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Toronto – Ronald D. Moore, Writer and Executive Producer of “Battlestar Galactica” is joining the Master Class speaker lineup at the Banff World Television Festival (BANFF). BANFF celebrates its 30th edition at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Canada, June 7–10, 2009.

Ronald Moore

“Banff’s Master Class series host some of the world’s most talented and successful TV creators,” commented Peter Vamos, BANFF Executive Director. “This is the place to hear firsthand the incredible knowledge and experience directly from the industry’s leading producers.”

“Battlestar Galactica” has been honored with a prestigious Peabody Award and twice as an official selection of the AFI’s (American Film Institute) top television programs. In 2006 Moore was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series, and in 2008 he won an Emmy for the “Battlestar Galactica” webisodes.

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Ottawa – The Canadian Film and Television Production Association (CFTPA) is pleased to announce that Norm Bolen is joining the organization as President and CEO, effective April 15th.

Norm Bolen

Mr. Bolen is the former Executive Vice President, Content, for Alliance Atlantis Communications where he had overall programming responsibility for thirteen Canadian specialty networks, and where he led Alliance Atlantis’ web based and emerging new media content and all broadcast operations. Prior to joining Alliance Atlantis, Norm spent 21 years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a journalist and executive. In his last position at the CBC he was the head of Network Television Current Affairs.

Mr. Bolen is currently Chair of the Banff World Television Festival, co-Chair of the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival and a Director of the National Screen Institute. Most recently, he has been a media consultant and a director of mDialog, a web-based high-resolution video distribution platform.

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Toronto – Today, Delvinia has launched the first in a series of published insights that will help understand the digital behaviours and attitudes of Canadian consumers. The insights, driven by their proprietary Insight Engine will give a breadth and depth of understanding, that until now, not offered by digital marketing services firms.

“Given the economic slowdown of recent months, Delvinia recognizes the need to provide a tool that would uncover and understand what drives consumers,” said Adam Froman, President and CEO of Delvinia Group of Companies. “The insights can then be harnessed to create meaningful digital customer experiences that will engage and are relevant to various Canadian demographic groups across a number of consumer sectors. The data uncovered can be a real eye-opener.”

The first insights that Delvinia is releasing looks at two important consumer segments that warrant understanding and continue to represent a great deal of spend potential: Baby Boomers, those aged 45 to 65, and adults who Don Tapscott referred to as the Net Generation (NGen), classified as young, tech-savvy adults between the ages of 18 and 30.
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Toronto – The entertainment software industry is a growing and vital contributor to the Canadian knowledge economy, according to a new report released today by the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC). Canada’s Entertainment Software Industry: The Opportunities and Challenges of a Growing Industry, conducted by respected Ottawa consulting firm Hickling Arthurs Low, and commissioned by ESAC, is the first ever national survey report of the Canadian entertainment software industry, involving original research, surveys and interviews of industry leaders.

“Canada’s entertainment software industry is one of the most promising knowledge-based industries in the country,” said Danielle LaBossiere Parr, Executive Director of ESAC. “This report reveals just how prosperous entertainment software is to the Canadian economy: an estimated $1.7 billion in direct economic activity, 14,000 jobs, and a further $2.2 billion in retail sales figures highlight a strong industry in spite of the economic downturn.”
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Vancouver Press Release – For over 15 years, Robert McKee’s Story Seminar has been the world’s ultimate writing class for over 50,000 screenwriters, filmmakers, TV writers, novelists, journalists, industry executives, actors, advertising executives, producers, directors and playwrights.

Former STORY students have written: A Beautiful Mind; Lord of the Rings I, II, III; Ironman; Law & Order; CSI; The Daily Show; Friends; Frasier; Seinfeld; The DaVinci Code; Shrek; Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest; X-Men 3; Finding Nemo and many more.

And former STORY students have won: 27 Academy Awards (98 nominations); 141 Emmy Awards (476 nominations); 20 WGA Awards (72 nominations); 17 DGA Awards (45 nominations) and a Pulitzer Prize for Writing.

Robert McKee’s famous STORY seminar returns to Vancouver in June — don’t miss this opportunity to become a former STORY student yourself.

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Burnaby/Kitchener-Waterloo – Desire2Learn Incorporated (Desire2Learn) a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise eLearning solutions, today announced that the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) has become one of the newest client partners to implement the Desire2Learn® enterprise eLearning solution as their Learning Management System (LMS).

Beginning with their “power users,” BCIT has rolled out the Desire2Learn platform for the Winter 2009 term using an escalated phase-in. Full, campus-wide implementation of the Desire2Learn eLearning environment will take place by the Fall 2009 term with the five main campuses and 18 ancillary campuses all coming onboard. More than 55,000 students, including both full-time and distance education learners, and all six Schools will use the system. BCIT expects to ramp up dramatically as they plan to implement the Desire2Learn system in numerous ways from distance education courses through to competency models across its Schools which span a diversity of curriculum from Health Care to Construction and the Environment.

“The Desire2Learn platform’s power, flexibility, reliability and efficiency are what has really impressed us. The system is extremely intuitive for both students and faculty,” said Bryan Fair, Educational Technical Advisor & Supervisor of BCIT’s Distributed Learning Services team. “We can’t say enough good things about the Desire2Learn team; they have partnered with us every step of the way to ensure a successful initial implementation. The pilot is advancing extremely well. We are able to move forward with confidence and assurance that we have a robust and leading-edge platform from a company willing to work with us as a partner on an ongoing basis.”
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Sault Ste. Marie – The Future Play 2009 conference on gaming and design is pleased to announce that seminar topics for this year’s conference have just been finalized.

Says Rick Mahoney of Cinetik, the Conference Co-Chair of Future Play: “I think we have been able to capture a very interesting spectrum of topics with the seminars we have selected. I feel that there is a good balance between technical ‘how-to’ seminars and presentations that will be more philosophical in nature.”

The full list of seminar topics is as follows:

Making Deep Games: presented by Doris Rusch

Game Audio Education – Adding Audio to your Games Courses and Games to your Audio Courses: presented by Karen Collins, Bill Kapralos, Leonard Paul and David Kerr

Designing Effective Exercise Video Games: presented by Nicholas Graham, Tadeusz Stach and Regan Mandryk

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Vancouver – The launch of Hecterra.com gives students the opportunity to research and compare every educational institution in Canada and even globally. The network offers profiles and information on institutions that includes opportunities, tuition costs, program descriptions, and more.

In development for five years, Vancouver Librarian Erez Segal has sought to create a one-stop shop for educational and career opportunities in Canada. The network is organized through region, institution-type, and educational field, providing an answer to any question regarding Canadian education.

Not ranking schools and programs, Hecterra lets students make up their mind based on facts and information provided by the network. It also features a comprehensive database of thousands of Canadian organizations offering employment opportunities on their websites
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Vancouver – Tasktop Technologies, creators of Eclipse Mylyn and the task-focused interface, have announced the release of Mylyn 3.1 and the enterprise ready Tasktop Pro 1.4. New features in Tasktop include the highly anticipated capability to automate time tracking by synchronizing actual time spent working with JIRA, Bugzilla and other popular issue trackers, saving developers from needing to manually create time sheets. Tasktop 1.4 also includes new integrations such as Microsoft Exchange server support, and the ability to work with threaded Outlook and Gmail conversations alongside their issue tracker within the IDE, even while offline. A major new feature in Mylyn, the open source foundation of Tasktop, is integrated wiki markup editing for authoring both tasks and user guides.

“With Mylyn, we have laid the foundation for ALM integrations with the Eclipse IDE.” Said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies and Mylyn project lead. “This release of Tasktop demonstrates the breadth of ALM solutions that now support the task-focused interface’s benefits such as offline editing and the focusing features that make it so much easier for developers to work on large systems. It also shows how making tasks central to the IDE enables new developer productivity features such as automatic time tracking. The ecosystem of Mylyn integrations is starting to create a network effect where productivity gains are multiplying as more tools and languages are integrated with the task-focused interface.”

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Vancouver International Partnering Forum and New Media BC’s Digital Media PopVox Awards return with bigger outreach and expanded programs

Vancouver – New Media BC announced its second annual Vancouver Digital Week will be held May 11-14, 2009 at the brand new Vancouver Exhibition and Convention Centre. Partner events include the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Canada, marking the first time the famed gamers meet up has come to Canada; Cossette West’s Convergence Conference, a digital marketing and social media gathering; and nextMEDIA’s first Vancouver event. New Media BC will present its own Vancouver International Partnering Forum and its People’s Choice PopVox Awards during Vancouver Digital Week. For a full list of events, visit: www.vancouverdigitalweek.com

“British Columbia is a global leader in digital media”, says Kenton Low, President of New Media BC. “Vancouver Digital Week is a partnership of top notch events focusing on digital media that brings attention to the world class talent and companies we have here in BC.”

The Vancouver International Partnering Forum (VIPF), to be held from May 12-13, 2009 was first launched in 2004 by New Media BC and continues as a significant annual event for leading Canadian digital companies to meet international decision makers, to explore partnership opportunities and negotiate deals. The forum attracts high calibre delegates from all over the world including the UK, USA, France, Germany, Korea, Australia, China, Singapore, Thailand and Japan. 2009 ushers in a new two day format allowing participants more networking components and the opportunity to double the number of business meetings during the hand-picked B2B sessions. Companies that have confirmed interest to attend this year’s forum include Google, Disney, Nokia, Rainmaker, Mediasense and Next Level Games. On-line registration is open at: www.vipf.ca

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