprise project management and enterprise timesheet systems for mid-to-large-sized organizations. HMS has two main components to its business: the HMS services business that assists organizations in deploying enterprise project management systems and designing the organizational processes that such systems require and is also the publisher of TimeControl, an enterprise timesheet system that has sold over 100,000 licenses worldwide.
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Special edition HP Mini designed by renowned fashion designer Vivienne Tam

Toronto – Digital divas rejoice! Best Buy Canada and HP today announce the retail launch of the HP Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam Edition. Designed with the fashion-conscious consumer in mind, this digital clutch represents the first partnership between a computer company and a world-renowned fashion designer to personalize a product for the fashion-forward, trend-setting digital diva.

“The HP Mini Vivienne Tam Edition is the ultimate tech accessory for fashion-conscious consumers,” said Loveena Chera, director of marketing, Best Buy Canada. “Integrating the latest in fashion and technology, we are pleased to partner with HP on this initiative as they understand the increasing demand we see from our customers for electronics that reflect personal style and design, as well as functionality and portability.”
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Astral Media Inc. is proud to announce its support for the Institute of Communication Agencies and Virgin Unite during Canada’s 2009 Advertising Week. In the “A day in the life of an agency” contest targeting young aspiring marketing and advertising students Astral Media will contribute $100 000 in media space on the Company’s out-of-home and radio advertising platforms to the winning student campaign.

The 2009 Advertising Week takes place from January 26 to the 29, a week-long celebration of the business of ideas and communication. As part of “Youth Day,” one of AdWeek’s key events, Astral Media is actively sponsoring the A day in the life of an agency contest, which will involve 150 students working in teams with 15 agencies on a communications brief to promote a benefit concert for Virgin Mobile and Virgin Unite’s RE(*)Generation program. Students will be mentored by various ad agency teams in building a campaign during the course of an intense morning of brainstorming. The winners will have the benefit of seeing their advertising concept developed and publicized on Astral Media’s out-of-home and radio properties in Toronto and Vancouver during the course of the summer.

“This is an exciting opportunity for Astral Media to demonstrate its ongoing investment in developing tomorrow’s creative talent,” said Jacques Parisien, Group President, Astral Media Radio and Astral Media Outdoor. “We are always pleased to be able to showcase the country’s next generation of talent, and we look forward to seeing the creativity they apply to such an exciting project as Virgin Unite’s at-risk and homeless youth program, RE(*)Generation.”

Delivering Cutting Edge Services and Introducing Expert Staff, 6S Marketing Advances into the Social Media Scene

Vancouver – 6S Marketing, one of North America’s top internet marketing companies, announces today that it will officially expand service offerings to include social media marketing. This expansion news is further amplified by the addition of a top ranking social media expert to the 6S team. Services will allow greater impact and outreach in online presence and allow clients to market and communicate via densely populated online networks.

Jenn Lowther

“We have had our finger on the pulse of the social media scene and have offered limited services to clients over the past year. But in officially launching this new division of our business, we knew that we wanted to have a true expert and trend-setter to lead our team. Our main priority is to ensure that all of our services are absolutely cutting edge and valuable for clients.” explains Chris Breikss, Co-Founder and Director of 6S Marketing.

Spearheading the expansion for 6S is newly appointed Director of Social Media Marketing, Jenn Lowther, a highly regarded veteran of North American social media scene. Jenn joins the 6S team following a position as Social Media Strategist at Invoke and a lengthy history of similar work in the gaming and technology industries.
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Vancouver – PhotographyBB announced today the release of the twelfth edition of the PhotographyBB Magazine Online. The PhotographyBB Magazine Online is quickly becoming a leading resource in the future of free information distribution, offering our readers: Digital Photography tips and techniques, DSLR camera function training, and image post processing tutorials in Adobe® Photoshop™, and RAW processing in Photoshop Lightroom™.

The January 2009 release features digital photography articles with tutorials to help digital photographers to learn new techniques for achieving both better photographs as well as leaning post processing skills in Adobe’s Photoshop® and Lightroom®.

“This release marks our twelfth issue for our magazine. We’ve come a long way over the past year, and the magazine has grown considerably in popularity and readership.” said Editor in Chief, Dave Seeram. “We are happy to say that we will be continuing our tradition of free monthly releases of the magazine for the coming year, with some pleasant surprises in store for our readers. Our January release features articles lending tips on taking better architecture photography, small set photography, a trip to Las Vegas, the Top Ten Lightroom Library Module tips, and much more. We’ve also got a fascinating look at how photographers are making use of social networking sites to promote themselves and their photography businesses.”

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Vancouver – Over the past two days, we attended some of the many educational sessions offered at this year’s Spark FX festival where we made a few new friends and learned many interesting things about the visual effects industry. It is no longer much of a surprise to me to discover the many outstanding creations which are coming out of Vancouver studios, and Spark FX is most definitely a powerful showcase for the talent and technology in this city. Kudos to all of the ACM SIGGRAPH Vancouver volunteers who put in many hours of hard work to ensure that the rest of us had a great event to attend.

The first session we were able to attend was with matte painter Dylan Cole, who revealed many of the techniques and processes he uses to achieve his outstanding work. For me personally, this session was very inspirational, as Dylan encouraged attendees to think creatively to solve creative challenges. I definitely want to try some of the techniques he used in building ice scenes, vistas and fantasy cityscapes. Most surprising was the use of photographs in the mattes, and how those photographs are meshed into a painting along with hand-drawn work to create a back-scene which is realistic to the movie watcher.

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Vancouver – PDFTron Systems Incorporated, a leading global provider of PDF development tools and components, announced the official release of PDFTron’s advanced PDF library, PDFNet SDK for Windows Mobile.

PDFNet Mobile SDK is an advanced C/C++ software development toolkit for viewing, annotating, creating, and manipulating PDF documents on mobile and embedded devices without any third-party software dependencies. Although the PDFNet Mobile SDK API has all the power and functionality of the desktop PDFNet API, the library is specially designed and optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, Pocket PCs, and other embedded devices.

Using PDFTron’s PDFNet Mobile SDK, hardware, software, telecom service and mobile application providers can add powerful new functionality to their products. The PDFNet Mobile SDK API also contains powerful tools to facilitate development and implementation, including compiled device-specific libraries, API reference guides, plenty of sample code, and a full-featured mobile PDF viewer.

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Toronto – A message from the staff at CIX: Please note that CIX is now scheduled for Fall 2009. Unfortunately, the venue that we booked has gone out of business; at this late stage we have been unable to find an alternative venue for the same week in March, and wish to avoid clashing with other industry events throughout spring.

CIX remains firmly committed to organizing a world class gathering in Toronto focused on Canadian technology innovation. We look forward to announcing our new dates shortly.

Innovation Never Stops
In the interim, we are continuing to accept submissions.

Village Gamer will announce the new CIX dates as soon as they become available.

Market leaders to create a series of Mystery Case Files books and Harlequin Presents games

Toronto – Harlequin Enterprises Limited, the global leader in series romance and one of the world’s leading publishers of women’s fiction, and Big Fish Games, the world’s leading online destination for games and interactive entertainment, today announced a new licensing partnership.

In the summer of 2009, Big Fish Games will begin publishing interactive games inspired by Harlequin Presents, the most popular romance-novel series in the world, which regularly tops eRetailer and retail bookstore bestseller lists. These games will be sold on line exclusively at Big Fish Games and at all major retail stores.

In the second quarter of 2010, Harlequin will begin publishing a branded series of books inspired by Mystery Case Files(R), Big Fish Games’ award-winning franchise with over 3 million units sold. These novels will be written by Harlequin’s bestselling authors. Harlequin will be the first to publish women’s mystery fiction for Big Fish Games.
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