Village Gamer

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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Vancouver – via E3 – United Front Games Ltd. is developing ModNation™ Racers, a creative twist on classic karting, designed exclusively for the PLAYSTATION® 3.

ModNation™ Racers puts innovation and creativity directly into the player’s hands with simple, intuitive and fun tools to create custom characters, karts and race tracks. These can be shared and played freely by anyone in the world on the PlayStation®Network.

“We are excited to be creating an accessible, endlessly imaginative and original property. Our team is inspired to push the limits of player creativity in this new take on racing.” said Julian Beak, Lead Producer. “Working directly with Sony is an honor.”

“With the creative pedigree and vision of this team and our plans for the PLAY CREATE SHARE™ genre, this partnership was a great fit for our strategic vision of this emerging genre.” said Scott Rohde, vice president of Product Development, Worldwide Studios America. “We are really happy to be working with United Front Games in bringing ModNation Racers to life, and excited to see what our consumers will create when they get to play in 2010.”

ModNation™ Racers was officially unveiled to the world during Sony’s E3 press conference.

Toronto – The Profit 100 Awards acknowledge the best in Canadian companies and creates a level playing field between small start ups and well established corporations. Celebrating entrepreneurship and recognizing growth, the award aims to uncover which business skill connects a company with 4 employees to a company with 1,600.

This year’s list contains a high percentage of interactive and new media companies, with the number one spot going to Allegro Wireless, a company which specializes in software and services for rugged handheld devices. PhotoChannel Networks Inc. whose technology allows consumers to upload digital photos for processing by major retailers; clients include Wal-Mart, Costco and Black’s landed in sixth spot, followed immediately by Kaboose Inc., a company recently purchased by Disney Interactive.

The only game development company to make the list was Frima Studios in the number ten spot. Frima has developed online multi-player games for blockbuster children’s films such as Harry Potter, Cars and Happy Feet.  Topping the medical software field at number twelve is Nightingale Informatix Corp. whose software allows patients to communicate with and receive information from their physician electronically.
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