A game for two... and more!

According to ITU, it is quite interesting to see that Korea and Hong Kong, followed by Canada, are the most connected countries in high speed Internet.

Peculiarly, Korea is also the Asian leader in game development for online gaming, a big user of broadband Internet. Canada, especially Montreal, has a quite impressive concentration of game developers: A2M, Digital Fiction, Electronic Arts, Hexacto, Microïds , Strategy First, Ubi Soft, with many of the most popular games in the world.

According to Nasscom President Kiran Karnik, quoted in Les défis du Cybermonde, “As the world is heading for a “knowledge economy”, it appears clearly that the key resources to maintain economic growth are knowledge and competence. Consequently, human resources will be the most important factor in determining a country’s ability to compete and to develop, rather than the territory or the capital.”

Surprisingly, the coming to Montreal of Electronic Arts (EA) has lead to a situation where UBI Soft, the French game developer installed in the city since 1997, is taking legal action against EA to stop them from hiring five of their employees, mostly those who where involved in the development of their last success of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. They are arguing that an exclusivity clause in their contract forbids them to work for a competitor during one year, suggesting that they are holding secret information that should not be revealed to a rival company. In fact, is it not a fight between two giants of the gaming industry, an American and a French company, over the qualified human resources available on Canadian soil? But how long will this situation last?

As Karnik puts it in his paper, “the knowledge economy is both an occasion and a challenge for developing countries. An occasion because it gives them a chance to get out of the vicious circle of poor investment, bad capitalization and anaemic growth. A challenge because they’ve got to find a way to develop rapidly their human resources.”

And no doubt that competition over the huge markets developing in Asia will not be coming only from Europe or America…but from Asia itself!

André G. Côté, Director-general

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The Multimedia World Watch (M2W), an organization of FIAM, and the International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM) are collaborating during VSMM’s upcoming 9th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. The world-famous event is to be held for the first time in Canadian soil (Montreal), from October 15th to the 17th.
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In a recent newsletter on Intellectual property and business, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) asked itself the value of IP and how to establish its financial worth. For those multimedia and digital content producers holding on to an intangible assets such as IP, it is of interest to know the various mathematical approaches to establish that elusive price.
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Souvenirs of Montreux…, For those of you who were present at FIAM’s last World Summit in Montreux and didn’t have a chance to take a look at the Summit report, please go to http://www.fiam.org/sommets/summit2002/index.html. You will find a résumé of the topics discussed, such as Software and the digital divide, Digital content and the law, Digital content production, Technology and know-how transfer, Human resource development, e-learning, etc. You can also download many of the presentations and take a look at the photo gallery.

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Petersberg Prize 2004 Call for Nominations – A value of €100 000 Among the variety of Prizes and Awards intended for the achievers in the field of digital technologies, one of them emerges for the originality of its concept, but also for the range of its prize which amounts to €100,000… Read more...

Canada
Quebec-based Multimedia association, Alliance Numériqc, should be happy to learn that the newly-appointed Minister of culture and Communications, Line Beauchamp, has agreed to go ahead with the idea of a made in Quebec strategy for the development of interactive digital content.
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CATA and SMART Toronto technology alliance have decided to merge their organizations. The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA) and SMART Toronto made this announcement in mid-August.
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The next time you switch from Verdana Light to Gothic Touch, make sure you’re in legal territory. In a recent article on fonts and IP, it was brought to our attention that you always have to check where the text fonts originate from. According to England-based Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), organizations and individuals have to have licences for using fonts that do not come pre-packaged in such word processing software as Office or Photoshop.
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Flash and J2EE, a marriage of convenience: Web software developer Macromedia should soon be releasing a new web-related application code-named Royale, diversifying by the same token its line of Web authoring products.
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The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) issued fresh data on Internet broadband uptake in the world and the numbers confirm the increasing popularity of this technology. 62 million individuals have taken up broadband in 2002, which amounts to a 72% increase from the preceding year.
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The challenges of the Cyberworld
Prepared under the Direction of Hervé Fischer, Les défis du cybermonde (The challenges of the Cyberworld) is a series of 28 articles published by as many authors in the daily newspaper Le Devoir. It is a large anthology of subjects covering many aspects of life such as science, economy, culture and arts, democracy, education, politics, private life, in the perspective of the overwhelming development of digital technologies.
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