I'll be at the press announcement tomorrow where the BC Apps for Climate Change contest is announced. From the invite:

Join Minister of State for Climate Action John Yap to see how the Province is challenging the software community to find new ways to tackle climate change using the world of online and mobile apps.

David Eaves has some more background information available.

Interestingly, Microsoft is also running an apps contest as part of their "For the Web" FTW coding competition. For that contest, the terms and conditions include requirements to host on some form of Windows or Azure hosting, but they are also trying to push some open government data.

I have hopes that the province contest uses some standard app contest platform (the one I've seen recently is ChallengePost), but somehow I doubt it.

I'll be posting updates as I get them. Not sure if I'll be able to ask questions, but leave comments if there is anything particular you're interested in and I'll see what info I can get.

Via INSNA and Mark Surman (who is doing seriously cool things with the Shuttleworth Foundation around Open Everything), I was copied on a request to look at prior art around a Microsoft patent application: Microsoft has a patent application posted on the Peer-to-Patent site for Recommending contacts in a social network. We are soliciting your help and that of the communities you know in finding prior art that will help the Patent Office to examine this application and determine if it deserves a twenty-year grant of rights to prevent all others from making, using, or selling this invention (this includes any research and R&D that would touch upon the claims of the invention, if patented). Can you let people know about this opportunity? We invite them to submit:

1. prior art
2. to annotate the prior art submitted by others
3. to vote on the relevance of the public submissions, and
4. to suggest fruitful avenues for research for the USPTO when examining this application.

Peer-to-Patent is not just another blog, wiki or website. It is an "extension" of the government institution! Posted information will be forwarded directly to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and be used in the examination process. Here's a bit more detail about the application and about Peer-to-Patent:

Recommending contacts in a social network A method and system for recommending potential contacts to a target user is provided. A recommendation system identifies users who are related to the target user through no more than a maximum degree of separation. The recommendation system identifies the users by starting with the contacts of the target user and identifying users who are contacts of the target user's contacts, contacts of those contacts, and so on. The recommendation system then ranks the identified users, who are potential contacts for the target user, based on a likelihood that the target user will want to have a direct relationship with the identified users. The recommendation system then presents to the target user a ranking of the users who have not been filtered out.

I originally blogged about the local dev center last July when I heard that Microsoft was opening it here in Vancouver.

A lot of this Vancouver / Canada startup / tech hub topics I'm now blogging about on the Bootup Labs blog, which you should follow if you're interested in those topics: Bill Gates talks on NPR about the Vancouver development center

I've been recently going down the path of re-shuffling my home media environment. Since I'm also still kicking the tires on various PC games (the new Steam community site is very interesting (link is my userid, you may need to be logged in) -- for the record, all the other games I mentioned I'm no longer playing.

Anyway, I've been thinking about a game console at home. The choice is really between the Xbox 360 and the PS3: the Nintendo Wii is a great supplementary machine with its very different interface options and social nature, but not such a great media center. I'm more likely to buy my own Wii controller and go over to friends that already have one.

Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 seem to have solutions in place to easily share media from your Mac. There is Nullriver's Connect360 and there is the open source MediaTomb which can let you run an open source UPnP server to share to both platforms (older how-to).

The Xbox LIVE and Xbox Live Arcade is compelling. Easily download small mini games. Get an account, earn achievements. Even playing "simple" games, you can compete with other people at home anywhere else online with you, and "invest" in an identity.

But...

...it's Microsoft. I acknowledge they've built a very interesting machine. It's much more of a market win than the PS3 by a long shot (at this stage of the game...). But it's optimized to work with Windows Media Center, and it's not really that hackable.

The PS3 on the other, I love for its open-ness. It actually has "install other operating system" as a *menu item*. That's fantastic, and totally appeals to me wanting to tinker.

But...

...for the price of a PS3, I could buy both an Xbox 360 *and* a Wii. It's pricey. Am I buying into tomorrow's technology, today? Also...it does come down to the games. And to the social network. My social network mainly has Xbox 360s (aside from Mark Yuasa who has a PS3 in addition), and some of the upcoming games that I'm interested in (e.g. Mass Effect) are Xbox only.

Hmmm...it seems like in writing this, I've convinced myself. My heart says I should get a PS3, but my head says Xbox 360.

What would you get? Why? Do you have one already? What do you use it for?

I'm going to be on Business News Network this afternoon, 4pm PST / 7pm EST, talking about if Microsoft is still innovating? This is, of course, related in part to earnings announcements from a bunch of companies, and more directly, the Microsoft investment in Facebook. I'll be on a mini-panel with Fred Vogelstein.

Some related links / thoughts below, I'll clean this up after the interview:

• John Battelle on Facebook and Microsoft
• Paul Kedrosky on Facebook and the Microsoft Curse:
  

  Do you believe that Microsoft knows its own strategic interests, and that it can act rationally and appropriately in their defense? Ten years ago I might have said yes, but today I have a much harder time. So when it comes to defending a large strategic premium over a credible competitor with a better basis for economic valuation, I have a hard time.

• Recent interview with Steve Ballmer at the Web 2.0 Summit -- from Ballmer on Windows Live search, "it's like a 6 year old playing hoops with the 12 year olds"
• Did Microsoft pay too much for Facebook? Well, Facebook might be overvalued, but it's small dollars for Microsoft and gives them potential insite into profile / social based advertising
• MSFT failures -- Zune, Windows Mobile (failure outside of the US), search
• MSFT wins and/or in progress -- Silverlight, an Adobe Flash competitor, casual gaming and home based social networks (XBox Live Arcade, Windows Media Center, etc.)
• innovation? Microsoft Research (PhotoSynth), new offices and working environments down in Redmond and elsewhere
• closing thought: competition is good, Microsoft isn't going anywhere; they *should* compete more on innovation rather than dollars and marketing

So, my phone was ringing off the hook this morning with people wanting feedback on the announcement that Microsoft Canada is opening a software development center here in Vancouver.

What's my reaction? It's great! Microsoft Canada has been taking some interesting steps lately, like hiring David Crow, who kick started the Toronto tech scene over the past few years. It was great to catch up with him at the Microsoft Expression launch event I attended a couple of weeks back.

Yahoo missed the chance to have an engineering team here when they moved the entire Flickr team down to San Francisco (the last big tech acquisition here in town, rumoured to be around $40M). Google has spoken with some local universities, but they tend to be computer science snobs, so they went for the more well known Waterloo (also to keep an eye on RIM, which being in the mobile space is going to become increasingly important).

I see the Microsoft lab here in Vancouver as an increasing acknowledgment that "stuff is happening" here. We've got a unique mix of creative and tech people, big companies and start ups, and world events like the 2010 Olympics that are going to put us at center stage.

So...Yahoo and Google...when are the labs coming to town? And, unlike Microsoft who are rumoured to be going to boring Burnaby or Richmond -- stick a center downtown somewhere. Gastown and Yaletown still have lots of room for you!

If you tune to Global TV for the noon show, I may be on there. I've also briefly talked to Business News Network, so we'll see if that's a go for the evening slot. Busy day....

Update: I got a small clip on Global TV in the noon show, which re-aired at 5pm and 6pm. I didn't manage to get the digital version of that clip, I'll update again if I can get a copy. I did end up getting interviewed by Howard Green from BNN (was formally Report on Business TV). It was myself and Bernie Magnan, Chief Economist for the Vancouver Board of Trade. The clip was up about an hour after the show, and I managed to find this direct link to the episode. I'm about 5 - 7 minutes in, and unfortunately it will only play on Windows as far as I can see.

On Thursday night I was invited to the Microsoft Expression launch event. I was soubly glad to attend because David Crow, who is now with Microsoft Canada, came through town for the event (a post from David about the upcoming BarCamp Vancouver ... which looks to be at capacity already!).

From comments by Sherif on Todd Dominey's post about Flash Player and Adobe Reader being combined:

Hmm, I wonder if Adobe just shot themselves in the foot with this announcement vis-a-vis Microsoft Sparkle (aka Expressions), which I realize isn't currently meant to be a Flash competitor. I see two possibilities:

1) Adobe tries to integrate PDF into Flash, the plugin becomes enormous, people balk at downloading it, Adobe backtracks, and keeps the two apps separate (I don't see the PDF plugin becoming smaller, at least based on past experience).

2) Microsoft sees an opportunity to win over the Flash market, after several failed versions (typically true with MS), develops an excellent, fairly small plugin (2-3MB) that does what Flash can do and more, and splits the market, forcing designers like us to buy two apps - Flash and Sparkle, giving us more headaches to deal with.

This at the same time that Dave Shea tells us that Macromedia is no more, but notes that "it has always seemed that Macromedia was fundamentally more in tune with the technology and the community."