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What's Next for Social Games? Canada's Big Viking Games is Carving a Path

The gaming landscape sure is different than from the days of Super Mario Bros. Games have evolved, from a one-way battle against artificial intelligence to split-screen and co-op missions, to totally interactive and engaging social occasions.

Today, so-called "social games" create an itch that needs to be scratched, and offer up paid in-game products as the calamine lotion (classic Don Draper line). They typically all use a similar structure and formula. For those of you unfamiliar, such games generally run on a freemium model.

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HootSuite's Ryan Holmes on Entrepreneurship, SXSW, and The Next Big Thing [Video]

This afternoon, Vancouver-based entrepreneur Ryan Holmes, founder of Invoke Media and CEO of HootSuite Media, participated in a live chat on Vokle as part of YEC Global. This live chat, which saw Ryan answer questions from readers in real-time, is now available to stream on Vokle here.

HootSuite has been a smashing success, not only locally but around the world. The social media dashboard has become of of Vancouver's most prominent startups in recent times. The company plans to double its headcount this year and reach six million users by the end of 2012.

Ryan remains on the board of Invoke, and also acts as an advisor for other startups, including LaunchRock and Appboy. He hopes to one day build a billion-dollar company.

Toronto-based TAXI's iPhone App Turns Pothole Hunting into Game

photo: paper-plane.frTAXI, a Toronto-based public relations and advertising firm, has created a free iPhone app that turns pothole reporting into a game. While most cities try to be proactive about fixing spring potholes, it is an arduous task—and potholes need to be found before they can be fixed.

The app was released in Montreal with a pretty interesting publicity stunt (see picture). The app is social by nature, reporting potholes, sharing statistics, and competing to be the reigning “pothole hunter." Besides this, the app is remarkably fleshed out, notifying you when you approach potholes, giving directions based on fewest potholes en route, and automatically recording the locations of any potholes you hit so you don’t have to use your phone while driving.

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Meet Canada's Grant Oyston: Can Social Media Trends and Big Data be Trusted in Light of Kony 2012?

Perhaps no one has drawn more attention than a Canadian university student in Nova Scotia named Grant Oyston. He has long questioned the charity behind the Kony 2012 movement.

His website, Visible Children, has garnered over 2.5 million views. After a notorious perception early on, he's starting to look a little better in the public’s eye as the infamous Kony campaign has taken a negative turn for the charity Invisible Children.

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Regina Company Offers Barcoded Gravestones for the Bereaved [Video]

Technology has made our world a more social place. We want to know the story, the history of everything we do.  “Who are the farmers that grew my coffee?”  “What are the conditions like for the people who assembled my iPad?”  Insight into the lives of those who affect us increases the emotional gain of these experiences.

Regina-based Remco Memorials want to expand on this idea, by placing quick response (QR) barcodes on gravestones. While engraving would be possible, Remco Memorials have wisely opted to use vinyl stickers, as technology lifetimes are not easy to predict.

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Entrepreneur, Meet Developer: Exploring Speed Networking with BizDatesTech

Entrepreneurs love developers. With the growth of the app economy, mobile development, and the social web, good software engineers and computer scientists are becoming more and more sought after.

The average starting package for a software engineer in Silicon Valley has risen from $85,000 in 2008 to $98,000 this year, despite the country's flat economy, according to data from Glassdoor. At Microsoft, software engineers can start at $128,000, and that's before options and bonuses. At Facebook, it's $138,000; at Apple, it's $149,000; and at Google, it's $151,000.

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America Looks to End Canada’s Reign as Most Socially Networked Country in World

In 2011, Canada held the number one rank for the most social networking users in the world on a per capita basis, according to research conducted by eMarketer.

China and the U.S. have some of the biggest populations to set the largest overall number of social networking users. Although China outnumbers the U.S. by nearly two to one with 256.5 million social networking users, a better examination would be to look at the percentage of the country’s total population, seeing countries like the U.S. and Canada take the top rankings.

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#ProjectKris: How a House Party for 60 in Calgary Became a Worldwide Twitter Party for 870,000

In a lesson on internet virality, one teenager's single, hyper-local tweet became a worldwide phenomenon overnight.

Calgary high schooler Hunter Mills used Twitter last week to inform his neighbourhood friends of a house party his buddy Kris Morrey was hosting. It was dubbed #ProjectKris, a reference to the movie Project X—about a house party that spirals out of control—which was a decision that would prove very foretelling.

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