THIS WEEK IN TECTORIA

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Got a cool story about technology and creativity in Victoria? Email stories, tips, pictures, links and anything of interest to Tessa Bousfield at: tectoria@viatec.ca

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Stand Desk: Automatic and Affordable

April 17, 2014 by Nevin Thompson

If sitting is the new smoking, we all have one foot in the grave. While many of us toiling away in the knowledge economy have to sit to get any work done, sitting for any length of time during the day may reduce our life expectancy.

So why not stand and work at your computer?

Stand Desk, a San Francisco-based startup, has an answer to that.

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Billed as the “most affordable automatic standing desk so far,” Stand Desk launched a Kickstarter campaign and reached its goal of $50,000 in 38 minutes. Indeed, still with over a month to go, 886 backers have already pledged a whopping $339,435, blowing the original goal out of the water.

What makes Stand Desk so popular?

First of all, the benefits of standing desks in general are pretty clear: increased productivity, energy, and reduced lower back pain.

Standing desks can also prevent or reverse carpal tunnel syndrome, and standing for part of the work day can also prevent metabolic syndrome.

However, standing desks typically sell for thousands of dollars. They’re expensive.

Stand Desk’s price?  $399, just a fraction of what other standing desks cost.

Stand Desk is pretty cool. Simple motors automatically adjust the height of Stand Desk, meaning the desk can be used at sitting or standing height and adjusts at the press of a button.

Stand Desk is also smaller than other standing desks, which means it is easier to introduce into established office layouts.

Stand Desk made its product affordable by simplifying the mechanics that go into raising and lowering the height, with a range of 28 to 45 inches, which should accommodate people as tall as 6’3″. The desk top is made of bamboo or particle board.

Stand Desk founder Steven Yu and his Kickstarter campaign even made Hacker News, where there is a great thread with helpful hints about how to ease into using a standing desk full time.

Filed Under: Tectoria, VIATeC Community

Tectorian of the Week: TinyMob Games

April 11, 2014 by Nevin Thompson

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Our Tectorian of the Week for April 11 is TinyMob Games. …You may have heard of them in Tech Cruch.

TinyMob unveiled their first game earlier today at the massive PAX East Boston gaming conference. It’s hard to believe TinyMob, led by Tectorians Chris Hoefgen, Alex Mendelev and Jamie Toghill, opened their studio last fall, just a few months ago.

Besides getting critical home-town recognition in a glowing Times Colonist article today, TinyMob and its new game is also the subject of a longer Tech Crunch profile published just this morning.

Tiny Realms, a Unity-based real-time strategy game for iPad and iPhone, looks like it’s going to be awesome, and it’s very cool that a Victoria-based company is creating eye candy that appeals to millions of gamers around the world.

The game lets you build worlds, assemble armies, wage wars, and build empires.

Tiny Realms is also generating a lot of exciting in a mobile games industry always seeking innovative ways to remain competitive and profitable.

“We have content and features planned out for the next 12 months post launch that not only add content, but will also expose more of the underlying mythology we’ve created for our world,” Mendelev says in the Tech Crunch interview. “The way we bring this to life is through player events actually having an impact on the fabric of the Tiny Realms universe. Player actions will leave indelible marks on the game we’ve created that other players will get to experience, too.”

The team unveiled the name, images and a trailer of game play at the PAX East Boston gaming conference. The finished product will be released later this spring.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Company profile, featured, Gaming

Tectorian of the Week – EchoSec

April 3, 2014 by Nevin Thompson

tectorian_of_the_week.1_1_.2EchoSec, the brainchild of Karl Swannie and his Victoria-based team, is our Tectorian of the week.

Recently featured in a thought-provoking and somewhat alarming in-depth Vancouver Sun feature, EchoSec’s made-in-Victoria technology hunts for media that has been geo-tagged and is offered by open web servers, going beyond commonly used search tools to enable anyone to capture, curate, manage, process and visualize data in an entirely new way.

Combining geo-tagged location data with social media feeds

In a nutshell, EchoSec combines geo-tagged location data with social media feeds to learn just about anything about anyone online: where you live, where you work, what time you go to work, and possibly even what you were doing at work if you happened to be logged in to any number of popular social networks.

EchoSec aggregates all this information in a single search.

Indeed, the Vancouver Sun writer decided to randomly pick out a traveller at the Vancouver airport to see how much could learned from the traveller’s digital trail.

A completely unfiltered and real-time view of the world

Swannie and his team stumbled across their discovery by accident while working on a search engine to help urban planners determine how people use public spaces.

The EchoSec team is using their unique technology to demonstrate to police, governments, companies and even military organizations that they should be aware information is being shared that is timestamped, traceable, and can be “mined, followed and predicted.”

EchoSec’s unique way of harvesting and displaying dynamic and user-generated content from sites like Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram gives EchoSec a completely unfiltered and real-time view of the world.

Try out the free version of EchoSec and find out for yourself

The free, public version of the EchoSec search engine pulls from just a handful of feeds, while the full version will have close to 500 sources of information that can deliver everything from the risky to the risqué.

Try the EchoSec public app here.

Filed Under: Tectoria

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