VIATeC Community

Skirmos – Open Source Laser Tag

March 21, 2014 by Tectoria

Have you ever dreamt of building your own laser tag course? Imagine your favorite first-person shooter video game in real life. Welcome to Skirmos: Skirmish Open Source Laser Tag.

Skirmos is an open source laser tag system that can be used for any and every game possible. It has the flexibility to be played indoors or out; in small or large games. Its unique open source nature allows anyone to make their own creative gametypes. Whether it’s free-for-all or capture the flag, a realistic simulation, or a replica from your favorite video game, Skirmos can be played in any manner you can think of.

The Skirmos Kickstarter campaign has 13 days remaining. Make your contribution today and bring this awesomeness to reality!

Tectorian of the Week

March 14, 2014 by Tectoria

2014 VIATeC Technology Awards – Nominations open Monday, March 17th

“The VIATeC Awards have become known as a unique event focused on entertaining the crowd with humor and irreverence while shining the spotlight on some of our awesome technology companies,” says Dan Gunn, Executive Director of VIATeC, the Victoria Advanced Technology Council. “It’s a great way for local tech firms to get increased profile with local media, policy makers and their peers which always helps when looking to hire new staff, find new customers or raise investment.”

Nominations will open at 9:00am on Monday, March 17th. Click here to access the nomination form (will not open until March 17th).

In total, twelve awards are presented at the evening gala

Technology Company of the Year
Emerging Technology Company of the Year
Startup of the Year
Product of the Year
Innovative Excellence
Executive of the Year
Employee/Team of the Year
Employer of the Year
Education Champion
Colin Lennox Award for Technology Champion
VIATeC Member of the Year
* Strategy of the Year

*New award category for 2014

More about the award categories:

Technology Company of the Year
Recognizes a Greater Victoria company that has demonstrated excellence in innovation and a commitment to the technology community while embracing sound business fundamentals.

Emerging Technology Company of the Year
Recognizes a Greater Victoria company that has the greatest potential to demonstrate excellence in innovation and a commitment to the technology community while embracing sound business fundamentals. This category is reserved for operations that have been established for less than 3 years.

Start-up of the Year
Recognizes a Greater Victoria company less than 2 years old that demonstrate significant potential to generate revenue, raise investment, or to have significant social benefit.

Product of the Year
Recognizes a Greater Victoria company that has achieved success in the commercialization of an innovative technology product (eg. market acceptance and sales).

Innovative Excellence
Recognizes a Greater Victoria company that has researched and designed an innovative service, process or product that is expected to revolutionize a sector, method of business or way of life.

Executive of the Year
Recognizes an individual who has had a significant impact on the success of an organization as a direct result of their leadership. For this award, executives are considered to be those that typically hold senior titles, eg. CEO, CFO, COO, President, Vice- President.

Employee /Team of the Year
Recognizes an individual or team in the technology sector who demonstrates outstanding initiative and service delivery, and has had a significant impact on the company for which they work.

Employer of the Year
Recognizes a company that has demonstrated its commitment to their staff and provides a pleasant workplace.

VIATeC Member of the Year
Recognizes a member of VIATeC who has demonstrated outstanding commitment to the technology sector through involvement, volunteering and support of VIATeC. The recipient of this award is selected by VIATeC.

Strategy of the Year
Recognizes the best strategy implemented by or for a Greater Victoria organization. Nominated companies are required to provide a letter of support clearly explaining their strategy and milestones. The judges will consider impact and results from the underlying strategy.

The Colin Lennox Award for Technology Champion
Recognizes an individual who has demonstrated passion and commitment to the Greater Victoria technology sector for at least ten years. Their long-standing support has been instrumental in Greater Victoria ‘s continued success on the world technology stage.

Education Champion
This award recognizes a teacher who inspires their students using innovative tools and technology. We are looking for teachers that use 21st Century Learning techniques to help prepare student to thrive in a knowledge-based society.

PonoMusic

March 14, 2014 by Tectoria

This is not just the next big thing in music. PonoMusic has the potential to completely re-shape the way creators create it and listeners experience it.

It all comes down to sound. As Neil Young (Pono’s founder and visionary) stated in his SXSW 2014 keynote speech, “Pono is a grassroots movement whose mission is to bring back the soul of music, which has been left behind in the evolution of convenience.”

The quality of audio that we listen to is dependent on the bit rate at which it is recorded at. The MP3 audio files that we are accustom to today have a bit rate of 192kbps or 256kbps. These are highly compressed files, and are smaller in size than higher resolution music files.

PonoMusic files have about 6 times more musical information than a typical mp3. With ultra-high quality resolution recordings (24 bit/192kHz), the difference between a PonoMusic digital file and an mp3 is about 30 times more data from which your player reconstructs the “song”.

What does this mean for you, the listener? It means that you will soon listen to music from a completely new dynamic than you ever have before.

Pono recently launched a kickstarter campaign that raised over $1.5 million dollars in it’s first 48 hours.

Find out more about PonoMusic or donate to their kickstarter campaign here.

[vimeo 88705147 w=500 h=278]

PONO Kickstarter from pono on Vimeo.

Tectorian of the Week

March 7, 2014 by Tectoria

VIATeC has purchased 777 Fort Street in downtown Victoria and will be moving to the new space by the end of the year. The building has 4 floors and a basement with a total of 15,600 s/ft. Many people will remember the building as the former home of J&L Copy or the Cooks Roberts law firm.

VIATeC started exploring the possibility of a building purchase shortly after opening Accelerate Tectoria at the corner of Douglas and Hillside. It quickly became obvious that by moving back into town awareness of VIATeC and the services we provide increased dramatically. We knew we had made the right move but we also knew that it would be better if we could set up right in the heart of the city.

The accelerator program has exceeded our expectations. Over 50 startups have entered the program and 10 have already graduated. The companies participating have created 121 jobs, raised almost $9 million in investment and increased their revenues by almost $2 million. One of the keys to our success has been our ability to keep costs down by signing a terrific sublet agreement for the space. However, that deal will expire in January of 2015.

As we considered our options, we discovered that with current market conditions it would be possible to buy a building and operate it for essentially the same amount as our sublet agreement.

While there are 330 tech companies operating in the downtown core, most of them are invisible to the average passer by. 777 Fort Street gives us a permanent home that will stand as a highly visible example of our thriving tech sector. We will have full control over our space, open it up to the community for its meetings and events related innovation and entrepreneurship and while we are building up equity for the building ownership, our operating costs will be the same as our current sweetheart of a sublet deal.

This move will increase awareness of the tech sector, add financial sustainability to VIATeC, allow the accelerator program to expand and give the tech sector as a whole a new gathering spot for meetings and events. We can’t wait to take you on a tour.

Patreon

February 28, 2014 by Tectoria

Musicians, YouTubers, Web Comics, Writers, Bloggers, Indie Gamers, Video Producers, Authors, Podcasters, Animators, Artists and Photographers… UNITE!

Unlike other fundraising services which raise for a single big event, Patreon is for creators who create a stream of smaller works.

For creators
The benefits of using Patreon are endless. This platform allows you to raise funds to work on what you love. Interact with your top fans on your activity feed where photos, videos, etc. can be posted and commented on. Give back to your fans with rewards, those who want to engage with you will be rewarded for doing so… it really is a win/win.

For the fans
Looking for the inside edge on getting the goods first? Patreon allows fans to receive timely updates from creators as they are creating the things you love. And don’t miss out on the rewards! If your favourite creators are feeling generous, you could receive anything from pre-sell concert tickets, downloads, personal gifts, hangouts, or anything else they can offer as a way to thank you for your patronage.

Still not sure how it works? This video will help you make sense of it all….

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-IDF809fQ]

iWatch Concept

February 21, 2014 by Tectoria

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5z3HuQp_w0&w=640&h=390]

A new iWatch concept video produced by Fuse Chicken, the Cleveland-based design startup imagines what a wrist-mounted Apple wearable computer might look like with a wraparound curved display. Combining everything that you love about your iPhone, iPod and wrist-watch, the iWatch could prove to be the modern day time keeper.

Proposing some advanced iOS 8 features for the device, the concept shows a device that looks like a smart band rather than a traditional watch. Featuring an elongated, curved screen that’s able to display various information, the device would offer support for existing iOS apps.

Siri, mail, messages, contacts, calendar, music and fitness apps would all be supported as well as new health apps, such as the rumoured Healthbook app.

The Healthbook presentation is perhaps the most interesting part of this concept: If this feature is real and is part of iOS 8, it will likely tie into any wearable hardware Apple dreams up.

Tectorian of the Week

February 21, 2014 by Tectoria

tectorian-of-the-week - Feb 21

Makosinski shines on Fallon

You probably recognize Ann Makosinski as the 16 year Tectorian who gave a great keynote speech at the Discover Tectoria event last December. From our stage to the Tonight Show, Makosinski was one of three young inventors featured on the Jimmy Fallon show as part of a segment called “Fallonventions.”

In a YouTube video explaining how she created the flashlight, Makosinski said she became interested in the area of “harvesting surplus energy” after learning “humans are a great source of untapped thermal energy.”

To produce enough power to turn on LED lights in the flashlight, Makosinski used four Peltier tiles to convert a temperature difference to electricity. If one side of the tile is heated by a human hand and the other exposed to cool air, electricity is produced.

Since winning the Google Science Fair last year, Makosinski and her invention have received international attention. The Grade 11 student at St. Michaels University School was named one of Time magazine’s 30 under 30 for 2013 and has given two TED Talks.

As she left the stage, Fallon said, “I’m going to work for her one day, I can feel it.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys0WVOPmA6g?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]

OSVehicle Tabby

February 6, 2014 by Tectoria

We know Tectorians love electric cars. Our last Tectoria Social Club meeting featured Tesla and it was a packed house. Well, if the Tesla is out of reach maybe the Tabby is more your speed.

Tabby is an open sourced electric vehicle that you can build yourself in an hour. That’s right, in less time than people in other cities commute each day you can build your own electric car. And if you’re the engineers that helped develop it, you can cut that time to 41 minutes flat.

TABBY is the first open source framework for the creation vehicles. It has been defined as the “Ikea Car”. It is a versatile platform that can be used to bootstrap businesses, to create your own vehicle, for education purposes, and much more.

Although the OSVehicle Tabby kit does not include things like doors, body panels and a windshield, you most definitely can still drive it.

OSV is taking pre-orders for the Tabby starter kit, with both the two-seater and four-seater configurations. Add a battery pack, electric powertrain and seats, and you have an electric vehicle that can top out around 50 mph for just under $4,000.<

All the plans and blueprints for TABBY can be downloaded in the website’s download section. You are welcome and encouraged to improve the designs, work on them, and upload them to share your ideas with the community through the OSV forum.

[vimeo 77204604 w=500 h=281]

OSVehicle: TABBY Timelapse from OSVehicle on Vimeo.

We All Need A Hand Sometimes

January 24, 2014 by Tectoria

This just popped up on Techcrunch a couple of days ago. The company is called ‘Zirtual’ and they provide a service whereby you can have a virtual assistant complete all sorts of tasks on your behalf. While we think the service solves a definite pain point, it is perhaps the business model of putting a SAAS shell on top of a service business that we find particularly interesting. They go to great lengths to really communicate just how focused they are on the quality of the service they are providing. Their website is clean, crisp. modern and generally leads you to believe exactly what they are saying is true. Check it out – the service may not be for you, but it is always exciting to see how another startup is strategically managing their launch. Read the full story on TechCrunch.

SXSW – Tectoria House is a GO!

January 17, 2014 by Tectoria

We’ve done it again. We’ve found accommodation that will house lots of Tectorians at SXSW. Last year three local tech firms joined us and we hope you’re among them this year. We assume that you know what SXSW is, but if you don’t, check it out HERE. Tectoria House is less than 3 miles from downtown and we will have a rental car to shuttle people daily. We have something for just about every budget – from King beds to sleeping bags on the floor. So if you are ready to head to the tech/film/music event of the year to take in keynotes, network your face off or spread the word about what you’re working on, send Robbie a note and book your spot: raylesworth@viatec.ca

Check out the accommodations here.