Ottawa Technology News

As news of the Mumbai massacre continues to unfold, stories of unaccounted for Canadians are headlining news media outlets across the country.

Two Live Current Media employees were caught in the crossfire in Mumbai and ARE accounted for but the connection to Vancouver's technology community brings this tragedy very close to home.

Vancouver-headquartered Live Current has a huge stake in India with their Cricket ventures and staff visit Mumbai often. This week President & COO Jonathon Ehrlich and Chief Revenue Officer Alex Chamberlain were visiting and got caught in the crossfire.

Chamberlain was in a restaurant at the Oberoi hotel when he heard gunfire and barely managed to escape. When the terrorists stormed the building, Chamberlain and a group of people were rushed into the kitchen and held hostage.

At the nearby Oberoi Trident hotel, Alex Chamberlain, a British website director, was having dinner with a friend when he heard shots fired. Moments later, a waitress stumbled into the dining room with her arms covered in blood. A fresh-faced gunman holding an AK47 rifle appeared behind her, herding the 30 panicked guests towards the emergency staircase.

“He ushered us up three flights of stairs before he told everyone to put their hands on the wall and get out our passports,” Mr Chamberlain told The Times. “He said he wanted British and Americans. Luckily before he got to me two women started crying, which distracted him.”

“I thought this was a nightmare. The whole thing was unreal. There was smoke coming up the stairs, gunshots above us, the sound of grenades going off. I thought if we got to the roof they’d shoot all the white people, so when I got to the 18th floor I decided to escape.

“I beckoned to the guy behind me and went through a side door and crouched under a table. I was convinced the terrorist had seen us. I was waiting for him to open the door and kill us both. The smoke was getting thicker and thicker. I couldn’t breath. After about 15 minutes we agreed we had to go down.”

Mr Chamberlain groped his way through the smoke, down 18 flights of stairs, before he met a group of six other tourists, including a Briton named Michael. They found a cricket bat which they used to smash a window and escape to freedom. “Every noise we made we were worried the terrorists would hear. When we got out of the hotel I felt amazing. Not safe but absolutely relieved.”

Ehrlich and Chamberlain are both safe and on their way home.

According to Telus' research, 55 per cent of Canadians track their medical history on paper, one third electronically and one in four by memory.

This survey findings explain why Telus Corp. announced today that it will invest $100 million over three years to develop a new health technology division to build and service networks to share medical records and other information.

The move by Telus's business solutions unit comes in the wake of the telecom company's purchase of Montreal-based electronic commerce firm Emergis Inc. early this year. Emergis is a major provider of software used to manage health care records, drug bills and other information in the pharmacy and broader health care industry. It's also a big player in financial services technology.

With its $763 million purchase of Emergis, Telus is moving aggressively to become a bigger player in health care technology and sees this as a major growth area for the company as provincial governments try to get health care costs under control and look for new ways to handle health services.

Like other phone companies, Telus faces stiffer competition from new wireless rivals in Canada and continued decline of traditional businesses. As part of its new investment in healthcare technology, Telus launched a new brand, Telus Health Solutions, a unit with about 1,500 employees.

Last week Winnipeg-headquartered Canwest announced a partnership with classifieds aggregator Oodle that may help them slow the flow of newspaper classified listings to competitors online.

Consumers will discover a more comprehensive neighbourhood marketplace. One that seamlessly brings together trusted brands like their local Canwest newspaper, niche websites like driving.ca and househunting.ca and local business listings from GoLocal directories. A visitor to one of Canwest’s newspaper web sites or canada.com need only click on “classifieds” to launch into the depth of listings from their own neighbourhood with only the freshest listings populating the top spots.

Together, Oodle and Canwest should be able to deliver a pretty good local classified search experience through Canada.com but the marketshare already lost to Craigslist and Kijiji will likely never return.