Village Gamer

Maplesoft™ has announced a new release of MapleSim™, the high-performance physical modeling and simulation software. With its broader application scope, streamlined modeling environment, and ability to efficiently simulate even more systems, MapleSim 5 makes it easier to tackle large projects and get results quickly.

MapleSim 5 comes with over 150 new components, including new libraries for magnetics and thermal fluids, which means the power of MapleSim can be applied to even more modeling projects. With these components, customers can use MapleSim 5 to quickly develop a wider range of applications, such as the solenoids in dialysis machines and fuel injection systems, saturating motors and transformers, and heat exchangers for machine cooling systems.

The MapleSim 5 interface includes many new and improved features to reduce model development time and help customers manage the complexity of their models. For example, enhanced diagnostic tools provide early feedback related to the definition of the model itself, such as identifying inconsistent initial conditions. MapleSim then provides assistance in resolving the problem, so corrections can be made before running the simulation. Other additions include increased control over parameters and initial conditions, easy export of 3-D animation simulation results, and streamlined design environments for building both model diagrams and 3-D model representations. The improved simulation engine in MapleSim can now generate highly optimized C code for all MapleSim models. This royalty-free code can be incorporated into other software in the toolchain.

MapleSim uses a fully developed symbolic modeling engine to handle all of the complex mathematics involved in the development of engineering models. This symbolic engine offers unique advantages that expand the modeling and simulation capabilities of engineers. Each MapleSim release further develops these capabilities, which include automatically generated model equations in full parametric form, equation-based custom components, optimized code generation for real-time systems, revolutionary multibody technology, and an interactive analysis environment that captures the full engineering knowledge that goes into each project.

“By leveraging symbolic computation technology, MapleSim offers unique advantages that enable our customers to succeed at very difficult design projects they simply cannot do with other tools,” says Laurent Bernardin, Executive Vice-President and Chief Scientist, Maplesoft. “MapleSim reduces model development time from months to days while producing high-fidelity, high-performance models. With MapleSim 5, our customers can apply those time and cost savings to even more projects, while further reducing the time needed to design their complex models.”

I only have a few minutes left before I have to head off for work, so here is a quick rundown of event news:

* If you haven’t yet registered for SIGGRAPH 2011, you should do so now, because ticket prices go up at midnight on June 18th.  Having the conference in Vancouver this year is a huge opportunity for our many-faceted digital media industry, and I hope that you all take advantage of it. We’ll be at the show, and we really hope to see you there, too.

* The Full Indie Game Jam that is happening this weekend at the Centre for Digital Media is sold out, but there is a waiting list. Registration is also now open for the June 23rd Full Indie meetup event, and with limited space available, I suggest signing up now. Games from the jam will be featured at the meetup.

* SIGGRAPH Vancouver Chapter presents The Art of Lighting and Rendering Rio next week at District 319. Jim Gettinger, Lighting Supervisor, will discuss lighting and lighting design as it pertains to the overall aesthetic of Blue Sky Studios’ latest animated hit, RIO. This talk will explore the developmental work pursued by Jim and his team taking the listener through many stages of the production process at Blue Sky. Lighting and lighting techniques will be presented from concept art, through pre-visualization, master lighting, and compositing.

* The next Women In Games Vancouver Martini Night is June 23rd at Guilt & Company. Ladies, come out for a relaxing evening of socializing with other women from the interactive media industry. RSVP on the event’s Facebook page.

* Annex Pro is hosting three (and free) software events in Vancouver; please click the event links for more information and to register. The first is happening tomorrow – Test-Drive Native Performance with new Avid Pro Tools|HD Native will be held at Annex Pro. Don’t Just Edit. Finish. Autodesk Smoke for Mac OS X takes place at Vancouver Film School on June 22. On June 28th, you can spend An Evening with The Foundry: Nuke 6.3, NukeX 6.3, Mari at Rainmaker Entertainment.

* New Media Manitoba presents iPad User Interface Design on June 21st. Chris, Olga, and Lee of Velocity Branding will guide you through their methodology for project management and designing for Tablets. This is a free event, and will take place at the NMM offices from 5-7pm.

* Interactive Ontario presents Interact Networking Mixer: Special Documentary Edition on June 29th at The Annex Live from 6 – 8pm. This event is free for DOC & IO Members or $10.00 for Non-Members. You are invited to come out and mingle with professionals in the interactive and documentary media industries, with the opportunity to uncover new possibilities for creative and business partnerships. This event is co-presented by docSHIFT (an initiative of the DOC Toronto) and Interactive Ontario.

* Tech Cocktail is coming to Vancouver on July 9th. The event will be very much focused on the future as we partner with Futurists:BetaLaunch as part of the World Future Conference by the World Future Society, a 45-year old non-profit organization dedicated to advancing ideas of the future. We’re also looking to engage with the local Vancouver tech community, inviting them to participate in this exciting event.

* Amazon invites you to come out and meet the Amazon Vancouver team, where you can learn about all the job opportunities at one of Amazon’s newest Software Development Centers in Canada. Meet and mingle with all the different teams that are growing and hiring at the new office. This will be a great opportunity to meet our engineers, learn about our culture, and find out about the exciting opportunities Amazon Vancouver has to offer. Have a drink and appetizers on us, but don’t forget to bring your resume. RSVP through LinkedIn required.

* The nationwide DEMO Innovation tour is back – it will be in Vancouver on June 23rd, Toronto on June 26th, and Montreal on July 15th.  Matt Marshall, DEMO Executive Producer and the DEMO team will travel around the country to connect with the DEMO community in search of the best innovation to showcase at DEMO Fall 2011, and they invite you to submit an application for a 30 minute private meeting with the DEMO team and leading Venture capitals in a city near you. There are ten spots available per tour stop. Each company selected will also have the opportunity to address a larger audience at the DEMO Tour party in the evening open to the entire DEMO community of VCs, investors, media and PR professionals.

Remember this is just a very small sampling of upcoming events – visit our Events Page for more listings.

Adlib Software has announced the general availability of the Adlib Content Transformation Platform, the industry’s first complete, automated transformation solution for the enterprise. The Adlib Platform is uniquely designed to streamline document-intensive business processes to improve efficiency, mitigate compliance-related risks and reduce costs. It is deployed as a shared service and can scale enterprise-wide, enabling centralized content-to-PDF transformation capabilities to multiple applications, departments and lines of business.

Today’s enterprises are challenged with increased content management demands, and struggle to find efficient ways to capture, manage, preserve and share content. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems including Microsoft® SharePoint® help ease these challenges. However, these solutions don’t always provide the necessary content transformation capabilities needed to enable the efficient automation of document-centric business processes that are important in removing time-consuming, error-prone and costly manual intervention.

Adlib turns volumes of content and intellectual property into digital assets that can be easily accessed, shared, leveraged and archived. For example, a leading international insurance company is using Adlib to increase sales by being faster than their competitors in delivering personalized customer quotes in PDF format. In addition, Pfizer, the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company, is turning patents into profits by speeding time-to-market for its drugs by streamlining and automating the creation of submission-quality PDFs and eliminating the need for time-consuming, costly and error-prone manual quality control reviews. Read the rest of this entry »

OpenText™ has released a new version of OpenText Integration Center featuring an enhanced, native connector to OpenText ECM Suite 2010. Customers can help better leverage their structured and unstructured content to reduce costs and improve efficiency. OpenText Integration Center unifies access to multiple sources of disparate information from OpenText ECM Suite for applications such as business systems integration, legacy decommissioning, in-place content management and content migration.

Most integration technologies focus on either structured data in databases or content in document repositories, but not both. Now with OpenText Integration Center, which inherently understands both structured data and unstructured content, customers can give business decision makers easy access to corporate information assets through ECM Suite 2010. This allows them to take advantage of powerful analytics, semantic search and rich interactive user interfaces to boost productivity and improve decision making.

“The current economic conditions are forcing organizations to reduce the number of information sources by bringing structured and unstructured content together under the roof of a single business process and repository,” said Eugene Cherny, General Manager for OpenText’s Connectivity Solutions. “By combining these worlds in the OpenText ECM Suite, we give customers a powerful solution that helps them reduce costs during a tough economy, while enabling them to do more with their information.”

The latest release of OpenText Integration Center, together with OpenText ECM Suite 2010, provides enhanced, integrated ECM support making it easier to design, integrate, and implement content integration projects. Typical applications include:

Content Migration — OpenText Integration Center offers complete migration features to move content from one or many repositories to any new destination with all its metadata and context. It helps to automate the movement of content while delivering content integrity and operational efficiency.

Legacy System Decommissioning – Finally turning the off switch on old systems can lead to substantial cost reduction. Customers can archive data from any application and automatically apply lifecycle management rules, such as records management classifications, retention rules, and schedules through ECM Suite 2010.

Data Archiving — With a global policy to integrate retention of structured and unstructured content into one archiving system, customers can be assured of speedy and accurate collection of historical information with a full audit history.

Systems Integration — OpenText Integration Center represents a new generation of integration solutions that transforms, cleanses, enriches and directs information across the entire spectrum of decision support systems and corporate applications, for integrations that include data warehouses, data marts, mainframe systems, ERP systems, CRM systems, and content management platforms.

Leading industry analysts such as Susan Feldman, IDC’s Research Vice President for Search and Discovery Technologies, have identified unified information platforms as a new and fast-growing segment in enterprise software. Facilities like OpenText Integration Center will support enterprise strategies to implement such platforms.

“Businesses of all sizes are wallowing in too much information, without being able to make sense of it. Our survey of IT buyers demonstrates that they are eager to fix the information quandary by investing in software that gives them a single access point to all their information silos. We expect this demand to fuel a new wave of growth in information access software,” writes Feldman in a report published in April 2011 titled “Unified Access to Information: Less Seeking, More Finding.”

Montreal’s MultiDev eCommerce software solutions company will be at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, the world’s largest e-retailing show being held next week in San Diego. With over 500 exhibiting companies representing 75 technology market segments, the 218,000-square-foot Exhibit Hall at IRCE 2011 will display e-commerce technologies of vendors that account for more than three-quarters of global e-commerce technology business. Like the IRCE Conference, which brings together more e-commerce strategic intelligence than any other event, the IRCE 2011 Exhibit Hall houses the largest display of e-commerce technology on the planet.

The e-comDrive solution, a first in its class, is a complete, all inclusive and fully -integrated Back-Office System that offers all of the functionality required to run a successful e-commerce business. e-comDrive’s integrated system includes; Order Management with Multi-Channel Fulfillment, Warehouse Management, Customer Relationship Management, Planning, Analytics, Accounting, 3rd Party Integration, Specialized Add-on Applications and much more; providing e-tailers with a complete suite of solutions that offers functionality designed to effectively manage and control their online business processes.

Stop by their booth #541 and discover how their revolutionary functionality and innovative features can drive your e-commerce business ahead of the competition.

The Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC has ruled unanimously in favor of i4i in the long-running i4i v Microsoft patent infringement lawsuit. The Supreme Court did not accept Microsoft’s request to lower the standard of proof, for challenges to the validity of a properly issued patent, from clear and convincing evidence to a preponderance of evidence. As a result of this decision, i4i has won its patent infringement case against Microsoft. At trial the jury ruled in favor of i4i and awarded $200 million in damages (now upwards of $300 million with enhancements and interest). The Honorable Judge Leonard Davis entered judgment on the verdict and issued a permanent injunction against Microsoft.

Loudon Owen, Chairman of i4i, says, “Microsoft tried to gut the value of patents by introducing a lower standard for invalidating patents. It is now 100% clear that you can only invalidate a patent based on “clear and convincing” evidence.” Owen adds, “This is one of the most significant business cases the Court has decided in decades. Affirmation of the Federal Circuit on a ruling in favor of patent holders is virtually unprecedented. While this ruling maintains the prevailing standard, the innovation community must be ever-vigilant to defend its property rights.”

Michel Vulpe, founder of i4i and co-inventor, says, “This has been a 16 year journey with a clearly defined purpose – to build a world leader in managing data. It is an important stepping stone for i4i and we can now continue to build our company the way we intended.” Vulpe adds, “Our army was small but mighty and we are grateful to our team, partners, investors, legal counsel, those who filed amici briefs, and everyone supporting the rights of patent holders. Naturally, we are particularly appreciative of our shareholders who continue to support us.” i4i’s legal team includes WilmerHale, McKool Smith, Finnegan Henderson, and Sterne Kessler. Read the rest of this entry »

Laptops and desktop computers continue to grow in popularity as both graduation and Father’s Day gifts. In response to this trend, Absolute^® Software Corporation has released some timely tips to empower recent graduates and deserving dads to protect their new computers.

Last year, surveys by BIGresearch® and the National Retail Federation (NRF) revealed that 10.6 percent of consumers purchasing gifts for graduates planned to give electronics, a 9 percent increase from 2009¹. Additionally, 18.5 percent of those surveyed this year intended to buy consumer electronics or computer-related accessories for Father’s Day². To help consumers protect their new costly devices and sensitive personal information, Absolute offers the following tips:

• Don’t Rely on Free Software Trials – It’s easy to forget or ignore alerts when software trials expire, leaving the computer at risk for malicious threats or worse if the device is ever lost or stolen. From day one of use, owners should activate full subscriptions of theft recovery, anti-virus and anti-spyware software. For example, consumers who activate their subscription to LoJack for Laptops are instantly able to take advantage of a full suite of security features to manage and protect their computer.
• Choose Dynamic Passwords – To achieve strong levels of protection, passwords should be changed often, differ greatly and be difficult to guess. According to research from the Georgia Tech Research Institute, ideal passwords also consist of a mix of randomized upper- and lower- case letters, at least one number and one symbol, and should be longer than 12 characters³.
• Fill Out The Warranty Information – If the computer is damaged while it is out of the owner’s hands, the manufacturer may cover repairs as part of the warranty if the device is recovered. Agreements differ from company to company; however, taking a few minutes to submit warranty information online or via mail can save consumers from additional distress and out-of-pocket expenses.
• Designate Folders for Sensitive Files – Every second counts after a laptop is stolen. Using the Delete functionality in LoJack for Laptops, users can remotely erase all or specific files so that they are not exposed to prying eyes. To get to important files quickly, computer owners should designate files, under non-descriptive names, to contain this type of information.
• Remain Alert When Traveling – Many laptop-friendly locations that consumers encounter during travel are also areas at highest risk for laptop theft. Based on customer reports filed to the Absolute Theft Recovery Team, some of the at-risk locations are public transit, hotels, restaurants/cafes and airports. Staying alert and maintaining possession of the computer at all times during travel will help to prevent theft. Read the rest of this entry »

Zevrix Solutions has announced Deliver 2.3.4, a feature update to its file delivery solution for remote and local destinations. Deliver lets users send files over Internet and local networks with variable e-mail notifications, automatic compression, encryption and other powerful capabilities. It supports FTP, Amazon S3, MobileMe and other remote and local services, and lets users send files to multiple destinations at once.

Deliver 2.3.4 can be purchased from Zevrix website for US$19.95 (free with purchase of BatchOutput for InDesign). The update is free for licensed users of Deliver, and a free trial is also available for download. Deliver is a Universal Binary and available for Mac OS X 10.5-10.6.

The new version lets users view destination passwords in clear text making it much easier for administrators to manage, store and retrieve passwords. Users have an option to view current password only, or to keep passwords in clear text as they switch between destinations. This feature is available through admin authentication only. Deliver also lets users automatically send output files and collected jobs from Adobe InDesign through seamless integration with Zevrix plug-ins BatchOutput and InPreflight.

Deliver quickly gains popularity as file delivery tool of choice at ad agencies, printers, audio recording studios, video producers and other facilities. Users only need to drop files onto the program icon, or select them from the system list, and the items will be delivered automatically to the desired destinations. The program will send automatic email notifications upon delivery, eliminating the need to babysit the files in order to notify the recipients. Files can be instantly downloaded from links included in the email. In addition, Deliver automates such repetitive tasks as file compression and encryption, and offers a detailed history of all deliveries.

Business management software developer Pronto Software today introduced the new PRONTO-Xi Dimensions, an innovative product that brings together ERP transactions and BI Analytics in a unified, out-of-the-box solution.

Launched at Pronto Software’s customer conference in Toronto, PRONTO-Xi Dimensions is the ‘next generation’ smart ERP solution that will transform the way businesses work and receive information. Quick to implement and easy to use, the new release responds to key market needs including instant insight into business performance for faster, smarter decision making for all employees.

Embedding the powerful IBM Cognos BI suite, PRONTO-Xi Dimensions enables mid-market businesses to manage large volumes of data and access real time analytics to understand key business drivers and influence business outcomes.

“We’re pleased to be working with Pronto Software to unveil the PRONTO-Xi Dimensions release to the North American market,” said Kevin Schell, General Manager, PSA Inc. “The business insight that PRONTO-Xi Dimensions provides will allow our customers to accelerate in their industries through unmatched Cognos 10 reporting and embedded Business Intelligence.”

“There is no ERP package more comprehensive in the market that can handle the industry demands of manufacturing, distribution, field service and retail, and with the addition of Cognos 10, PRONTO-Xi Dimensions is certain to hit the market running,” Schell added.

“When planning for this release more than 18 months ago, we envisioned a product that’s not just a logical extension of the success we’ve built so far, but a game-changing solution that will make our ERP engine smarter and create greater access to knowledge, to enable customers to innovate and differentiate,” said Pronto Software Managing Director David Jackman. Read the rest of this entry »

Annex Pro invites anyone running Pro Tools 8 and earlier versions, on Apple G4, G5, first-gen Mac Pro, iMac or  Windows PC to come in for a hands-on Native Performance test drive with the new Avid Pro Tools|HD Native. Experience for yourself the new high-performance, low-latency, PCIe-based I/O of Avid Pro Tools|HD Native, running on the New 8 and 12 core Apple Mac Pro
Pro Tools is now faster and more affordable, using host-based processing of new Apple multicore Mac Pro computers.  Bench-mark tests show that Pro Tools|HD Native analog to analog throughput latency is far lower than competing FireWire, USB 2.0 and other PCIe interfaces, with the added benefits of: