Two interesting topics have come up in recent days; both of which seem connected. The first is Amazon’s prediction that ebook sales will overtake paperback sales by the end of 2011. Not entirely surprising, considering they’re already outselling hardcovers (“180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers”). And on it goes: paperback sales are eclipsed, ebooks will then be compared to the combined sales, paper becomes the minority, and so on. I think we all know the trend.

So if the market’s future is digital, what exactly do we want from the experience? The answer to this question depends a lot . . . [more]

I live in a one television household. One television supplied with data via satellite dish, 3 cell phones, 3 laptops, a desktop, an iPad, 3 iPods with screens and the best piece of tech – a long play record player that has a USB port. We don’t watch a lot of television, but for a family of four, we do consume our fair share of internet bandwidth.

There is plenty of news lately about internet delivered television. Google TV, Apple TV, and way back in 2005, PC World talked about Microsoft’s Internet TV, today’s version being Microsoft Mediaroom . . . [more]

There has been much written on Slaw and other places about the paperless office, or the virtual office. 

My personal view is that for the most part, we either already have the tools to accomplish it, or if we don’t have them, they can be acquired at low cost. The barrier is mostly our will to do it. Some people don’t see the need, or have a hard time giving up paper, or just find it hard to change.

Technolawyer points to an article that’s worth a read by New York lawyer Jay Fleishman entitled Being a Virtual Lawyer is . . . [more]

Chris Berzins is a long-time member of the Canadian administrative tribunal community and someone whose writings I’ve followed for some time. When he recently forwarded a copy of his most recent article – called “Administrative Transparency and the Protection of Privacy in a Digital Era,” now published in the May 2010 supplement of The Advocates’ Quarterly – I jumped on the opportunity to invite him to an interview.

We talked last week, and had a wide-ranging conversation that led me to conclude that Chris is a guy who has a very honourable commitment to seeing that administrative tribunals do things . . . [more]

This week, as Quebec moved towards paying for in vitro fertilization with the goal of reducing expensive and risky multiple births (which may or may not work), it was hard to find a singleton in the world of biotech.

Twin diagnostics projects were born this week as Warnex, the Montreal Heart Institute & CEPMED announced ; and to combat childhood diseases.

Vancouver-based Forbes Medi-Tech , as Pharmachem expressed interest in topping a prior bid by MHT.

Finally, the Canadian industry as a whole got a mediocre second fiscal quarter to match 2010’s first mediocre quarter, though Wayne Schnarr . . . [more]

As you’ll probably know, even if you’re imprisoned within your firm’s IT compound, the browser wars are back again, and the competition has been heating up. The latest major entrant into the lists is Google’s Chrome, which, now that it permits extensions, has moved from near zero to 7% of the market, pillaging mostly from IE’s share. Safari is holding its own, not gaining much of any ground outside the Mac OS world, while Firefox, once the white knight challenger, has begun to falter, weighed down perhaps by over use of extensions.

Now there comes what looks to be . . . [more]

This story by Erika Kinetz (AP) is on Google news with an AP logo, but I’m not sure what you’d say was the most authentic source for it. I found it serendipitously on Roger Ebert’s Journal (from which it appears since to have been removed.)

Christopher Dawson of ZDNet has also commented. . . . [more]

I recently read a biometrics-related article on CNET News (I am obsessed with the subject) indicating that a group of Japanese railway companies has installed 27 facial recognition-enabled billboards in subway stations around Tokyo as a one-year pilot project that will collect data on passersby in order to tailor advertisements to them in real time.

Last Friday Google announced it will be discontinuing its Google Nexus One phone sales online,

This week we received our last shipment of Nexus One phones. Once we sell these devices, the Nexus One will no longer be available online from Google. Customer support will still be available for current Nexus One customers.

Guess who got one of the last orders in and received their Google Nexus phone in the mail today?

. . . [more]

As most people use their mouse or touchpad as their primary Windows navigation tool, it is worthwhile to spend a few moments learning how to work more efficiently with this simple tool.

Few things annoy me more than sitting down to help someone with a computer problem only to find that I have to move the mouse about three feet across the desk to get the cursor to move just a few inches across the screen. Good exercise perhaps, but how can these people get any work done?

On a laptop, the equivalent is moving your finger across the touchpad . . . [more]

This week in biotech was the same all over the world. E&Y brought their “Beyond Borders” roadshow to Toronto and walked a crowd at MaRS through a retrospective of 2009’s biotech successes and failures.

One interesting feature of this year’s report (pdf) was the uniformity of trends among different countries. No matter where you were in the world, a few things were true:

• Revenue was up;
• R&D spending was down;
• There were lots of licensing deals; and
• By the end of 2009, companies had returned to their normal levels of cash reserves and operating runway.

More data is coming to . . . [more]

The European Community has placed a new online front end on its law-related offerings, aiming to make it easier to find what you want amid the welter of languages, systems, and regulations. The recently launched European e-Justice Portal contains sections directed at the public, businesses, the legal profession, and the judiciary. Within the Legal Profession section are the following resources:

• Law – providing general information and links with respect to the laws of the union, member states, and international treaties
• Case law – offering links to databases containing judgments for these various jurisdictions (and notably lacking any references to WorldLII

. . . [more]