Vancouver Kris Krüg photographer / geek / Bryght founder is interviewed by The Aesthetic Poetic.

Scott, Bernie & Will have announced V2 of ConceptShare, along with an excellent partnership agreement:

Wow, it’s an exciting day for us at ConceptShare HQ. Today we’re announcing two product launches. We doubled our team just two months ago to meet existing customer demand, and to prepare for the growth that today would bring.

ConceptShare V2

Today we turned on ConceptShare V2, the  first major upgrade to our online tool for design collaboration since it launched at the beginning of this year. We redesigned the entire application to be smoother, with fewer clicks so everyone can work faster. Designers will enjoy thoughtful touches like more vertical screen area and customizable layouts for their project workspaces. We’ve also taken the “beta” label off our video support, since it’s working quite well.

We’ve reworked the framework underneath so we can improve ConceptShare even faster in the future. To date we’ve made over 100 updates to the product, and we’re just getting started. Some of the best suggestions have come from our community, so please keep them coming.

CorelDRAWConceptShare

CorelDRAWConceptShare is a branded site built for CorelDRAW users. It’s the first project with our fellow Canadians at Corel. This is the start of a 5 year partnership, which speaks to the level of commitment from both sides. It also means you can count on more cool announcements in the future.

They don’t enough blog buzz yet, but Corel is a major player in the software market. They have over 100 million active users in 75 countries. CorelDRAW does really well in the European and Asian markets, and is growing its user base worldwide.

Plus they got link love from TechCrunch, so they got that going for them.

Jevon, Jonas (and perhaps more J- folk?) from StartupNorth have created a new website for discussing the wireless industry in Canada - Wirelessnorth.ca. The official announcement:

Announcing the launch of a new blog covering the wireless industry in Canada. Our goal is to celebrate and promote everything awesome in Canada’s mobile industry from mobile startups to the latest innovations coming from Canada’s big telcos and device maker(s) . Of course, we’ll be touching on hot topics like net neutrality and the wireless competitive landscape in Canada. And whatever else inspires us along the way

Tom Purves:

The motto of the CRTC, Canada’s telcom regulator is “Communications in the Public Interest”. Right.

Sigh, Canada, as adventurous as ever:

Venture capital sluggish locally

Venture capital activity in Ottawa showed some improvement in the second quarter, but has remained largely unchanged since the beginning of 2003, a new study says.

According to the quarterly venture capital report released yesterday by OCRI, there were four deals in the second quarter of 2006, for a total of $43.3 million.

"While venture capitalists appear to be investing at a cautious rate, they are maintaining their support of their portfolio companies," said Stephen Daze, executive director of OCRI's entrepreneurship centre. "In addition, we are starting to see an increase in the overall deal flow in the city and remain cautiously optimistic moving forward."

... and ...

Venture capital funding falls 80%

Despite an 80-per-cent decline in venture capital funding for Ottawa-area firms in the June quarter compared with the same period last year, the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation is expecting some improvement in coming months.

Four startups landed $43.3 million in the latest quarter, according to OCRI, a big drop from the $209 million of venture capital funding a year earlier when three big deals averaging $50 million each drove a healthy rebound for the full year.

...

OCRI said that many venture-capital-funded companies are now well funded, and thus follow-on investment is likely to remain light.

However, of the 39 startups that got venture capital financing in 2003 and 2004, only 15 have received additional funding. Nine other companies died, were bought or left town.

Sean Wise and Reg Cheramy have created a new webring called the Canadian Tech Mob, and well hey, we've joined (look right). As they explain it:

A bunch of us were talking down at Under the Radar about how many Canadians are in the Valley and more importantly how the world doesn't know, what we all know, that Canada kicks ass in tech and innovation. So one thing led to another and now we have the "Canadian Tech Mob".

The Canadian Tech Mob is a not for profit, grassroots campaign to try to publicize Canada's tech presence. If you are a blogger, entrepreneur, VC, or other member of the Canadian Tech ecosystem, we hope you will join with us to support the "spilling" of the secret of the Great White North . Let's show the world what Canada is made of!

The basic concept is to show you're proud to be a member of Canadian technology community and to increase the profile of Canadians in technology

An interesting story in the New York Times today about how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all building giant data centers in Washington state to take advantage of cheap power, and to a lesser degree, proximity to customers:

Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers — known in the industry as the Googleplex — that is a singular achievement. "Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset," said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and a founder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.

The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles east of Portland has been a closely guarded corporate secret. "Companies are historically sensitive about where their operational infrastructure is," acknowledged Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for operations.

Behind the curtain of secrecy, the two buildings here — and a third that Google has a permit to build — will probably house tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks, held together with Velcro tape in a Google practice that makes for easy swapping of components. The cooling plants are essential because of the searing heat produced by so much computing power.

The complex will tap into the region's large surplus of fiber optic networking, a legacy of the dot-com boom.

If it's cheap power you're looking for, I have just the place for you -- Labrador. Consider the benefits:

• the Lower Churchill Falls project (yet to be built) is expected to generate 4,000 MV
• Churchill Falls is cool to cold, reaching an average daily maximum of 18 degrees in July and in fact, for much of the year, the daily average temperature is below 0
• It's less than 1500 km to NYC, the New England States and central Canada
• labour is available
• the government would be willing to make consessions

Issues uncovered while making this post:

• it would be nice to be able to dynamically update your Google Key OR at least post a message but not display it.
  
• the map extension is flaking out in "show" if there is no key
• it would be nice to be able to place multiple markers on the map AND to reference those markers from within the message body
• we need a cool way to add a degrees symbol (and other special characters)