Canadian Budget Promises Innovation Money For Research With Profit Potential

The Canadian government's budget for 2010 includes $200 million in funding for practical research. "The federal government plans to boost Canadian productivity by increasing investments in scientific research and innovation – measures that in the long term are intended to drag Canada out of its pool of red ink." says the Globe and Mail. “These investments will help create clusters of great new jobs on the frontiers of knowledge,” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told the House of Commons.

Claiming a victory in the budget is the Association of Canadian Community Colleges after a $30 million was directed at research conducted in community colleges, “This is a real recognition of the work we do.” said James Knight, association's president.

Good news! 

Apple Sues HTC Over Smartphone Related Patents

It seems as though the competition is heating up in the smartphone market in more ways than one! Apple has decided to confront HTC in the courts with claims of patent infringement on more than 20 of it's patents related to user interface and hardware.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. “We’ve decided to do something about it.” 

For it's part HTC spokeswoman Linda Mills said “HTC values patent rights and their enforcement but is also committed to defending its own technology innovations,”

It was bound to happen sooner or later, HTC and Android based phones are starting to make a dent in the market place...

 

Source: Globe and Mail

Sony Urges PlayStation 3 Owners Not To Play Online

Owners of the older generation PlayStation 3 game systems are being warned by Sony not to play online until a coding error in the clock functionality of the system, similar to the Y2K bug, is fixed. Errors began being reported recently that resulted in the system date being reset to Jan. 1, 2000. Using the systems online could cause errors, make it impossible to record gaming achievements or restoring some data, cause an error message saying the user has been logged out of the online game network, and result in game trophies to disappear. The error does not occur in the newer slim version of the PlayStation 3 that began shipping in September '09.

Source: CBC 

America Prefers Online News Over Newspapers

The newspaper publishing industry in general has been having an extremely difficult time financially over the last decade and a current report shows that news hungry consumers are turning more and more to online services such as news aggregators such as Google News and AOL.

"Americans have become news grazers both on and offline - but within limits," said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism."They generally don't have one favourite website but also don't search aimlessly. Most online news consumers regularly draw on just a handful of different sites."

Besides aggregators large news sites such as CNN and BBC are also popular, and the newspapers which are struggling to remain relevant are still, for a large part, trying to find themselves online and make it profitable.

I'm definitely an online news guy, with the exception of the weekends where I like thumbing through the Saturday edition of the Globe and Mail. I think it's more of a tradition than anything else, or perhaps its a small break from the randomness in which we consume news online. The usual routine of skimming article titles and following  links which take me from site to site is replaced by a leisurely turn of the page consuming nearly every article front to back. It's sort of nostalgic but doesn't lend it's self to the fast pace of the week days.

Source: BBC News Online via rss :)