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Talk about a slam dunk: they arrested him while he was meeting with his probation officer.

This week, we're at Infosec in the impressive Olympia Grand in London, England, so this episode was recorded right at the exhibition...

Android's next version will finally give users the same type of control over app permissions as iOS.

Managing director Sam Sebastian says only half of small and medium businesses in Canada have their own website, while fewer than one in three use cloud computing

Alek Krstajic, the new chief executive at Wind Mobile Corp., is pledging to go about his business as the industry’s underdog and talk a lot less about what he’s doing because, well, he doesn’t have to.

“Wind is a private company, and going forward we won’t be sharing much info or numbers,” he said on Tuesday during a keynote at the Canadian Telecom Summit. Krstajic quickly set a tone in his first public address as CEO that differs vastly from the boisterous one of the company’s founder, Anthony Lacavera.

What truly levels the playing field in our sector is spectrum

After stints at Bell Mobility, Rogers Cable and faltered new entrant Public Mobile that was sold to Telus Corp., industry veteran Krstajic moved into the corner office at Wind in March as part of a major overhaul, which ushered in a new chairman and two new directors. A source close to Wind told the Post that the hiring was done to create proper processes and curtailing the unnecessary disclosures is an early fruit of that labour.

While Krstajic may take a quieter path to the finish line, he shares the same goal that Lacavera, an investor and Wind’s honourary chair, always has: to thrive as the fourth choice for wireless consumers in Canada. Like his predecessors, Krstajic reiterated that this objective demands access to coveted airwaves to fulfill.

“What truly levels the playing field in our sector is spectrum,” Krstajic said. “You gotta have it. If you don’t, you’re just not in the game.”

Wind serves roughly 800,000 cell-phone subscribers in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, according to the latest figures released by the company. It is also sitting on unused spectrum licenses in other places across Canada, which were bought in auctions that locked out the incumbents from bidding.

The long-festering capacity-connectivity debate was sparked again Tuesday during the Summit’s regulatory panel, which featured five regulatory executives who proudly wore their employers’ slant.

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“We need more spectrum, as customers use and demand more data-hungry services on our network,” Bob Boron, the chief regulatory officer at Wind, asserted during the discussion. He pointed out the gaping hole in Wind’s chest of low-band spectrum, adding that securing licenses to these airwaves is “something that we need to work with regulators in terms of setting up the auction framework.”

Boron’s comments about his desire to acquire more coveted real estate garnered flack from Ted Woodhead, the senior vice-president of federal government and regulatory affairs at Telus. “You’re absolutely right, you need spectrum,” Woodhead said. “But you also have to pay for it. And even when you were given an opportunity to buy it and you don’t, I question why you need further regulatory assistance.”

Redmond, Wash.-based software giant has been in negotiations for more than seven years with Ottawa about the location of the server farms that could host sensitive government data

Microsoft Corp. is getting ready to plant its flag in Canada’s growing cloud industry, as the Redmond, Washington-based company announced on Tuesday it will begin offering its commercial cloud services from Canadian datacentres next year.

“Soon, the Microsoft Cloud will be truly Canadian,” Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner said in a statement. “This substantial investment in a Canadian cloud demonstrates how committed we are to bringing even more opportunity to Canadian businesses and government organizations, helping them fully realize the cost savings and flexibility of the cloud.”

Two locations, one in the greater Toronto area and one in Quebec City, will offer Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics CRM Online, addressing data residency consideration for customers and partners. Microsoft is building out additional datacentre capacity in both locations.

Microsoft Canada’s chief technology officer, John Weigelt, said that the locations were chosen after looking at the availability of green power, access to good network capacity, and at centres of innovation within Canada. “We’re sizing to meet the demands of the Canadian marketplace,” he said in an interview, adding that Microsoft will continue to evaluate capacity requirements as demand grows.

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Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada, said that delivering cloud services from datacentres on Canadian soil opens up significant new cloud-based possibilities for organizations that must adhere to strict data storage compliance codes. “We’re very proud to be delivering the Microsoft Cloud right here in Canada, for the benefit of Canadian innovators, entrepreneurs, governments and small businesses,” she said in a statement. “Delivering the flexibility of hyper-scale, enterprise grade, locally deployed public cloud services is the ultimate Canadian hat trick.”

Weigelt said that the services will be offered in preview toward the end of this year, with full commercial availability in 2016. Azure will be the first available service early in 2016, with Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online following later in the year.

Today, Microsoft offers cloud services to more than 80,000 Canadian businesses, from startups to enterprises, and these Canadian datacentres will further expand the market. According to IDC, total public cloud spend in Canada is projected to grow to $2.5B by next year. The fastest growth will be from public cloud infrastructure with a 45 per cent increase by 2016.

Customers such as digital asset management firm MediaValet anticipate increased business once the Canadian datacentres go live.

“Since launching the first version of MediaValet in late 2010, we’ve had opportunities to work with healthcare, government and higher education organizations in Canada, but have been hampered by their rigorous data compliance needs,” said David MacLaren, president and CEO of MediaValet, in a statement. “Microsoft’s investment in a Canadian cloud will open up doors to significant sectors of the Canadian market and help us grow our market share on home soil.”

Weigelt added that companies of all sizes can benefit. “Some companies see the cloud as IT,” he said. “I look at a plumber or a carpenter who has to deal with a computer – they’re passionate about growing their business, not about computers. If we can remove the burden of managing technology they can focus on their passion.”

“I know other regions are looking to Canada as a shining example,” he added. “We really punch above our weight. Canada is the doorstep to the world.”

Fitbit Inc., the maker of wearable devices that collect data on exercise and sleep patterns, is seeking to raise as much as US$478 million in an initial public offering.

Fitbit and its stockholders plan to offer 29.85 million Class A shares for US$14 to US$16 apiece, according to a prospectus filed Tuesday. At the high end of the offering range, Fitbit would be valued at about US$3.3 billion.

Fitbit is profitable, with US$745 million in revenue last year and has over US$100 million in net income. Still, as it markets the sale to investors, the company must show them it can continuing growing, despite heightened competition and the tendency for many users to stop using activity trackers after a few months.

A third of smartwatch and activity-tracker owners abandon their device after six months of use, according to a survey of 1,700 consumers by consulting firm Endeavour Partners in July 2014. Fitbit cites competitors such as Jawbone Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., as well as Apple Inc.’s smartwatch, in its prospectus.

Fitbit says that its strategy to boost growth includes innovating more products and services, increasing marketing efforts, expanding distribution globally and building relationships with corporations for employee wellness programs. The company plans to use the proceeds from the IPO for research and development, sales and marketing, and capital expenses and potential acquisitions.

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Fitbit offers seven devices, ranging from US$59.95 to US$249 each, and offers products in more than 45,000 retail stores. The company was founded eight years ago by James Park and Eric Friedman. Prior to Fitbit, the two started Wind-Up Labs Inc., an online photo-sharing company that was ultimately acquired by CNET Networks Inc. in 2005. Park, now 38, serves as president, chief executive officer and chairman of Fitbit, while Friedman, also 38, is the chief technology officer.

The company recalled one of its products, the Fitbit Force, in March 2014 after users reported allergic reactions to the wristband. Fitbit was subject to litigation which impacted the company’s operating results during the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014, according to the prospectus.

Fitbit will have two classes of shares after the offering, with Class B representing 10 votes and Class A providing one vote per share. Foundry Group, True Ventures and SoftBank Corp. are investors in Fitbit.

Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG and Bank of America Corp. are managing the offering. The stock will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FIT.

–With assistance from Caroline Chen in San Francisco.

Bloomberg.com

It turns out the years-long hubbub over The Witcher III: Wild Hunt was justified.

The Polish-made RPG is enormous, engaging, and thoroughly entertaining. Developer CD Projekt RED has previously adapted the characters and world of fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowski to excellent effect, but never with such scope and depth. The world of The Witcher III is a vast, town-pocked wilderness with seemingly endless stories to discover and in which to take part.

Indeed, the most impressive part of the game – and this is something that even acclaimed open world fantasy RPG peers Bethesda Softworks (The Elder Scrolls) and BioWare (Dragon Age: Inquisition) can learn from – is how virtually none of its quests are simple make-work tasks. Each one has meaning and worthwhile narrative.

When you help someone in need you become invested in their plight. You get to know and understand the players, what they want, their hidden motivations. Each task and character is unique and memorable; each quest significant and emotionally rewarding.

And when you take on a Witcher contract – white-haired protagonist Geralt makes his living cleansing the world of monsters terrorizing hapless humans – it’s not just a mindless mission to kill a creature. These quests are composed of multiple stages that require investigation, deduction, tracking, and learning everything you can about your adversary, its strengths, and weaknesses. And at the end there’s always a satisfying and frequently multifaceted battle against a powerful, believable foe.

Even random elements found in the wild – a letter here, a weathered skeleton there – frequently come with interesting little narrative tidbits that will grab your attention and leave you marvelling at just how much effort has gone into the construction of this enormous fantasy world.

Basically, The Witcher III hits a grand slam home run with its mythology. It’s rich and nuanced, drawing from concepts both familiar – werewolves, vampires, and even Cinderella – to others that are thoroughly unique and particular to Sapkowski’s books. And it all melds together into something hardcore sword and sorcery fans ought to find utterly captivating.

However, having sung these praises there’s something else that also needs to be said: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt often succeeds in all the ways mentioned above despite itself.

By which I mean it suffers an unexpectedly large amount of small-ish (and in some cases easily fixable) problems that have potential to do everything from make the experience initially alienating – especially for those unfamiliar with the books or previous games – to forcing those who stick with it to suffer repeated annoyances for the game’s (very) lengthy duration.

The Web is now full of odes to everything The Witcher III does well. Go read them. They’ll convince you that it’s a game you ought to be playing. They’re right and you should.

But rather than add my voice to this justifiably loud choir I’m instead going to provide a list of some initial and ongoing peeves I’ve encountered during my first 40-plus hours of play that have to one degree or another detracted from my overall experience.

If nothing else, these issues should serve to remind us that as wonderful as our favourite games may be, there’s always plenty of room for improvement.

CD Projekt RED

1. Best of luck if you’re a Witcher n00b

Leonard Maltin wrote decades ago (before pop culture became as obsessed with sequels and epic series as it is today) that if you watched Return of the Jedi without having first seen Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back you’d probably be completely lost.

The same might be said of The Witcher III and its precursors.

The third game drops you into a world filled with rival factions, complex race relations, and ongoing conflicts, and has you assume the role of a very old character with a long and complicated history. CD Projekt RED assumes to a surprisingly large degree that players are familiar with (and remember) all of this.

To the writers’ great credit, players new to the series should be able to read between the lines to glean at least a basic understanding of Geralt’s relationships with his friends, enemies, and other witchers he encounters. And if you dig around the glossary and read all the tomes you encounter you’ll find plenty of additional details about the world, its past, its factions and leaders, its creatures, and various personalities.

But it takes quite a while. And without some sort of proper, up-front introduction to our hero and his history, Witcher greenhorns may initially find The Witcher III intimidating verging on off-putting.

CD Projekt RED

2. Unreliable prompts for object and character interactions

This is one of my biggest ongoing peeves.

When Geralt walks up to something with which he can interact – dropped loot, a blood stain, a chest, or a non-player character – we’re supposed to see a little button icon pop up to show us we can do something. However, he needs to be in the exact right spot with the camera facing the proper direction to trigger these prompts. I often needed to make him awkwardly scooch around and fiddle with the camera angle in order to make them appear.

It’s especially problematic when Geralt is investigating a scene and needs to interact with a blood smear or footprint in order to activate the next clue. I sometimes walked right over an area I was supposed to examine in order to progress a quest without seeing any prompts, forcing me to backtrack over previously covered ground.

And this isn’t just a once in a while sort of problem. It happens all the time.

CD Projekt RED

3. Occasionally wonky combat

Combat is generally a ton of fun. It’s a mix of parries, dodges, light strikes, heavy hits, and simple but strategic magic.

It’s also occasionally kind of wonky.

Sometimes it’s because Geralt’s attack animations can’t always be interrupted once started, even if you see an attack coming from another direction (which occasionally led me to frustrated and pointless button mashing).

Sometimes it’s because he gets a little bit stuck on environmental geometry, especially in closed, crowded spaces, like caves, in buildings, or on ships.

And sometimes it may be because you’ve stumbled across something more troubling, like a painfully artificial rule of engagement.

Take the time I found a bandit camp filled with fighters many levels higher than my Geralt. I got hit once, lost two thirds of my health, realized I didn’t stand a chance, and ran away. But I noticed within a few metres that my foes weren’t following. I turned around, walked back, and they came after me again. I backed up a couple of steps and they retreated. It was like there was a magical barrier they couldn’t cross that started around five or ten metres from the camp’s perimeter.

So I stayed just outside this border, pulled out my crossbow and took pot shots at them until they were all dead. They’d run around a little when they were hit, but they didn’t attack or dash away.

It’s a cheap exploit that pops up noticeably from time to time. And each time it does it breaks the spell the game’s creators worked so hard to achieve.

CD Projekt RED

4. Trees made of paper

I’ve come to think of The Witcher as representing something close to the pinnacle of game graphics. But despite some very impressive character models and award worthy costume designs, my expectations diminished a little with The Witcher III.

I’ve been playing on PlayStation 4 rather than a supercharged PC, which, admittedly, may have something to do with it (the frame rate is at times alarmingly erratic, especially in a large, high-traffic city like Novigrad).

Still, some of my mild disappointment has nothing to do with fidelity or performance.

Exhibit A: Trees seemingly made of paper. The first thing I noticed about Geralt’s world it is that most of its trees don’t feel as though they’re composed of sturdy wood. They bend and sway in the wind so much and so rapidly that it’s like they’re perpetually experiencing the opening stages of a violent hurricane. The effect is all the more disconcerting when these trees are juxtaposed with other objects – hair, clothes, hanged bodies – that aren’t affected by the wind in the same way.

Plus, vegetation in general seems to have too-soft appearance. Leaves, pine nedles, and the edges of grass blades sometimes seem to blur together, almost like a painting.

Add in the overt sameyness of certain areas – like the nearly endless sprawling fields and forests of Velen, where landmarks are few and far between – and I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed sometimes.

It’s certainly pretty in its way, but to my eyes it feels like a slight step back from the smaller but methodically designed, deeply detailed, and wonderfully memorable environments of The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings.

CD Projekt RED

5. Frustrating fast-travel

Getting around this great big world is often a lot harder than it needs to be.

You can fast travel to any signpost once it’s been discovered (or a map to it has been purchased). However, in order to initiate fast travel you need first make your way to a signpost, which in some areas are few and far between.

I’ll admit it makes sense that you can only fast travel to specific points, but why should you have to trudge through a bog for a couple of minutes just to get to a signpost in order to begin fast travelling?

CD Projekt RED should have at least made fast travel available wherever you’re able to call Geralt’s horse, Roach, or when you’re on a boat. A steed or ship, not some random signpost, is the key to Geralt getting where he needs to go quickly. I often ran to signposts in the opposite direction of my destination simply because they were nearest.

What’s more, the signposts at which you arrive after fast travelling often aren’t ideally located.

For example, the signpost for a sizeable town and garrison around which many early missions take place is located at the foot of a bridge on the opposite side of a river. That means most of the locations you need to visit within the town are hundreds of metres away even after fast travelling, making for plenty of dull, pointless trots over the same ground.

CD Projekt RED

6. Bugs, bugs, and more bugs

Open world games are notorious for their bugs – so much so that many players not only expect them but are surprisingly willing to forgive them (see: pretty much any Elder Scrolls game).

That said, The Witcher III has more than its fair share, and some are particularly egregious.

My very first Witcher contract – to bring down a griffin – suffered a mission-arresting problem in which the winged beast became invulnerable and simply began circling in the air. It wouldn’t attack, and nothing I did could hurt it. Once I realized this I ran halfway across the map and back, hoping to reset the fight. It didn’t work. I eventually needed to restart from my last save.

That wouldn’t be the last bug I encountered during battle. And I ran into plenty of other types of glitches, too.

More than once the world has simply disappeared beneath my feet, making it appear as though I was running on air. The rendering engine would then either catch up and fix the problem or I would get booted to a blue PS4 error screen.

I’ve also watched dialogue scenes disconcertingly fade to black between sentences, as though the conversation has ended or time is passing. Then the image fades back in and the conversation picks up where it left off, as though several awkward seconds hadn’t just passed.

Plus, there have been times while crafting that all selections within the recipe menu have simply disappeared. I’ve had to back out of crafting, then jump back in again in order to keep working.

And at the start of a foot race up a mountain both my opponent and I were unable to move. In-race dialogue began playing while we just stood around. Half a minute passed. I was about to reload my last save when my opponent suddenly began sprinting up the hill, leaving me in her dust.

I won’t even get into the times I’ve gotten stuck on a rock or tree after sliding down a hill, found myself surfacing from a swim through the supposedly solid bottom of a boat, or listened as Geralt repeated a bit of monologue immediately after having already spoken it.

Like most open-world adventures, The Witcher III clearly could have used a little more time in the oven.

Happily, though, there are things called post-launch patches. And CD Projekt RED has proven pretty good at applying them in its previous games. With any luck, these bugs – and maybe some of the other problems I’ve listed here – will be rectified in the coming weeks and months.

And then The Witcher III: Wild Hunt – already a fantastic game – might become the truly great one that it very nearly already is.

A former Ontario privacy commissioner is criticizing BCE Inc.’s ill-fated relevant advertising program and urging other companies to avoid similar missteps when making sense of the troves of valuable personal consumer data they are collecting, filtering, analyzing and storing.

“We pay for Bell service and they’re gaining at the other end by driving ads to us that we don’t want,” Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s former information and privacy commissioner, said during a panel Monday at the Canadian Telecom Summit. “That’s not a good model. Customers don’t like this, and I’m a Bell customer.”

Bell was tracking every website a consumer viewed, every app opened, every television show watched and every call made. Through the contentious relevant advertising program (RAP), the telco would marry these insights and other long-compiled account details to create a profile of users, which would then be sold to fee-paying third parties so they could better target and match their advertising initiatives.

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After hearing a record 170 public complaints and completing an 18-month investigation, the federal privacy commissioner ruled that the breadth of the data collected was too sensitive for the opt-out consent regime Bell had in place. Privacy watchdog Daniel Therrien noted in his April report that how Bell handled credit scores for behavioral targeting was “inappropriate” and in violation of the country’s privacy laws. 

Bell said it has terminated this iteration of the program and deleted all user profiles and while the matter has been resolved by the Commissioner’s Office, Cavoukian and another panelist at a separate industry event held last week in Toronto continue to dissect its composition and how it went wrong. Bell Canada and Bell Mobility are still facing a $750-million class action lawsuit in Ontario and Quebec.

Michael Maguire, a senior adviser at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada who leads inquiries into potential violations of the country’s privacy law, said the investigations team considered four factors relating to how the company dealt with subscribers to determine if the telco’s advertising program crossed the line. One of these four considerations was whether the program was a secondary purpose that didn’t relate to the primary delivery of telecom services, which it was deemed to be.

“It was the combination of these things [being collected] that in our view would lead customers to expect they’d be given the opportunity to express their consent and opt into the program,” Maguire said during a panel Thursday at the IAPP Canada Privacy Symposium. He applauded Bell multiple times for its cooperation.

Other issues he noted were that Bell had a French website but not a French privacy policy and it had little record of how its employees were internally handling the consumer data – things Bell agreed to improve.

But Cavoukian, now the executive director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University, said this is a symptom of Bell’s consumer disregard, a glaring contrast to rival Telus Corp., which has “walked that talk” by embedding privacy into its services. “Telus is great at that,” she said, “Bell not so much.”

Executives ought to take the privacy angle of the growing analytics file – and the years-worth of trust that can be eroded quickly as a result of misuse – more seriously, she added. It should be treated it as a value exchange between parties, meaning consumers need to be paid in some way for their information.

“If you treat data like currency,” Cavoukian said, “you’d never think of taking anybody’s data.”

 

The new feature lets users add OpenPGP public encryption keys to their profiles that can be used to encrypt notifications Facebook sends to users' email accounts.

...and gives you a glimpse into just how much the data king knows about you!

This daily Signal Boost is our attempt to give readers a morning head’s up on the news that will matter to Canadians interested in media, technology and telecom

We're offering a free Phone Privacy Check on the Sophos stand at Infosec Europe... ...because we think you should be informed about privacy and security, not worried!

MONTREAL — Amaya Inc. has confirmed that its top two executives are named in an investigation by Quebec’s security regulators relating to trading activity of the company’s stock ahead of the $4.9 billion PokerStars takeover in June 2014.

Riccardo CellereAmaya Inc CEO David Baazov has been named in the investigation.

The online gaming company said Monday the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) authorized Amaya to disclose the names of CEO David Baazov and chief financial officer Daniel Sebag.

“I believe that any concerns that I or other Amaya officers or directors violated any Canadian securities laws are unfounded and we are confident that at the end of its investigation, the AMF will come to the same conclusion,” Baazov said in a statement.

The company said the investigation does not involve personal trading by Baazov or Sebag, and that the AMF has not filed any charge relating to the company surrounding the acquisition of Oldford Group, parent company of the PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker online gaming platforms.

“We have been cooperating with the AMF since the announcement of our acquisition of Oldford Group,” said Baazov.

Last December, the AMF executed search warrants at Amaya’s headquarters west of Montreal, as well as the offices of Canaccord Genuity and Manulife Financial.

In the lead-up to the deal PokerStars deal, Amaya’s stock price doubled to more than $14 a share. It would eventually climb past $38 a share, but company representatives said there were publicly disclosed reasons for the price increase.

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“To date, the AMF has neither threatened nor initiated any legal proceedings against the Corporation or its employees. Amaya has also not been provided with any evidence that any officers, directors, or other employees violated any securities laws or regulations,” said Ben Soave, a member of Amaya’s Compliance Committee, in a statement.

Soave, a retired Chief Superintendent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said Amaya has conducted an internal review supervised by its independent board members with “the assistance of external legal counsel.”

“This review found no evidence of any violations of Canadian securities laws or regulations,” Soave said in the statement.

In the same news release, Amaya also announced it had completed the sale of the Cadillac Jack Inc. gaming company under the indirect parent company Amaya Americas Corporation to to AGS LLC for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $476 million.

Twitter: @DamonVDL

TORONTO – At work, Canadians don’t use mobile technologies as much or as well as they do at home, creating a widening and costly productivity gap between our professional and personal lives, a new study shows.

According to a Ryerson University report out Monday, titled “Transformation of Work,” almost all of the 38 senior managers surveyed said their company was using some form of mobility, but fewer than 30 per cent of them saw a clear value proposition for adopting, despite a growing appetite to communicate and collaborate across business units and places. The result is unconnected companies and cost-savings left on the table.

The hesitation to embrace mobility in the office has resulted in a glaring lack of the “explosive” consumer data use and higher monthly cell phone bills that wireless carriers attribute rising revenue to, each quarter. While smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous at home, these devices are not being formally managed – let alone being optimized – at work. Instead, mobile strategies are nonexistent, ad hoc and lacking metrics.

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But the solution isn’t the technology itself, says Nitin Kawale, president of the enterprise business unit at Rogers Communications Inc., which supported the Ryerson University study along with Mitacs. It’s about persuading the people in charge to change the way teams work – and not relying on IT to steer the boat.

“It’s the same issues today as they were 20 years ago, which was about deconstructing business processes and reconstructing them,” Kawale said in a keynote speech Monday at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto. Only then, the boardroom debates were whether companies should have a presence and conduct business on the web. “The real difference is the whole environment is on steroids and we’re moving at light speed.”

He warned that the Canada economy can fall behind in germane sectors such as oil and gas, utilities, forestry and agriculture – which are “absolutely ripe” to be connected to the so-called Internet of Things. If there’s no sense of urgency to adopt mobile devices, Canadian businesses will lag their international rivals.

“We shouldn’t fear cutting the cord on old technologies,” said Kawale, urging firms to unlock productivity from their connected employees right now. “Do not let technology be the issue, cause we all know it’s not.”

 

TORONTO • While wireless carriers are spending billions to build, upgrade and broaden their cellular networks to deliver faster and more reliable coverage, equipment provider Ericsson Canada is pressing for the debut of even better technology within the next five years as the appetite for connectivity grows around the world.

The number of mobile subscriptions is projected to exceed the world’s population in 2015, but the looming capacity crunch won’t be just a result of more people using smartphones, Ericsson Canada president Mark Henderson warned Monday. The source of strain will likely be data-transferring machines.

“As the previous four generations of wireless technology connected people, the fifth generation is going to connect everything else,” Henderson said during a speech at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto. “Traditional networks and their one-size-fits-all approach need to be adapted to the thousands of use cases and the many different subscriber types,” some of which might not yet be visible.

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In comparison to what today’s networks manage on average, these new systems will have to process 1,000 times higher data traffic volumes, according to what Henderson described as an industry consensus. Also, 100 times more devices will require connectivity, with some applications demanding speed that’s 100 times faster than today’s. Some will expect absolutely no latency, or time delay, at all.

He predicts the industry ought to prepare for “an enormous transformation of connectivity” and a surge of new, pervasive demand propelled by the global rise of the so-called “Internet of Things” over the next four or so years. Ericsson Canada says it is focusing on innovation, having invested $317 million in R&D efforts in Canada last year. One of the company’s largest R&D centres outside Sweden is based in Montreal.

“Networks built for much smaller volumes will not be able to handle and cope with these new demands,” said Henderson. Networks built for specific use cases won’t work either in the 5G era. “We need technology that’ll efficiently support a wide variety of devices, applications, their limitations, their needs and to do that in cost-efficient ways to accommodate this enormous growth of connections.”

The specifics of how the Canadian telcos plan to adapt or what their future networks will look and feel like are sparse. But in this fierce technology arms race, the slowest carriers to move will quickly be left behind.

Nintendo’s next dedicated video game system will be built to run on Google’s Android operating system, according to a report by Japan’s Nikkei newspaper that set the gaming world abuzz Monday morning.

Briefly mentioned at a press conference earlier this year by Nintendo chief Satoru Iwata, details about Nintendo’s next game machine – codenamed NX – aren’t slated to be revealed until next year, with a launch date some pundits have speculated to be at least 30 months away.

But the rumoured potential that this device might be built around Google’s popular operating system could offer hope to Nintendo enthusiasts worried about the struggling game giant’s future in the hardware business – though some fans have already expressed trepidation.

Any worries about a heavily co-opted Android-like interface are unfounded. Android is malleable enough that Nintendo could – and surely would – transform it for its own needs, creating a GUI that would harness the power and speed of a proven and sophisticated platform while retaining Nintendo’s signature look and feel.

Indeed, Android could help solve many problems suffered by Nintendo’s current and previous console operating systems – including sluggish response, unreliability, and unintuitive navigation – while freeing up resources to focus on what Nintendo does best: Make great games.

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More than that, a familiar Android environment could prove attractive to studios that have previously passed on bringing their games to Nintendo’s systems due to the expense of designing for a machine so dissimilar to Xbox, PlayStation, and PC platforms. And the more good games that come to Nintendo hardware, the more people will likely buy it – which would in turn lead to additional revenue reaped in licensing fees. These are all undeniable pluses.

What’s more, Nintendo devotees concerned that Android might pave the way for the publisher’s games to begin appearing on non-Nintendo devices – thus losing some of their unique appeal – need remember that Nintendo already launched that boat this spring with the announcement that it was partnering with Japanese game maker DeNA to begin making and releasing apps for phones and tablets.

Besides, the likelihood that Nintendo would devalue high profile releases in its core franchises by porting them to other platforms is low to the point of non-existence. Android would be a means to make Nintendo hardware more open for other game makers, not a way for Nintendo to make its proprietary games available on competing hardware.

Of course, this is all just speculation. Chances are we won’t know whether this rumour is true until sometime next year, when Iwata provides additional information on what NX is and what it will do. We still don’t know if it will be a home console, a portable device, something in between, or something entirely new.

But if the Android rumour turns out to be accurate, Nintendo may have removed several of its longstanding roadblocks – and substantially lessened the cost and effort of new platform development – in one quick, clever move.

MILPITAS, Calif. — A recycling centre in the Silicon Valley is looking for a woman who dropped off an old Apple computer that turned out to be a collectible item worth US$200,000.

Victor Gichun of Clean Bay Area says the woman dropped off boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her garage after her husband died.

She didn’t want a tax receipt or leave her contact information, and it wasn’t until a few weeks later that workers at the recycling centre opened the boxes to discover an Apple I (one) computer inside.

The San Jose Mercury News reports it was one of only about 200 first-generation Apple computers made in 1976.

Gichun sold the computer to a private collection, and he wants to split the proceeds with the mystery donor.

The Associated Press

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Microsoft Corp. is preparing Windows 10 for release on July 29, in time for the back-to-school personal-computer season, as the company tries to boost an ailing PC market and revive its own fortunes in mobile devices.

The operating system will be available for PCs and tablets as a free upgrade to people using Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, or on new Windows 10 devices, Microsoft said in a statement Monday. Windows 10 for other devices will be available later this year.

Microsoft said in April it expects a billion people to be using its Windows 10 operating system in the software’s first two to three years on the market, signaling optimism in its push to revive Windows and make it more useful on smaller devices. Still, market research firm IDC is predicting that PC shipments will drop 6.2 per cent this year as a corporate PC purchasing cycle runs out of steam.

Windows 10 has a design that blends some aspects of Windows 8 with the older, more popular Windows 7’s appearance. It adds a new browser called Microsoft Edge, to succeed Internet Explorer. The update to Windows will also bring the Cortana voice-controlled assistant to PC desktops, and will have touch-enabled Office applications such as Word and Excel built in for smartphones and tablets.

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Bloomberg.com