It is really, really, really hard to believe. But as bad as internet access is in Canada, it just got worse. Yesterday, Shaw Communications, a Canadian telecommunications company and internet…
Filmmaker Adam Curtis returns with a brilliant new documentary series that explores the ways in which many of our modern ideas and conventionally held beliefs have been perversely shaped by…
International Institute of Mobile Technologies and Engineers Without Borders Toronto have joined forces to create Mobiles without Borders to encourage the use of mobiles in development. To start things off…
This is not a complicated post. Just a simple idea: Why not create an Open311 add-on for Ushahidi? So what do I mean by that, and why should we care?…
Nortel’s patents sold for 4.5 billion dollars–a true indictment of the many dollars and years of R&D investment. Some of Canada’s top scientists worked there–it truly was an innovative company…
Okay, super psyched about this. Back at the Strata Conference in Feb (in San Diego) I introduced my long time uber-quant friend and now Wikimedia Foundation data scientist Diederik Van…
Last night I had a great time taking the stage with Alexandra Samuel in Vancouver for "We Want Your Thoughts" at the Khafka coffee house on Main St. The night's…
My next novel has a comedic take on the Technological Singularity, so I thought I’d start to do some more posts about the topic here on The Skwib. The following…
With the possible exception of weather data, the most successful open data set out there at the moment is transit data. It remains the data with which developers have experimented…
Much of the UN climate negotiations that went on in Copenhagen in December, 2009 was just so much hot air and spinning of wheels without any movement towards a liveable…
Not a long post from me today, but just a link to an article in the Globe and Mail that explains what RIM’s misfortunes could mean for the city of…
It looks like my predictions about Blockbuster and RIM are coming true. In this alberta@noon column on CBC Radio One with host Donna McElligott I discuss what options are available…
A while ago I was going to post a quick something that I saw about the Ottawa Tech Sector from the Ottawa Citizen, but didn’t post it. Unfortunately things didn’t…
A follow-up to yesterday's post, "Setting a high tech government funded asset adrift," where the sunsetting of funding for CANARIE, Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network, was raised. I did…
Here is an item today that may be an indicator of the ideological underpinnings of this government shining through. See this post from Dwayne Winseck at the OpenMedia.ca site on…
Over at the Beyond the Commons blog Aaron Wherry has a series of quotes from recent speeches on healthcare by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in which the one constant…
In this alberta@noon column on CBC Radio One with host Donna McElligott I introduce listeners to the website Etsy and then talk about the he said/she said battle going on…
Yesterday I was reminded by the fact that I have great friends – friends who are far better to me than I deserve. You see, yesterday was my birthday and…
The ongoing attacks on net neutrality constitute a new round of enclosures of the modern commons. If the original enclosure movements during 16th and 17th centuries in England signified the…
Using Data to Make Firefox Better: A mini-case study for your organization
I love Mozilla. Any reader of this blog knows it. I believe in its mission, I find the organization totally fascinating and its processes engrossing. So much so I spend…