Village Gamer

Scribendi has launched new self-publishing and e-book publishing services to help authors achieve their dreams—no matter what they’ve written or which publishing route they’ve chosen. The new services include e-book editing, e-book proofreading, and e-book formatting and expand on Scribendi’s current manuscript service offering, which helps authors get their books published via the traditional route. Read the rest of this entry »

The Thinking Skills Club, an after school activity that uses online games as a way of tuning up children’s cognitive gears, has created a YouTube video giving an overview of the site itself and how it works. Using Snow Line, a game in the Executive Function section of the site, club founder Mitch Moldofsky leads a virtual tour that includes playing the game, demonstrating how the “brain puzzles” that track a child’s progress are built, and even linking up to research about the supporting skills that underlie the choice of games. Read the rest of this entry »

Enterprise electronic signature solutions developer Silanis Technology has announced the launch of version 9.5 of its cloud e-signing solution, e-SignLive™. This release sees the addition of Dutch, French and Spanish user interface forms and prompts to the existing English interface, allowing signers and senders to choose their preferred language. This means that the benefits of e-signing now extend to a broader audience, allowing all participants in the e-signing transaction to sign in their language of choice. Thirty six countries electronically sign documents using e-SignLive alone. Today they are using predominantly English but due to an accelerated adoption of e-SignLive in other countries, Silanis has aggressive plans for adding new language support in the upcoming releases. Read the rest of this entry »

Vantrix, a Montreal-based provider of intelligent media delivery solutions to mobile network operators, announced the availability of Message Optimizer 12.1, a market-leading solution that optimizes MMS messages sent between mobile devices. Now leveraging the same platform as Vantrix’s flagship product, Bandwidth Optimizer, this new release delivers a number of capability enhancements and a long-term upgrade path to help operators maximize the performance, efficiency and revenue potential of their MMS offerings. Read the rest of this entry »

BlueBat Games, an independent Vancouver studio that helps game developers and casino brands socialize their games on browser-based and mobile platforms, today officially announced its BlueBox Engine. BlueBox is a developer-centric social gamification engine that increases player engagement via proven social gamification strategies and mechanics. Designed from the ground up with online casinos in mind, it enables casino operators to leverage the social network effect and hook players into real life rewards. Read the rest of this entry »

BDC Venture Capital, one of Canada’s largest and most active venture investors, has announced that it is committing $1.5 million to 10 recent graduates of three Canadian technology accelerators, including, for the first time, two graduates of Launch36, a New Brunswick-based accelerator for Atlantic Canadian startups. This brings to 49 the number of accelerator graduates supported since BDC Venture Capital launched this program in mid-2011, totalling investments of $7.35 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Access to domestic violence training for police advanced today with the launch of a new online course developed to help police better protect vulnerable women and families. The new course, the second in a three-phase training program, provides an in-depth look at how police assess domestic violence risk, with a focus on victim-safety planning. This course will also help to further improve and standardize practices around inter-agency co-operation, risk assessment, bail hearings and safety planning for families. Topics include: Read the rest of this entry »

Custom development and R&D lies at the heart of every new production, and it’s costing studios a fortune. At SIGGRAPH 2013, Fabric Engine is demoing new products that will bring the time, energy and financial costs often associated with this process under control. Whether it’s unleashing multi-threaded performance inside packages like Maya and Nuke for technical directors (Creation: Splice) or showing off a new procedural locomotion system for crowds and characters (Creation: Horde), booth #737 (with Shotgun Software) is where the future of content creation tools become a reality. Read the rest of this entry »

3D animation and visual effects software developer Side Effects Software has announced the Houdini Engine, which allows for deep integration of Houdini technology into a wide variety of Digital Content Creation tools. Now both film and game studios can load Houdini Digital Assets into their goto applications and build a more integrated procedural pipeline that does not rely on baked-out data. Read the rest of this entry »

The Motion Picture Association–Canada and the Canadian Media Production Association (CMPA) have released a new first-of-its-kind study on the economic contribution of the film and television industry in Canada, revealing that, in one year alone, the sector supported 262,700 jobs, including 132,500 FTEs in film and television production, and generated $20.4 billion in GDP for the Canadian economy. Launched at an industry event at William F. White International in Toronto, the Economic Contribution of the Film and Television Sector in Canada (PDF) is a comprehensive study of the economic contributions of the film and television industry in Canada, commissioned by the Motion Picture Association – Canada in collaboration with Canadian Media Production Association (CMPA) and conducted by Nordicity. Building on research released in Profile 2012: An Economic Report on the Screen-based Production Industry in Canada, the new study captures the direct, indirect and induced economic impacts of the industry’s entire value chain in Canada. Read the rest of this entry »