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Planning for business travel is a lot more involved than booking flights and packing your laptop — you also need to prepare yourself for optimal communication with partners, colleagues and locals. Recently, I was in Florida and was surprised by how many people spoke Spanish. Now, I know that figure is nearly a quarter of their population.
With an upcoming trip to Quebec on my calendar, and knowing that almost everyone there knows at least a little French, I decided to take the time to study some of the language beforehand. I tested out Babbel and this was my experience.
What: Sale on Babbel
Price:$223 with code LEARN (Was: $420)
Where to buy:Babbel Language Learning: Lifetime Subscription
The first few steps in my language-learning journey
The reason I decided on a Babbel in the first place was that I’d heard so much about this particular app online and through friends. Trying to find free language resources wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, and I didn’t want to commit to expensive, in-person courses.
Babbel also made it easy to set up realistic goals. Becoming fluent in French before my upcoming trip didn’t feel like a realistic goal. Now that I have a lifetime subscription, I may want to learn other languages in the future or brush up on my French. I selected my reason for learning, my desired proficiency and my target deadline, then the app set a weekly goal for me.
Study a broad range of topics, useful for travel and beyond
In just the first course, I’ve already learned how to greet people and say goodbye, introduce myself, share where I’m from and which languages I speak, order at restaurants and ask how much something costs, talk about my profession and say my age and ask for contact details.
Babbel does a great job in explaining the informal and formal differences between different pronouns and terms. For instance, I already know that I should address clients and those I don’t know with “Bonjour!” and my familiar colleagues with “Salut!”
Hands-on practice for real-world situations
Each lesson also prompts me to practice my pronunciation , usually after seeing and hearing a new term. This remedies a common concern with learning a language through an app — Babbel calls it speech-recognition technology.
While the software will let you know if you completely mispronounce a word, it’s not foolproof. One of my favourite features is that it motivates you to actually say the words out loud because that’s what you’ll be doing in the real world.
There is also an entire course titled “Listening and Speaking” where you can sharpen more of those conversational skills. After taking a few lessons, these tend to focus on vowels and consonants.
Review sessions built for long-term goals
A big concern I had, with my Quebec trip still being quite a few months out, is that I would forget a lot of what I learned if I started now. But that’s no real reason to put aside language-learning goals and the app had a way of accounting for this.
Babbel keeps track of each new term you learn and how many times it’s been reviewed, ensuring that you only see it as often as you need. You even get to choose the review method between flashcards, writing, listening, speaking, or playing a mini-game.
The review sessions have their strengths and weaknesses. A huge advantage is that their system seems to work, though a disadvantage is that if you take a break from the platform, it doesn’t seem to factor that in and you may get some difficult prompts in the mix.
Take advantage of the Babbel sale
While I chose to study French, Babbel has 13 other languages to choose from and you can easily switch between them at any time. Whether you’re u sing it for business or pleasure travel, or simply to pick up a new and marketable skill, learning a new language is a fun and rewarding experience.
I recommend Babbel for anyone looking to learn a new language for travel.
What: Sale on Babbel
Price:$223 with code LEARN (Was: $420)
Where to buy:Babbel Language Learning: Lifetime Subscription
Prices subject to change.
]]> Score: 9/10
Platform: iOS (reviewed), Android, Windows, OS X
Developer: Rovio Entertainment
Publisher: Rovio Entertainment
Release: November 8, 2012
ESRB: N/A
It’s almost like Rovio Entertainment doesn’t want the world to get any work done.
Angry Birds Star Wars , the latest entry in the Finnish app maker’s line of addictive physics puzzlers starring frowning fowls, is barely a day old, yet we’ve already worked our way through nearly all of its deliciously Lucas-ian levels.
Now, meshing Luke Skywalker, Ben Kenobi, and Han Solo with Rovio’s cast of feathery pig haters might seem a little strange at first, but it’s really not that much different than Lego Star Wars .
The key to a good pop-culture crossover lies in ensuring its constituent elements retain the characteristics that made them so endearing in the first place, and Rovio has done a fine job of not just incorporating some of the most beloved bits of Star Wars into its formula, but actually using them to make the Angry Birds experience better.
Some of Rovio’s creative decisions were pretty predictable. The birds are, unsurprisingly, decked out as Han, Chewie, et. al., while the bad piggies play the roles of sandpeople and stormtroopers (yes, they’re a little short for the part, but so was Luke). They’re flung through environments modeled after famous locations like Tatooine and the Death Star, and the game is loaded with authentic Star Wars sounds, from snippets of John Williams’ classic score to the jarringly juicy blasts of turbolasers.
But Rovio has done much more with the Star Wars theme than simply pilfer iconic images and sound effects.
Our costumed fliers have special powers befitting the characters they play. Luke swings a big blue lightsaber that lets him cleanly cut his way through pretty much any of the game’s breakable objects. Ben uses the Force to push towers over without physically touching them. Han comes equipped with a blaster that fires three shots at any location we tap on the screen.
Even R2-D2 can zap piggies like they were Jawas.
With the possible exception of Angry Birds Space , these powers represent the biggest addition of significant new mechanics in a single Angry Birds game since the original.
More than that, they work together to meaningfully alter our strategies.
I was downright giddy when I discovered that I could use Luke’s lightsaber to not just slice through crates lying around moisture vaporator farms but also deflect incoming blaster fire back at the sand-piggies taking potshots at me. And when I figured out I could bounce Han’s blaster fire off of metal objects to hit pigtroopers around corners I felt like I was bullseyeing womp rats in my T-16 back home.
I’ll admit these clever new abilities are sometimes taken a little too far. Angry Birds is at its best when the player feels there are plenty of ways she could go about accomplishing objectives, and there are times in Angry Birds Star Wars when it becomes obvious there is really only one proper way — one specific shot — that will earn a perfect three-star score (just wait till you get to the garbage compactor level).
But Rovio did it right for the most part, respecting George’s (oops, I mean Disney’s) beloved space opera while evolving its own property in fun new ways.
If you’re on the hunt for a new time killer for your phone, trust us: This is the app you’re looking for.
]]>Investors continue to buy into Wave Accounting Inc.’s technology and business model as the Toronto startup announced a fresh round of financing worth $5-million Friday.
The latest infusion is led by U.S. venture capital firm Charles River Ventures and comes after a $1.5-million seed round that closed in early June.
Wave also got about $750,000 in funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario in September.
OMERS Ventures , the venture capital investment arm of the Ontario pension fund, which participated in the first round of seed funding and was also part of this latest round of Series A financing.
The company offers a free web-based accounting software and makes money through targeted advertising and group-buying opportunities.
Launched in November 2010, the company said in a statement Friday it has signed up almost 75,000 small businesses in 198 countries since then.
“Wave’s immediate plans include ongoing application development, as well as the launch of a complimentary payroll application later this year,” the company said.
]]>Research In Motion Ltd is hoping to make its BlackBerry devices a little more social in an effort to revitalize flagging sales and spark new interest in its smartphones.
On Thursday, RIM launched a new version of its popular BlackBerry Messenger instant messaging application, one that will also allow BlackBerry users to send messages from within other applications.
The new software, known as BBM 6, is now available from RIM’s BlackBerry App World application marketplace.
Makers of several of the most popular applications on the BlackBerry platform — including Score Media Inc and Foursquare — are launching new versions of their applications that integrate with BBM 6 today.The new software will, for example, allow users to begin a BBM chat with another BlackBerry user while following the live blog of a baseball game or share scores with a friend while playing a video game on their smartphone.
RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger technology allows users to send instant messages to other BlackBerry users and see when the messages have been delivered and read. With 45 million users, BBM is a key differentiator for RIM as the Waterloo, Ont.-based company attempts to reassert itself in the battle for smartphone supremacy against rivals Apple Inc and Google Inc.
By opening up the BBM platform to other developers, RIM is hoping to give third party developers a new reason to create games and other software for BlackBerry devices.
Both Google and Apple offer more applications than RIM in their online marketplaces.
RIM first unveiled plans to open the BBM platform to third party developers at its developers conference in San Francisco last September, and select developers began working with the technology at the company’s BlackBerry World conference in May. At the time, RIM said it planned to roll the new capabilities out to its approximately 370,000 registered third party developers sometime this summer.
The new BBM 6 technology arrives as RIM is preparing to launch seven new BlackBerry devices powered by the new BlackBerry 7 OS later this year.
RIM, which slashed 2,000 jobs on Monday in the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history, has struggled to keep pace with rival smartphone makers over the past 12 months as the BlackBerry maker struggled with product delays and the underwhelming debut of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
]]> Company: Wave Accounting
Launched: November 2010 in Toronto
Industry: Software
Number of employees: 16
Growth: Signed up 32,000 registered users since launch at a rate of 370 a day. Recently closed a $1.5-million financing round.
Kirk Simpson is nothing if not the consummate salesman.
While having his photo taken for this story, chief executive of Wave Accounting
explains his company’s free small business accounting software to the photographer, who says he might give it a try.
Mr. Simpson says the web-based application, which offers a basic accounting solution, appeals to business owners with little time and no interest in bookkeeping. “You didn’t go into business as a photographer because you love accounting, you went into business because you love photography,” he says.
Mr. Simpson and business partner and co-founder James Lochrie saw an opportunity to replace the “spreadsheets and shoeboxes” many small businesses now run their accounting on. “We thought that given the new technologies and the ability to automatically bring in bank transactions off of people’s credit cards, there was no reason to live in a shoebox anymore,” he says.
It took about 18 months to develop the software — which offers double-entry accounting, expense tracking and standard reports — and the free app was launched last November.
Since then, 32,000 businesses from 184 countries have signed up.
Toronto-based Wave Accounting spends almost nothing on marketing, but it isn’t relying on Mr. Simpson’s word-of-mouth technique either to raise interest in its product. It’s using social media and since early May has made the app available on the Google Chrome store, which has garnered it more than 20,500 users.
While pleasantly surprised at the quick uptake through Chrome, Mr. Simpson says the company is meeting expectations in terms of adoption. That’s good news, because the company’s business model depends on having a large subscriber base from which to draw information for advertisers, who will in turn put together offers targeted at those users.
“On an aggregated, non-identifiable basis we’ll be aggregating offers against data points,” he says.
The data pulled from information inputted for accounting purposes will lead to offers on items such as mobile phone rates or office supplies.
“By bringing together all these small businesses in a single location, we can go out to Rogers and say, ‘We have 20,000 small business owners, give us an offer to put in front of them,’ ” he says, adding this has value for small operations without procurement departments or time to shop around for the best offer.
The company plans to roll out its first advertiser-led offers in North America later this month. Mr. Simpson says the considered a fee-based model but when they saw what Mint.com was doing with its free web-based personal finance service they reconsidered.
“When we really started to look into what the data structure looked like and the opportunities to do it in a non-traditional way, we knew instantly that was the direction we wanted to go.”
In early June, Wave closed a $1.5-million seed round of financing led by INKEF Capital, the investment alliance of pension funds OMERS in Ontario and ABP in the Netherlands. It included angel investors and spanned four to six months. Initially, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Lochrie invested their own and friends’ and family’s money.
“The bottom line is with a free app you’ve got to prove that your model can onboard users significantly faster than a paid one and you just build your monetization through a different platform,” he says.
]]>Joey Jeremiah never saw this coming. The fedora-wearing character on the Degrassi Junior High television series from the 1980s and 1990s likely never imagined testing the high school waters with an app on his smartphone.
But fans of the current Degrassi show will soon be able to do just that as a mobile game to be released next month offers them the chance to play the role of a high school student and interact with popular characters including Eli and Fiona.
Stephen Stohn, president of Toronto-based Epitome Pictures Inc. and executive producer of the show, said Wednesday that Degrassi is teaming up with XMG Studio Inc. and MuchMusic (the show’s broadcaster) to launch the app because its fans are so immersed in the new media world.
“Our audience is there,” Mr. Stohn said in an intervew. “So on the show we have to depict stories of what they’re doing in these spaces, but we also have to reach out to them in these spaces.”
Ray Sharma, founder and chief executive of Toronto-based XMG, said his company’s research shows that teenagers not only purchase applications for mobile devices, they also influence their parents and other family members.
“About 50% of the app economy is being driven by teenagers,” he said. “They’re influential about what apps to get and what are cool.”
That kind of influence is why he wanted to work with the Degrassi brand, which has been required viewing for Canadian teens for more than three decades.
Mr. Stohn’s wife Linda Schuyler created the Kids of Degrassi Street 30 years ago and various versions of the show have been on the air ever since.
The game, which is expected to be available on all major platforms, will be story-based in nature and new episodes will be released on a monthly basis, Mr. Stohn said.
Each episode will focus primarily on the player’s interaction with three animated Degrassi characters. Similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, the user’s choices about what to do when faced with situations such as those that come up on the show -drug issues, relationships, school work -will influence how others perceive them.
Mr. Sharma predicts it will appeal in particular to “tweens” who are not yet in high school but want a taste of what it is like.
“You’re kind of curious about what it’s like to be in high school, and this game allows you to actually experience that,” he said.
But the television show -which went on the air in 2001 in its current incarnation as Degrassi: The Next Generation before reverting simply to Degrassi in its 10th season -boasts of a broad demographic of fans: from age 12 to 34, Mr. Stohn said.
Although he suspects the game will be most appealing to young girls, he’s not ruling out its appeal to a different group.
“Women in their late 20s are actually a very high demographic of Degrassi viewers and we think they may be high acquirers of the game and the characters,” he said.
Which leaves only one question: Will the game feature a Zit Remedy reunion show?
]]>There’s nothing quite like a Royal Wedding, and the nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s next Friday, April 29 are sure to be no exception.
But the world has changed substantially since Prince William’s parents — Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana — were wed 30 years ago. More than 750 million people tuned in on television for the last major Royal Wedding, but at the time, the world had never heard of Twitter, Facebook or smartphones.
One British minister said two billion people are expected to watch the wedding on television, but when the happy couple finally do tie the knot next week, it will happen before one of the largest online audiences the world has ever seen.
For Will and Kate, getting engaged in a digital age has meant their wedding will be a global spectacle, broadcast to computer screens across the world.
In the online world, official Twitter accounts, a YouTube channel, dozens of apps and Facebook pages will enable fans of the Royals around the world to take part in the royal romance — if you can still call it romantic when more than a quarter of the world’s population is likely to be watching.
Of course, here at the National Post, we’re doing everything we can to bring you every glitzy fairy tale moment of the Royal Wedding. National Post reporters will be live blogging the event beginning at 5 a.m. with Tweets from London and commentary from around the world . You can check out our entire Royal Wedding coverage package here .
To help you get ready for the first Royal Wedding of the digital age, the FP Tech Desk has rounded up a helpful collection of links, apps and Facebook pages to help you celebrate Will and Kate’s big day.
ROYAL WEDDING HQ
Official Royal Wedding 2011 is the Buckingham Palace-approved online headquarters for everything related to the Royal Wedding. Check in regularly for the latest updates as well as an archive of all the previously released information, including: the music that will be played, the official wedding photographer, a video interview with the designer of the Royal wedding cake and more.
TUNE IN LIVE, ONLINE
If you don’t mind setting your alarm clock a few hours early, you can catch the Royal wedding being streamed live on several websites. At 5 a.m. EDT, The Official Royal Channel on YouTube will offer live coverage of the wedding, complete with a recap of highlights following the ceremony. In the days leading up to the Royal Wedding, the Official Royal Channel will feature videos of staff from Buckingham Palace testing canapé recipes for the wedding reception and an interview with the dean of Westminster Abbey, the church where the ceremony will be held.
British public broadcaster BBC will also have live video and commentary on its website beginning at 1 a.m. EDT.
Prefer to watch the wedding from the comfort of your very own Facebook page? Simply RSVP to a special E! Online Facebook event . Log in beginning at 4 a.m. and you can Facebook chat with friends as Kate walks down the aisle towards her Prince, er, Charming.
ROYAL PHOTO ALBUMS
To gain access to the Middleton family photo albums, check out the British Monarchy’s Flckr photostream . There are photos of young Kate alongside designs for the Royal wedding cake and commemorative China.
THE ROYAL TWEETSTREAM
http://twitter.com/#!/ClarenceHouse/status/61009452563841024
Clarence House, the official residence of Prince William’s family, has declared #rw2011 the official hashtag of the Royal wedding. You can also follow @ClarenceHouse for the latest wedding news. To make sure you don’t miss anything, you can also set up a Twitter search for #royalwedding, another hashtag getting a lot of tweets in the lead up to the big day.
http://twitter.com/#!/BritishMonarchy/status/61025200803807232
@BritishMonarchy is an official — verified by Twitter — source for news on all Royal events. Theses days its focus is, of course, the Royal Wedding.
In addition to the Royal Family, the media is also adding to the Twitterverse with wedding-related tweets.
The BBC has added to its extensive wedding coverage with the Twitter account @bbcroyalwedding , and msbc.com’s account @royalwedding has been awarded the title “Best Twitter feed to follow” by British newspaper The Telegraph .
http://twitter.com/#!/royalwedding/status/61048289654620160
If you get tired of all the cliché Royal-loving, follow humourous — but fake — accounts set up in the name of the bride and groom: @PrincessKateFTW and @William_HRH .
The fake Kate account is managed by a comedy sketch writer in New York City who has the future princess contemplating going to medical school before reconsidering to spend more time organizing her large tiara collection.
http://twitter.com/#!/PrincessKateFTW/status/53469822276730880
For his part, @William_HRH tweets about his plans for a bachelor party with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Charlie Sheen.
http://twitter.com/#!/William_HRH/status/52819989908033536
ROYALS IN YOUR POCKET
The Official Royal App comes straight from The Royal Collection , an official administrative body that sells officially sanctioned Royal products and manages the Royal Family’s art collection. It tells the love stories behind the past seven Royal weddings and is available in eight languages. Which is good because, according to Google’s Official Blog , search trends show countries like the Philippines and Singapore are among the Top Ten countries Googling “royal wedding.” The Royal App is available for Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad and Google Inc.s Android for about $2.80.
Ian Jones, a photographer who has been following the Royal family since 1992, features some of his exclusive shots of Will, Kate, and the rest of the Royal Family on the Royal Wedding app available for iPhone and iPad for $0.99 . This app was developed by Neon Play.
Hello! magazine’s The Royal Wedding app divides a huge amount of Royal Wedding information into nine categories. For free, you can toggle between sections titled “The Dress,” “The Ring,” “The Ceremony” and others on your iPhone or iPad.
Royal Wedding HRM Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton aggregates news on the Royal couple from British newspapers and blogs. It features a countdown and the ability to post articles directly to Twitter and Facebook. You can buy it for $1.99 and use it on an iPhone, iPad or Android operating system.
For a mere $0.99, you can personally select a wardrobe for the entire wedding party, including the Queen’s pet Corgi dogs, using Dress the Royals – Wedding Edition . There are more than 40 outfits to choose from, including a number of wedding dresses and a Santa suit. The app is available on iPhone and iPad.
The Royal Wedding Invite app is of course a faux invitation and probably won’t fool anyone if you’re thinking of crashing the Royal Wedding guest list. However, it may still be useful for learning fun wedding fact about Westminster Abbey, where the wedding is to be held, the reception at Buckingham Palace, and details on how Will proposed to Kate.
THE ROYAL WEDDING PROCESSION IN 3D
Not to be outdone, technology giant Google has expanded the 3D imaging of London available through its Google Earth service , which now includes all the buildings and trees lining the entire royal procession route. So if you can’t be in London next Friday, this just might be the next best thing to get a sense of the parade route.
]]>
In the startup world, not every idea is a winner.
While many aspiring entrepreneurs start off harbouring fantasies of becoming the next Biz Stone, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, the reality is that for every successful startup that evolves into a sustainable business, 10 others will be forced back to an empty white board to dream again.
What can be even more frustrating for some startups is that, sometimes, circumstances prevent them from taking that next step.
Maybe the idea is ahead of its time. Maybe it’s a case of a major technology company on which the startup depends changes its terms of service.
Sometimes it’s a split with a founder, sometimes it’s a market being co-opted, and sometimes it’s just bad luck.
You can built a smartphone app for Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry devices only to struggle to find users. You can create a game for Apple Inc.’s iOS platform only to watch the download counter stuck at zero.
In other words, it’s not as simple as submitting an app to an App Store and watching the cash roll in.
Even with a good idea, one that receives a healthy dose of buzz and a great deal of promise, nothing in the tech world is a sure thing.
But knowing when a startup isn’t working and knowing when to pull the plug and walk away can be tricky.
For Matt O’Leary and Aron Jones, the pair of Toronto entrepreneurs behind Connectsy , it was a tough learning experience watching their creation receive rave reviews and then struggle to find users.
Their social meetup app was designed for devices running Google Inc.’s Android software and acted as a sort of marriage between Facebook Events, Foursquare and SMS messaging.
After coming up with the idea for Connectsy, they launched it into the Android marketplace. But the user uptake was slow.
It wasn’t long before the pair were showing off a rough version of the app at the TechCrunch disrupt conference. They received good feedback and visions of Silicon Valley investors began to dance in their heads, but still, no users.
When they got back, that version of Connectsy was scrapped in favour of a simpler version. Tighter.
Mr. O’Leary and Mr. Jones started brainstorming. They relaunched the company at one of Toronto’s Sprout Up hosted by Sprouter Inc. Connectsy caught the eye of the media and buzz was building. But still, it seemed the user base refused to grow.
Soon after, the pair started talking to the folks at Year One Labs in Montreal, and it wasn’t long before their eyes were opened.
“This culminated in a trip to Montreal, where we spent the day in their space, and were taken to school,” the two men wrote in a blog post on the Connectsy website .
“They had us pick use cases and target markets for Con-nectsy and reshape the vision based on those. What came out of those exercises was a revelation. It was much clearer what the customers problems were, and how to solve them. The solutions we were coming up with weren’t Connectsy.”
Finally, in February, after returning to Toronto, the pair decided to pull the plug on Connectsy and walk away from the business.
“We came to the conclusion that we weren’t solving a big enough problem and that email and SMS were already working for most people,” Mr. O’Leary said.
“Changing a user’s behaviour is really tough. In the early stage, we believed we were more utility, then a nice-to-have [app], but eventually [we] concluded that wasn’t true.”
Still, Mr. O’Leary said it was a tough decision to mothball Connectsy. “We were all in, emotionally, mentally; every ‘ally,’ ” he said.
“We had invested a good amount of time and money into the venture and never planned to admit a ‘fail.’ Once we realized there were bigger problems for us to solve and that all our learnings could be applied to the next venture, it became much easier and even exciting to move on.”
While some startup chief executives might be afraid of failure, most venture capitalists and serial entrepreneurs will tell you that failure is a virtue.
In fact, many venture-capital investors in Canada and the United States will look more kindly on companies in which the founders have tried and failed before because they know the entrepreneur has learned lessons that would be impossible to learn by taking a leap of faith and falling flat.
As for Mr. O’Leary and Mr. Jones, they don’t see themselves resurrecting Connectsy anytime soon. Instead, they’re hard at work on their next big idea, something called HipSell.
“After months of what we were calling ideation and customer discovery, we finally have decided to go all in on a new idea,” Mr. O’Leary said.
“It’s very different then Connectsy, although still has mobile and location built in. We can’t say too much about it right now, but you can enter your email at hipsell.com to be notified when we launch.”
mhartley@nationalpost.com
]]>Want your business to stand out? You need a web app.
Entrepreneurs are just beginning to discover the marketing potential that comes with developing their own applications. But, your company can’t just create any old app and expect it to succeed. To create a good application that actually speaks to your client base, you need to do some research.
Fortunately, Small Business Trends takes some of the guesswork out of app building.
The website lists 10 qualities your app should have to make it stand out and engage your customers.
Here’s No. 1:
]]>
TORONTO — For the moment, Dan Liverance’s life has been reduced to a series of lists.
With less than 24 hours remaining in the Great Canadian Appathon , there is still much to do, including finding time to squeeze in a quick meal break, something which has proved difficult for Mr. Liverance during the weekend.
Mr. Liverance and the rest of the Humber College team Logic Error are doing everything they can to ensure they submit a completed smartphone video game by Sunday evening, and that’s means staying focused — even if that results in writing some messy code along the way.
Photo Gallery: The Great Canadian Appathon
“We spent the first 12 hours writing without any organized strategy,” said Ashton Costa, a member of GGGamers, a rival team from Humber College also working out of the office of Telus Corp. in downtown Toronto.
“But once we had the brunt of the tedious work done, we took a step back to refine.”
In fact, it’s a strategy favoured by most of the teams involved in this year’s Great Canadian Appathon — a 48-hour video game coding competition for university students sponsored by XMG Studio Inc., Telus, Microsoft Corp., KPMG and the National Post.
In this case, the approach allows fellow GGGamer members Syed Naqvi and Dan White to proofread and edit previously written code, while teammate Mike Ross makes further progress on the team’s game engine.
But for the members of team Logic Error, the coding process is a little different. Mr. Liverance explained how they set-up what’s called a subversion repository — or SVN — which allows each member to submit written code and track changes over the course of the competition.
The system allows Mr. Liverance to see what his other teammates are doing, without having to hover over each other’s shoulders.
After 24 hours of coding, their approach has worked surprisingly well, considering none of Logic Error’s members have ever worked together in the past.
“You just focus on what needs to be done, and block out the rest,” Mr. Liverance said.
This approach allows members like Marco Vetere to focus on composing audio for the team’s space-based title, while others handle separate tasks.
The scene at Telus headquarters is one that most independent game developers would no doubt find familiar. With limited time, people and resources, each of the hub’s participants are often responsible for multiple aspects of development — from underlying code to graphic design — often at the same time.
“It gives us a feel for what it would be like to run our own studio,” Mr. Costa said.
“It’s something many of the guys in our program are considering.”
Although difficult at times, Kyle Dwyer of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology team Rational Toast has entered numerous coding challenges — ranging from 24 to 72 hours in length — in the past, and noted there are useful strategies for developers coding under pressure.
For example, Mr. Dwyer and his partner Ryan Hill rarely code their engine from scratch, and instead rely upon pre-written code. That allows more time for the pair to “polish, and make things look nice.”
Of course, if Mr. Ashton of team GGGamers is any indication, that’s often easier said than done.
“No sleep and four times the recommended dose of caffeine in your system can really get to you,” he said.
]]> OTTAWA — On day one, it’s all about strategy.
In a small classroom inside Carleton University’s student centre, four teams competing in the Great Canadian Appathon debated game design and concept.
Over the next 48 hours, these teams, made up mostly of computer science students, will immerse themselves in strings of code and digital game worlds for the chance to have their game published and snag some of the more than $45,000 in cash and prizes.
Teams will be coding games for Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone 7, with the first-place game landing a spot in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
But whether they’re set up in the ‘Hub’ established at Carleton or camped out at home, on Friday most of the Ottawa teams were just hoping to finish on time.
Photo Gallery: The Great Canadian Appathon
Uri Gorelik and Spencer Whyte dubbed themselves team “We’re Just Here For Swag.”
The two second and first year computer science students are fairly new to the world of game development.
“We’re kinda just winging it,” Mr. Gorelik said as the competition kicked off across the country just after 5 p.m. ET.
“This is all new for us.”
He showed off a small, messy pencil sketch of the side-scrolling action game they have planned.
Mr. Gorelik said he’s been working on another game for the past three months, so doing one from scratch in 48 hours will definitely be a challenge.
By 6 p.m. everyone was concentrating on concept. Other game ideas in the room included a medieval-style jousting game using the phone’s motion detection abilities and a Chinese-philosophy inspired puzzle game.
“I think the ones that come into the hub have an advantage,” said Daniel Licht, the Carleton hub organizer from XMG Studio Inc., the Toronto gaming company co-sponsoring the event with Telus Corp., Microsoft, KPMG and the National Post .
At the hub, students can test their creations on the Windows phones organizers have on hand and learn tips and tricks from Microsoft and XMG representatives.
Mr. Licht said the 48-hour deadline is meant to be a challenge, but is definitely achievable for these competitors.
“You have to have a background in development,” he said. “You should come in with some experience.”
Participants ranged from first-year bachelor of computer science students to second-year PhD candidates. But not everyone was enrolled in a computer science degree. Laughing Stalker’s team member Andrew Hay is a fourth-year geology student.
“I’m determined to get something about rocks into this game” he said.
Even before the pizza arrived, one team in particular didn’t seem phased by deadlines.
Zoop Groop’s Steve Hutchinson, Tyler Kerry and Brendan Smith, all in the fourth year of the game development stream, said the most crucial part of developing a game is having a great idea.
“Right off the bat we have to decide if it’s going to be entertaining and feasible,” Mr. Smith said before he and his teammates slipped out to the on-campus student bar to brainstorm and get some “brain food.”
On Friday their team was envisioning a game similar to the popular Worms Armageddon, where tanks shoot projectiles across the screen at each other.
And for these aspiring game developers, the competition could mean more than a published game or cash in their pockets.
Mr. Licht said XMG is scouting the competition’s best developers. And the winning team will get a guaranteed interview for a spot with the company.
“We’re growing really fast. So we’re trying to aggressively meet that growth,” Mr. Licht said.
But some, like Mr. Hay, said they’re not concerned with fame or fortune.
“I’d like to see a game working,” he said. “Getting it done. That’s the number one goal.”
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It wasn’t that long ago that Canadians who went out shopping for a cellphone were looking for a device that would be used primarily to make phone calls.
Now, it’s not enough for a mobile device to simply make calls and receive text messages. Consumers want to know their device can enable them to watch sports highlights, edit work documents and allow them the ability to try and beat their top score on Angry Birds during their subway commute.
For Dan Page, director of content business development for wireless carrier Telus Corp. , ensuring that customers can get access to the latest music, movies and video games on their smartphones is key to the company’s ability to differentiate itself from its competitors.
The ability to customize a mobile device with downloadable content isn’t something that’s new for Telus, the Vancouver-based company has been in the business of enabling downloads to mobile devices since the early days of feature phones when ring tones were considered the ultimate customization tools.
“The first step is to understand how Telus relates to applications and games on mobile devices,” Mr. Page said.
“First and foremost, Telus has been in the business of distributing applications and games a long time, dating all the way back to ring tones when they first evolved on basic WAP sites right up to full fledged HD gaming experiences on some of these new devices.”
It might seem like a cliche, but the reality is that in today’s smartphone industry, content is king. Consumers, now equipped with multifunction mobile devices, expect to be able to access a wide range of services on the go.
Access to premium content is one of the main reasons why Telus rival BCE Inc. shelled out $1.3-billion to acquire CTV and why Rogers Communications Inc. was rumoured to be interested in purchasing Maple Leaf Sports and and Entertainmen t.
In July, Telus signed a two-year agreement with the Canadian Football League that will give Telus’s mobile customers access to live football games from their mobile devices.
Of course, video games are an important part of any carrier’s mobile content offerings. According to the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC) , more than 7% of Canadians play video games on their smartphones.
But it’s not simply traditional video game audiences — namely young males — who are showing an interest in mobile gaming. According to the ESAC, teenage girls are the biggest demographic for mobile games, with nearly twice the national average enjoying games on their phones.
“We manage a content platform on our network, so our users can access and download the best games that are out there,” Mr. Page said.
“So we’ve got strategic partnerships with some of the top application providers and gaming studios, including GameLoft and Electronic Arts , but we also deal with a lot of Canadian content providers such as Magmic which has been a big force when it comes to developing Blackberry games.”
This weekend, college and university students from across Canada will be participating in the Great Canadian Appathon , a 48-hour video game building competition organized by the National Post and Toronto’s XMG Studio Inc, and sponsored by Telus.
Indeed, the next generation of video game developers will be on display as student participants spend the weekend creating new games that will run on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone 7 platform .
One of the way Telus is hoping to facilitate mobile transactions and encourage Canadians to buy more applications on their smartphones is through carrier billing initiatives.
“We hold a ton of billing relationships and consumers don’t necessarily want to download apps and input credit cards and have to give their credit card and personal information to multiple service providers, so we handle content from a mobile standpoint and act as a billing system,” Mr. Page said.
“What it does is it ensures that there is actually a larger sell through of these items. The more clicks you have to go through, the less likely it is that you’re actually going to buy something. If you can click one button that says ‘buy now’ and it can be billed to your carrier, then you only have the carrier to deal with, and you’ll be more likely to purchase the application.”
]]>Imagine how Dennis Crowley feels.
Last summer, it seemed the sky was the limit for the chief executive of Foursquare, the popular social check-in startup. A rising star in the technology world, Foursquare’s mobile community boasted more than three million users who used the company’s service to share where they were and what they were doing with their friends.
Then one day, the brains behind social networking giant Facebook decided they too liked the idea of a location-based check-in service. Facebook already had millions of users checking their profiles on mobile devices, so they thought why not let them share their location with their friends too?
It wasn’t long before Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook chief executive, stood before an audience in Palo Alto, Calif., to unveil Facebook Places, and questions began to swirl about Foursquare’s now uncertain future.
Even though Mr. Zuckerberg invited Mr. Crowley on stage to help unveil Facebook Places and to discuss how the two services would integrate with one another and work together, the writing was on the wall: Facebook and Foursquare were now rivals.
Indeed, for any entrepreneur with a fledgling startup, the prospect of going toe to toe with a global giant that is armed with legions of developers, an instantly recognizable brand and a seemingly endless supply of resources can be a frightening predicament.
It’s a bit like signing up for a baseball league on a team with your friends only to discover after a few games that you’re going to be playing the New York Yankees.
It’s a story David Offierski knows all too well. As the founder of the Toronto-based mobile coupon startup Clip Mobile, Mr. Offierski has spent the past year trying to carve out a name for his company’s smartphone apps, which enable users to check in with their location to find deals offered by local businesses in the immediate vicinity.
A restaurant located near Yonge and Dundas Square in downtown Toronto, for example, could offer Clip users who check in nearby a mobile coupon for a free appetizer.
Not only was he competing with check-in services such as Foursquare and Gowalla for the attention of savvy smartphone shoppers, he’s now competing with Facebook Places and the social network’s 500-million-strong user base.
“We always knew that Facebook would move into this space,” he said. “They’ve made no secret of that. But the pace at which they’ve done it is a little scary. The pace at which the awareness and development in this business has evolved over the past year is pretty scary.”
With just 11,000 members using Clip’s service, Mr. Offierski knows he can’t compete directly with the likes of Facebook and Foursquare on their terms, so instead, he’s employing a strategy more akin to direct marketing than gaming.
“Our focus has been to capture intent to purchase,” he said.
“Everybody who downloads or opens Clip at any given time is doing so because it does a very specific task for them, it gives them local offers based on their proximity … whereas the other guys are not focused on this functionality. They’re focused on other things, whether it be social, whether it be gaming or something like user-generated reviews.”
For small business Davids locked in battles with global Goliaths, Mr. Offierski said the most powerful slings in their arsenal are the ability to work closely with local businesses — many of them still fearful of mobile marketing — and being able to make quick changes to a business strategy when that’s what the situation calls for.
“Certainly being small and being able to pivot in a space that is evolving very very rapidly … not being bureaucratic, being nimble, being able to see maybe even to make decisions based on gut inference and sheer market observation as opposed to hiring a bunch of consultants and do market research, that’s a big opportunity for us, ” he said.
That ability to focus on local markets with local sales talent has helped TeamBuy, a Toronto-based group-buying startup, expand to a dozen Canadian cities to compete with sites such as U.S. giant Groupon Inc., which is reportedly generating more than US$2-billion in annual revenue.
“We don’t have an advantage in Halifax just because we’re Canadian,” TeamBuy chief executive Ghassan Halazon said.
“It’s because we find the superstars in Halifax who know Halifax and we gather around him or her and give them the support. We have that personal, on-the-ground touch, which is not yet part of the strategy of the bigger guys in every city.”
For many Canadian startups, launching before a U.S. rival has a chance to set up shop north of the border can help educate the market and establish a footprint of loyal users and customers before the giants set foot in their backyard.
“No doubt, starting early is important, but it’s not everything,” Mr. Halazon said of TeamBuy’s two-month head start on Groupon in Canada.
“It’s as opportune as you make it. We wanted to be the educators of the concept to Canadians. We felt that it would be that way that people would remember us the most and associate us with the group e-commerce movement, as opposed to just jumping on the bandwagon and following through with the pattern.”
Still, there is something to be said for a giant like Facebook shining a spotlight on an industry that can be good for rivals, too. Foursquare enjoyed its biggest influx of new users ever in the 24 hours after Facebook Places was launched, while the popularity of Groupon has inspired dozens of copycat sites to follow in TeamBuy’s footsteps.
As Mr. Halazon points out, in many emerging technology industries — including the increasingly crowded group-buying space — there will be room for multiple players, and that just because a company was the first to pioneer an idea, that doesn’t mean it will be the one to turn it into a billion-dollar business model.
“In all fairness, people talk about Google, they talk about Facebook and they bring it up that these are the companies that innovated,” he said.
“But when you look deeper, Yahoo was Google before there was Google. There was Friendster and MySpace before there was Facebook…. I’m not implying that we’re aiming to be bigger than Groupon, I’m just saying we’re at a relatively early point in this very young industry and it’s a little presumptuous at this point to think that any one player will really control the space.”
Tools
Do you ever have trouble remembering the difference between a dividend and a derivative? Do you ever forget what EBITDA stands for?
Now there's an app for that.
Thanks to a new financial glossary app for Apple Inc.'s iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices from Toronto's CSI Global Education Inc. — the folks behind the Canadian Securities Course and 170 or so other certification and financial compliance courses — users can look up more than 4,000 financial terms and definitions on the go.
“We
know that mobile applications have an important role to play in
supporting the learning experience. CSI’s financial glossary app serves
to reinforce the knowledge and proficiency gained through our programs," said Roberta Wilton, President and chief executive of CSI.
CSI says the app is designed to be useful for both retail investors as well as professionals. The new app, which is available through Apple's iTunes App Store, allows users to bookmark and make notes about specific terms.
– Matt Hartley
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