Archive for March, 2010
Spreadsheet the icing on small bakery’s cupcake
Mar 31st
Technology doesn’t always have to be complicated in order to help a business save some time or money. Sometimes it can be as simple as using a spreadsheet – especially when your business involves baking large batches of cupcakes.
Niki Brinton is the owner of Oakville, Ont.-based Cupid’s Gourmet Cupcakes. She started her baking business in her kitchen, using evenings and weekends to bake large batches of cup cakes and then sell them – first to friends and family, then from a mall island booth, and now from her own dedicated location. Since Brinton’s day job was a math teacher for senior high school students, she didn’t think it too hard to figure out what ingredients she’d need to bake 1400 cupcakes using large hand-drawn charts postered on her wall.
New and exciting models of learning in New Brunswick
Mar 24th
To date we have advised readers of New Brunswick’s efforts to shift our public education system to a 21st Century learning model. We have explored the nature of 21st Century competencies and how 1:1 notebook models empower students and foster 21st Century learning. In our last article we began identifying current ICT applications within our system to illustrate our current state of readiness to go even further (School District 16-Drupal). In this article we provide two new examples of how ICT rich environments are changing the nature learning in New Brunswick’s public education system.
1. James M. Hill Memorial School’s Broadcast Journalism:
Imagine a real television studio, a sound recording booth, HDTV cameras, video and audio mixing consoles, professional lighting, green screens, special effects software and virtual sets in a public school. These are some of the tools used by students in Broadcast Journalism at James M. Hill Memorial School in New Brunswick. This course is also being offered at four additional schools. Web applications such as Bridgit software and Moodle allow the students to participate in real time, regardless of where they are located. Read the rest of this entry »
Business is booming in Canada’s riskiest online city
Mar 23rd
Location, location, location.
If homeowners and businesses were to take a cue from the Norton Top 10 Riskiest Online Canadian Cities Report, Burlington might well be ghost town in a couple of months.
The report, the first of its kind by the security software company, names the South Ontario municipality as the overall Canadian champion of its spam and online fraud hot bed award. The city was followed closely by Port Coquitlam and the Township of Langley, both in British Columbia. (Toronto, don’t feel so bad you also made it – to eight place right next to Markham.)
So what are businesses to do if they’re on Norton’s risky city lists? Cut the Internet connection? Close the online shop? Move to a new location? Read the rest of this entry »
Mobile payment needs more than an iPhone Bump to get going
Mar 19th
I’d like to apologize to Darrell MacMichael of PayPal Canada for costing him all of $8 while we were filming a demo of his company’s new Send Money Version 2.0 application for the iPhone.
Send Money is an app that enables smart phone users to access their PayPal accounts with their mobile device. The new version works with the Bump app on the iPhone which allows people to exchange information on their phone by just touching (or bumping) their iPhones together.
Pharmaceuticals drive February spam
Mar 18th
Spam continued to be the scourge of inboxes around the world in February, when the spam rate surged to 89.4 per cent, an increase of 5.5 per cent over the previous month. As expected, a number of spam campaigns were launched related to Valentine’s Day. But the jump in spam can’t be blamed entirely on this holiday.
Instead, Canadian pharmaceuticals were a primary cause in recent months. According to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report, pharmaceutical spam accounted for approximately two thirds of all spam. Since then, pharmaceutical spam has risen above 80 percent of spam, and “Canadian Pharmacy” is one of the most well-known brands.
MessageLabs Intelligence found that the spikes in volumes this month were driven by a Canadian Pharmacy-style spam campaign and that the Grum and Rustock botnets were generating the surge. Read the rest of this entry »
How smart do you need to be to use a smart phone?
Mar 16th
- By Dominira Saul
In today’s fast paced and mobile world often our customers, vendors and collaborators expect 24-hour availability and instant responsiveness. Business people are expected to be able to respond to situations with the smallest possible turn around times. The growing popularity of smartphones gives even more weight to these expectations. 
The advent of light, powerful laptops in the early 90s led to a mobile revolution. It freed workers from their offices and allowed them to work remotely and while on the go. The advent of powerful smart phones has allowed us to take the tele-work revolution one step further. Workers have now been freed from the need to be close to networks, power sources and peripherals. Most smart phones can edit documents, surf the Internet and send email. These cornerstones of business communications are further extended by the ability of these phones to download additional applications. In addition to these basic functions, a smart phone will also allow you to IM, Skype, SMS, MMS, Tweet, Blog, Phlog, Vlog and use a host of other business and social networking features. If you are not a smart phone user, placing all of these features in the palm of your hand may seem daunting.
School district boosts Web strategy with open source software
Mar 10th
Juggling daily classroom duties and other responsibilities make it very difficult for school staff and students to maintain and update school websites.
This was the case with School District 16 in eastern New Brunswick, where upkeep of the school websites often fell on the shoulders of one staff member who had little or no web design experience. As a result, many of these sites were rarely updated.
However, since developing a content management system based on the open source Drupal server software, the district has streamlined its web services. Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Read the rest of this entry »
iPad will rewrite Canadian wireless pricing – cheap AT&T-like rates must come here, too
Mar 9th
By Carmi Levy, independent technology analyst and journalist
The clock is now ticking. Apple’s iPad hits U.S. retailers April 3rd and migrates north of the border sometime before the end of the month. The gamechanger in all of this isn’t the device, however. It’s the pricing model for 3G service that AT&T will follow – and how it could potentially push Canadian carriers to follow suit. 
AT&T is rolling the dice with a data plan map that breaks all the rules. First, at $15/month for 250 Megabytes of usage and $30 for unlimited access, it’s a lot less expensive than smartphone traditional data plans. Second, it doesn’t require a contract, so consumers can opt in and out and back in at will.
To Canadian consumers and businesses long used to paying more for less, a near-total lack of unlimited-data availability and near-universal 2-to-3-year lock-in, the prospect of an AT&T-like wave rolling into Canada is almost too good to be true. Read the rest of this entry »
1:1 computer model for students gains international approval
Mar 5th
“The world is finally accepting the inevitability of the 1:1 computer model in the classroom.”
Bruce Dixon, a globally renowned learning visionary, made this pronouncement at a conference in Vienna, Austria on February 23, 2010. The conference, hosted by the Austrian Ministry of Education, was sponsored by the OECD, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank (www.bildung.at/nml-conference2010). Dixon’s declaration was heard by 120 delegates representing 42 countries, including many developing nations. What delegates had in common was their effort to introduce one computer per child models into their public education systems to meet the needs of New Millennium Learners. Read the rest of this entry »
Throne speech reveals plan for biometric passports for “every Canadian”
Mar 3rd
It was just one brief sentence in a wide-ranging throne speech, but it’s cause enough for some healthy concern. The Government of Canada has once again promised to take a look at issuing a biometric-enabled passport for “every Canadian.”
