Josh Lavoie of the Georgia Straight covered the newest version of Google Earth this week and anyone familar with downtown Vancouver will want to have a read and check it out online.Now, with the latest version of Google Earth, the Google empire contains a 3-D model of my home. With a quick update, a relatively new computer, and a speedy Internet connection, users can view 1,400 buildings in downtown Vancouver.
The 3-D downtown core is part of Google’s Cities in 3D Program. With the upcoming 2010 Olympics, Google touts the addition as a good way to promote and expose the city to its users around the world.
How accurate can it be? Dave Shea of Bright Creative and Mezzoblue pulled up some of his cityscape photos of Vancouver on Flickr and duplicated the views - the resulting comparison is pretty cool.
Google Earth recently added a few hundred 3D models of buildings in Vancouver, and I got a chance to play around this afternoon. I thought I'd try and recreate a few photos I've taken to compare.
This is going to look laughably primitive in a few years when we have high-res textures and real time weather/lighting (well, it does already thanks to the wonky texture mapping) but being able to zoom through my city in 3D is pretty darn neat.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
Bright Creative is a one-person studio in Vancouver BC, run by myself, Dave Shea (more about Dave). I’ve been taking commissions from clients... [more]
The 2009 Award nomination season is upon us and two awards series have submission deadlines fast approaching.
The British Columbia Technology Industry Association is calling for submissions for their 2009 Technology Impact Awards (TIAs). The TIAs provide BC technology companies with an opportunity to increase their visibility and exposure and are open to companies with a head office or significant operating division (with senior management) in BC. The submission deadline is March 13th and you can do it online.
Backbone Magazine and KPMG are presenting PICK20 awards for the second year in a row - a round-up of Canada’s premier Web 2.0 innovators. They're looking for the companies who are leading the way across four implementation categories:
Check out last year's winners and get your nomination in before March 2nd if you think you're worthy.
As the largest and most influential association representing BC's technology industry, BC TIA is dedicated to fostering growth and development in... [more]
As technology is changing in business, it is also changing the way we live. The world, the economy and the workplace are all evolving, and Backbone... [more]
KPMG LLP, a Canadian limited liability partnership established under the laws of Ontario, is the Canadian member firm affiliated with KPMG... [more]
This blog post is part of a series titled Thriving Though the Downturn: Eleven Strategies that will make your Company Boom.
Recent market changes have all of us attempting to figure out what it means to our companies. As the downturn accelerates, you must act now to plan your future. The key is getting into action, but doing so with a plan that recognizes the new reality.
For entrepreneurs and senior executives there is a tendency to try and make all the decisions. In challenging times, mine your human capital for creativity and ideas. Someone will have the answer. Find ways to brainstorm and get ideas on the table. Are there individuals who are showing creativity and leadership? Put them together as a team with a deadline for coming up with five ideas from the eleven strategies listed here in the next week.
Look around your organization. Who is rising to the current challenges? Who look like they are running away or burying their heads in the sand? The leaders will rise to the top. Look for those individuals and support them.
In crisis situations, leaders often feel the world on their shoulders, especially if you are the entrepreneur or business owner. All those employees. All those customers. You can’t support the whole world. Do you usually go to the gym three times a week? Go five times a week in the crisis. If you don’t have peak physical performance, you can’t have peak work performance. Do you go to yoga once a week? Go more, both for the physical and mental aspects. Look after yourself, so that you can be there for your families, your friends, your employees, and your customers.
Work on teamwork. This is a time for everyone to pull together and work as a team. Stay positive. You will get through this time and you and your teams will be more experienced people for having risen to the challenges. Karen Luniw, founder of the Law of Attraction Center says it well. “The most crucial area of focus for entrepreneurs is on keeping a positive mindset. This is not just about positive thinking but really about believing in yourself and your product or service. It's important to keep asking ‘what's the opportunity’ as opposed to 'how am I going to survive'. These are two completely different mindsets that will create different outcomes in one's business. If you can keep your eye towards opportunity - you can see it and create it.”
David J. Greer provides tailored, senior-level support to companies needing to accelerate areas of their operation that have plateaued, or to... [more]
Earlier in January, we mentioned twtapps, a Montreal-based start-up developing simple, useful Twitter aplications. Twtapps most recently 
ntroduced twtpets, a game for pet owners, and twtwlst, a gift registry. The company has just come out with a new app - twttrip is the newest member of their Twitter app family, and developer Felipe Coimbra calls it his "favorite of the twtapps."
Twttrip allows Twitterers to share travel plans with friends and followers, meet other people whose trips coincide, and display the tweets posted during a trip.
Does anyone have a favourite Twitter app they just can't live without? Let us know.
We build fun and useful apps to enhance your experience on twitter. They are developed the way twitter was meant to be: simple! All of our apps are... [more]
At first glance, the long-standing browser wars are over. Once-dominant IE is seeing more of its mindshare usurped by Firefox every day. But take a step back and you’ll see there are competitors gnawing at the edges, whether its Apple’s Safari delivering web content over the iPhone and on your Macbook, or Google’s new Chrome browser fighting for recognition.
But take a further step back, past the desktop, and that’s where you’ll find Opera.
Though Opera was one of the first browsers to challenge Internet Explorer, back in the mid-90’s, the company decided long ago to cede the desktop to closed and open source giants, and instead concentrated on the world beyond the desk, be it mobile phone, picture frame, embedded system or even the Nintendo DS and Wii.
“We could see that everything would eventually be connected, and we wanted to put our resources into being cross-platform,” Opera Communications manager Ted Miller said.
And in addition to going cross-platform, Opera put a substantial effort into criss-crossing the globe, making sure their software was in place in markets as divergent as Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
“We get statistics on what people are doing with their phones, and we see just as much data use coming from old Nokia phones in Egypt as you’d see from iPhones based in San Francisco,” Miller said.
Currently Opera provides two solutions on the mobile space, Opera Mini, which works on a client server model and can be run on any Java-enabled phone, and a full obile web browser, which works on Windows Mobile and Symbian 6 phones. Unlike the iPhone, those models can run Flash and other plugins.
And though its unlikely Opera will be able to get their browser onto the iPhone, Miller acknowledged that the current surge in smartphone use is in no small part due to the introduction of Apple’s ubiquitous device.
But for Opera, the future lies in not only standards and cross-platform compatibility, but in the widget.
“Lots of people put out RFPs for widget technology over the last year, but we already have a Widget SDK out,” Opera regional sales manger Mike McCrady said.
The eventual plan is to be able to create “widget repositories”, so the user will have a group of useful widgets for home, another for the office, and all are able to sync and communicate across devices.
But in the immediate future, Opera has some “major announcements” in the works for the upcoming CTIA conference this April in Las Vegas.
Opera started in 1994 as a research project inside Norway's largest telecom company, Telenor. Within a year, it branched out into an independent... [more]
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