Canadian Youth Flirt With Online Danger

CANADIAN YOUTH KNOW OF ONLINE DANGERS BUT…

A new survey, released today, of more than 1,000 Canadian youth aged 9-17 by Microsoft Canada Co. and Youthography, revealed surprising results of their Internet habits.

The results show that while young Canadians are aware of potential dangers online, many of them still engage in risky behaviour.

For the most part, youth rely on the Internet to communicate with friends and family, research information for homework and play games. They are concerned about Internet safety and more than three-quarters of them are very careful about the personal information they give out online.

The good news is that parents are becoming more engaged in their children’s online activities, compared to previous findings, with 84% of respondents saying they have had a discussion with their parents about the potential dangers of risky online behaviour. Eighty-six percent say their parents have taken measures to ensure they are safe online, such as locating the computer in visible locations like the family room or kitchen, rather than in a child’s room.

The bad news is that despite all this awareness, many youth still engage in risky online behaviour. The survey identified a number of key areas where Canadian youth continue to put themselves at risk, including:

Social Networking

·        Youth post personal information for public view, such as a profile picture (39%), home town (16%), name of school (20%), relationship status (22%), and e-mail address (21%) to social networking sites. Sharing more than one of these pieces of data can allow predators to easily uncover someone’s real identity.

·        30% of youth have lied about their age on a social networking site, 15% have pretended to be someone they are not, and more than 30% have accepted a friend request from a stranger.

Adult Content and Sexual Behaviour

·        1 in 4 males use search engines to find adult sexual content. 

·        More than 20% of youth visit sites that have pictures or videos showing violent acts, fighting, or racist content.

Cyberbullying

·        40% of youth have been bullied online, up from Microsoft’s research in 2004 where 25% respondents reported being cyberbullied. 16% admit to being the bully and of those, 50% say they did it because they were bullied first.

·        In general, 67% believe others bully online because they can do it without getting caught and 63% believe that the same kids who bully online usually bully in person.

Online Gaming

·        1 in 5 of those who play games in online communities has made contact (phone, email, in–person) with someone they have only ever met online gaming.

·        1 in 4 youth has been harassed when online gaming.

 

Online Behaviour

·        Forty-five percent of teens and 27% of tweens go to cyberspace to escape their problems, avoid family, deal with stress, relieve anxiety, deal with sadness or depression or feed their online addiction.

·        Youth, especially tweens are concerned about online safety, more so than drugs, alcohol, smoking, body image or sexually transmitted diseases.

 

“This is Microsoft Canada’s fourth iteration of online safety research and we believe this study offers one of the most comprehensive looks yet at the online activities of Canadian youth including gaming, cyberbullying and social networking,” said Gavin Thompson, Director of Corporate Citizenship, Microsoft Canada. “There are many encouraging results in the research, including the fact that youth rank online safety as a very important issue and that a majority of youth are making smart choices online. Despite this good news, many youth still engage in risky online behaviour. Microsoft Canada has made online safety and security one of our highest priorities and we recognize that as a leader in our industry we have a responsibility to do all we can to make it a safer place – especially for our children.”

In some ways I am not surprised of the risky behaviour of young Canadians. They are aware of the risk factours online, but continue to show more trust or simply think they won’t be the ones directly affected by online dangers.

According to numerous previous studies, it takes only 20 minutes for a stranger online to gain the trust of a young person.  

“It is important for parents to be involved in their children’s lives, which includes their on-line and videogame activities, as much as knowing about their friends, sports, music lessons and other things going on in their lives. It is also important to educate youth about the positives and the pitfalls of the cyberworld – but to do so, adults need to understand it first and to see how it has influenced their own activities, family values and work actions,” said Dr. Bruce Ballon, Head of the Adolescent Clinical Education Service (ACES) for Problem Gambling, Gaming and Internet Use at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

To read more about the research please see the Fact Sheet.

To read more about Microsoft Canada’s online safety initiatives and Microsoft Corporation’s continued focus on helping to create safe and secure technologies and increasing awareness amongst Canadians, please click here.

 

This Internet Safety Report was prepared for Microsoft Canada Co. by Youthography, January 2009

Youthography conducted online, representative random sample surveys of 1,065 children age 9-17 across Canada.

With a representative sample of N=1,000, the results are considered accurate to within +/- 3.0 percentage points, 19 times out of 20

 

This DSLR thinks it’s Photoshop!

 

New Olympus E-620 and E-30 Art Filters applied while you shoot

 

 NEW DSLR GET’S ARTISTIC-Olympus pushes the envelope one more time with the release of the unique and affordable E-620 12 megapixel DSLR, available in Canada this May, for $799.99 (body) and $899.99 with  ED 14-42mm f3.5/5.6 Zuiko Digital Zoom Lens.

I have not been able to play with one yet, but if it’s anything like its E-30 12 MP pre-cursor I have been using for the past month, released late last year, this camera is a win-win-win-win-win.

Why?

-It breaks the 10 megapixel barrier the past Olympus DSLR’s have been content with. Albeit, a touch more digital noise, when pushing the ISO to its limits, but the consistently excellent mechanical IS (image stabilization) modes make up for that. There are three IS modes: a 2D for general shooting and the other two allowing for horizontal and vertical panning keeping one axis sharp. They work so good, your tripod will be lonely again.

-It comes with six art filter settings, applied to the picture as you take it. Effects vary,  from grainy monochrome to pin-hole, saturated colours, soft focus and muted colours. Enough to make mundane photos jump back to life.

-Multiple exposures, up to two frames, can be taken live and are recorded as a combined photo (if you shoot in dual Raw + JPEG mode, the original frames are kept too. This requires planning and frankly, unless you are good at it, you are limited on how well your two sequential images will look when exposed on the same “frame.” You have some control on the density of the two overlapping images. What I find most exciting, is the ability to merge (double-expose after the fact) two to three pictures you have already taken on the E-620 with a wide transparency range you can control for each frame. On the way back from a recent trip to Mexico, I spent hours on the return flight, overlapping frames on the E-30 from several hundred frames for some spectacular multiple exposure effects. Overlapping photos later, lets you plan your shots beforehand, like shooting a variety of extra frames so key image elements effectively work with multiple exposures (see my examples on this page). For example, I made sure I shot full moon frames composed differently for combining with a variety of other photos.

-A simple feature, but wanting by every photog shooting in dark places…the camera controls light up!

-Small and light. The E-620 is similar in size to the E-420 with all the extra features, plus improved auto-focus in Live view. It also has a double battery grip option and complete underwater housing.

To me, it was like re-discovering the art of photography in a different dimension.

I don’t want to bore you with all the other camera details, all well thought out, in a small dynamic package with one of the sharpest optics from the get-go.

For a list of all the features of the new E-620, go to: www.olympuscanada.com

Merge several images after they are taken, on the E-30 and new E-620

Feb Blues with some bright spots

Like I predicted, Technology cutbacks and job losses are starting to flood in, just when some analysts said they could see light at the end of the tunnel. Today, I  don’t believe any comment from technology companies saying they are doing OK.

Except for cellphones and games, today’s necessities for survival!

I was at a classy Toronto press launch for Sanyo’s new line of “Dual Camera” Xacti, All-HD camcorders for 2009, out in a few months.

Full 1080p and 720p HD models, Including Waterproof HD Cameras with high still megapixel count will bring consumer all-in-one digicams to a new level. And to show how serious Sanyo is about doing stuff different, many of these models will be out in the original vertical handgun-like model, as well as traditional horizontal ones…still with smart one-handed functionality.  
For more information go to: http://en.ca.sanyo.com/News

TECH TSUNAMI

TECHNOLOGY MEETS REALITY

Well folks, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Just when you thought technology would somehow escape the big black recession hole that has been consuming people, jobs, business and investments, came the first Tech wave of troubling news.

Microsoft is talking louder on expense cuts, including layoffs. The software giant will not be selling as many software licenses to computer makers and businesses will skip an upgrade to a new OS or back-Office system. Nortel officially fizzled to penny stock and Circuit City is closing its doors in the U.S., letting go of 30,000 workers.

Google is laying off 100 folks, which for a company of that size, is small change….but these 100 employees were recruiters!

Technology companies work on a different timeline than brick and mortar businesses. A furniture store for example, feels the pinch the same month consumers are spending less. So would, as we all know by now, car makers.

But technology produces stuff anywhere from six months to a year in advance, under earlier approved budgets and expectations.

The next few months will show the end of that previously healthy cycle and the beginning of today’s economic reality that people cutting back on technology, from enterprise to consumers, will not spend like the last cycle.

That means the chip makers, computer makers and IT business are realizing they won’t be selling as much this next year.

The result?

Warehouses are filling up with an overflow of electronic goods from TVs to stereos, DVD and Blu ray players and computers. And there is a wave of new consumer models coming this way in the spring.  

Hang on to your keyboards folks cause there will be more tech companies making bad news in the next few months.

New Year

Well folks here we are into another year and here’s hoping you all have a healthy, happy and virus, phishing and spam-free year!

Off course this is too much to hope for, especially on the security side of things. It seems people have a better chance of keeping healthy than their PCs do!

Check out my tech wish-list for 2009 in my Edmonton Journal Column at:

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Technology/techie+utopian+vision/1137592/story.html

CES IN TOUGH TIMES?

I am heading down to the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week to mix it up with the movers and shakers in technology and will be reporting from the site. Sure there’s parties and receptions but I am just as excited walking the far edges of the exhibit halls looking for the small vendours with cool ideas. 

Needless to say the tough economy has also affected technology companies and it will be interesting to see how CES play out this year. I know fewer reporters are going this year and that is no surprise.

This time last year it was impossible to find a decent hotel room…even now, less than a week away, there are lot’s of rooms available with new discounts. The best gage of how things are going in Vegas are the cabbies…they have an amazing network of tracking the city that never sleeps economy. 

 

ZUNE WOES FOR CANADIANS

What surprised me more than Microsoft’s original Zune player skipping a beat over a leap year fixable programming bug, was the fact that a portable player can last three years! I use Zunes and frankly, I like them…they are solidly made and have a faster interface than iPods.

My biggest Zune beef, as a Canadian, is not being able to buy music online directly from the Zune Marketplace, open only to U.S. Zune users. Microsoft Canada officials have explained to me the complicated politics of getting agreements with artists and music publishers for a Canadian Zune Marketplace, not to mention the fact that the local iTune and all the other Windows compatible music download sites have most of the market share.

Microsoft Canada goes to great lengths explaining to me that unlike the U.S., more Canadians buy albums than digitally downloaded music. That may be strangely true, but according to the last Nielsen Co.’s year-end figures, more than 70% of  U.S. music transactions were track downloads, outselling albums by a ratio of 2.5 to 1. The report says total album sales dropped to 428.4 million, 14% fewer than in 2007, 45% down since 2000.

There’s even more benefits for U.S. Zune Marketplace members. A Zune Pass subscription which gives Zune owners access to millions of tracks for $14.99 a month now allows them to keep 10 tracks a month for free. Unlike the unlimited plan which restricts transferring music to a PC or burning CDs, the free songs let you do that and more. Unlike the unlimited plan where you lose all songs once you stop the subscription, these song give-aways are yours to keep.

Sorry folks, I have to go analog and buy myself another album for my Zune…

DARK CLOUDS AND LIGHT CLOUDS

NEW MICROSOFT OS IN CLOUD NINE

I am in Los Angeles at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) where Microsoft is announcing and showing new software and services that usually is for geeks. But this time there’s going be some exciting stuff for consumers and enterprise-end folks.

Worldwide media, including myself, were invited early for a preview of the, now official Windows 7. We were shown some cool new features in an immersive day-long session. I wish I could tell you what I saw, but attending media had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that lifts  this Wednesday 9 am EST.

Suffice to say, the Microsoft Windows 7 team, 1000-strong, have some cool new tricks up their sleeve for the next Windows OS, sort of being planned to be sort of ready by early 2010. Maybe.

Can’t tell you more, I wish I could, not to mention all this cloud stuff every Microsoft employee here is giddy about. So, check out the online news on Windows 7 and Microsoft’s version of cloud computing this Wednesday.

PRICE ADUSTMENT ON TECH GOODS IN CANADA COMING SOON

Just had a chat with Steve Boone from the Edmonton mymacdealer.com shop who is predicting some dark clouds about to hit Canada…not the Microsoft kind but a jolt of reality on how much more expensive it’s going to be to buy tech hardware here in November. With the huge drop of the Canadian dollar against the U.S. buck you can expect some harsh increases.

Currently, a new Apple MacBook Pro sells HP Pavilion dv7-1000 for $2,149 CDN off the Canadian Apple site. That’s $1,675 US compared to $1,949 US on the U.S. Apple site. So while Americans can get great deals up here with more than 15 per cent savings, we are stuck, again. If you are planning to buy a PC soon, or other pricey hardware, I would consider doing so before November.

BLACKBERRY HAS FEELINGS

The Storm senses physical orientation, automatically adjusting the screen to work best, as in the full QWERTY touch and tactile feel keyboard shown here.

This was an exciting week for BlackBerry lovers who secretly suffer from touch screen envy. The big surprise wasn’t that the new BlackBerry Storm (up to now, it was called Thunder) was out so soon, but that Canadian CDMA cellphone providers were carrying it.

 

This means that Telus and Bell have more clout than Rogers when it comes to getting the next hottest smart phone – even one from Waterloo-based Research in Motion – or that Rogers simply passed. What do you think?

The best news about the Storm to me was that it is a World phone with full GSM capabilities right up to 3G, so who cares who carries it? I know Rogers and Fido have a good thing going with being GSM, available even on the moon, but CDMA, for all its battery guzzling features, offer better quality voice. Did you know that the already impressive talk and standby time on the Storm is even longer when in GSM mode? You will actually get the best of both cellular worlds with the Storm.

Telus was first to announce the new Storm in Canada but it didn’t take long for Bell to play catch up with a “me too” release later in the afternoon last Wednesday. The two competing CDMA companies, who are also partners in implementing the 3G and future 4G infrastructures in Canada, got into a contest of sorts on who would be first to actually deliver the phone.

Like, who cares folks? They both will have it before Christmas, so what’s a week here or there?

The Storm will not have the two-finger pinch effect of the iPhone – that’s a killer patent feature for Apple – but it’s kind of funny that RIM is so going out of its way to make its touch screen Storm behave… like a real keyboard, with fewer touch mistakes. You will have to press a little harder once the letter highlights on the first touch to actually make that key work, accompanied by a tactile feedback sensation.

I hope the Storm gives a better HTML experience than previous BlackBerries that can’t play most of the online videos. Despite it being the newest gee-whiz RIM gadget, it should not sell for more than $200 (with a 3 year contract) if it wants to be embraced by everyday consumers. Don’t forget, it has a bigger screen but does not carry pricey items like a real keyboard, trackball or WiFi, the later being a let-down for me. Sure, I get a great deal with Rogers data plans, $25 for 500 MB, for my Bold (not long ago, Rogers would only give you 4 MB for the same money) but I find that in WiFi mode, the online experience is much faster than 3G cell mode.

Still, can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Google “BlackBerry Storm” for the online RIM, Telus and Bell sites. 

 

The week that was

MISCOSOFT HOLIDAY GOODIES

I was in Toronto last week, checking out Santa’s helpers at the Microsoft hardware workshop. I must admit, some of the designs and functionality impressed me and I am not very forgiving on Microsoft mice of the past. Well now they have some fancy blue light models coming out that work on just about any surface the traditional red laser mouse starts losing itself on. I saw cool tiny web cams and an eye-catching portable mouse that folds over for storage. Honest, I thought I had a flip phone. So I put first dibs on the next model that comes with a Skype enabled Bluetooth speaker and microphone. You read it here first.

I got to see the new larger capacity Zunes too and discuss new features on the recent Zune 3 upgrade, for both the player and the PC software. Zunes now have games to play! One neat feature is being able to tag a song you listen to on your Zune player radio. When you synch it later at home, wirelessly through WiFi or with USB cable, the software directs you to where you can buy the audio CD that contains the song. Hmmm…buy audio CD, there’s a blast from the past! Microsoft Canada says Canadians buy more audio CDs than online music. Let me get this right. Use cutting edge digital audio players to buy audio CDs. I am sure the Zune Canada folks will change their “tune” when the longwaited  Zune Canada Marketplace finnaly get’s going.  

Geez, you guys. You have a sharp looking and working media player going and unless you deliver the full experience in Canada soon, you are encouraging users to fend for their own digital music, and most of it btw, illegally gotten and shared. Not to mention slowly eroding allegiance from your fan base. When Zune Marketplace opens here, Zuners might keep away sticking to their audio CDs instead!

LENOVO HOT DEALS

Lenovo just announced its new line of ultra small and light ThinkPads, one of them an irresistible Tablet PC, using the new Intel Centrino 2 chip family. But if you want a great deal on the slightly older but still excellent line of ThinPads and Tablets check out some hot hot hot prices on www.lenovo.com/ca  with phenomenal discounts. These deals are so hot, more than a third off, for still very decent and current quality performing laptops, that even I ordered one system (as a reviewer, I live from one loaner PC to another or build my own). I have not done that since the first 386 I bought back in the late early 90s for “only” $4,000!

ONE MORE APPLE SHOP

Calgary just got its first genuine Apple store, with crazy overenthusiastic staff, following Edmonton’s recent Apple store at WEM. I must say the service is most excellent, making shoppers feel like a winners with well-trained and knowledgeable staff. I think Microsoft would have been better received from consumers too if it had  a bunch of Windows Stores in North America. Instead we are being bombarded by touchy good feelie ads featuring cameos from BillG and regular folks who are, you guessed it, PC users. Too late guys, Vista is still not appreciated. BTW, I checked out the most recent lapbooks or NetPCs from Acer, Asus, Dell and HP and they all run on Windows XP, or Linux.

Linux store openings…now there is an idea!

FREE GOOGLE GETS WHAT IT WANTS

GOOGLE ALERT!

The new Google web Chrome browser released this week has a few dirty secrets. The Auto-Suggest feature, on by default, is helpful to users who like the dynamic pointers a Chrome browsing session offers, but at a price.

With this feature on, Google’s Big Brother is watching your every move. Even if you just type, it records your every keystroke before your press “enter” in the Omnibox.  It also records your computer’s address, so now you can become a permanent stat on Google servers.

You can avoid this data-snooping by turning the auto-suggest feature off or use a different search engine while using Chrome as your browser. Or switch to Chrome’s incognito mode.

That’s nice for Google to build up its data base, to help cement itself s as the super search engine and browser of all time.

This becomes another obstacle for Microsoft’s Live search and a scene stealer for the recently released IE 8 beta browser.

Lesson learned? Google is great, but there is a price for its free stuff some users may not want to pay in the future.

MOTOROLA

Motorola Canada showed off dozens or phones from its current and new product line to invited journalists in Toronto this week. Most impressive was the MOTOROKR E8, now the flagship phone for Motorola’s music-playing cellphones, available at  Rogers. It uses touch technology that vibrates back when you press on lighted buttons. But its ability to seemingly morph its onscreen buttons to suit the application it runs just rocks. For example, when you switch from phone mode to music playing mode, the phone pad disappears, replaced by music playing buttons like play, pause, next song etc. Or if you switch to digital camera mode, only the shooting controls show onscreen.

To see a demo of the phone in action, kindly shown by Stephen Orr, VP, strategy and Business Development with Motorola Canada go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asda_-B9Tv0

Surprisingly, Motorola also showed the almost ready for Canada MOTOZINE ZN5 5 megapixel digital camera phone using Kodak chip and software technology including KODAK PERFECT TOUCH for improving photos, on-camera. Originally slated for sale in China, this product caught the attention of other countries, including Canada. Expect to see it under Rogers or Fido soon. One ultra cool ZN5 feature is the panorama mode, which automatically tells you when the second and third frames are lined up for the next shot. A recent showing of high quality poster prints from the ZN5 at Kodak’s Holiday show in New York this summer blew me away in sharpness, clarity and colour detail.

We were also treated to some of clever and amusing movie shorts created by the Motorola sponsored Talent Lab whose selected works is showing as Motorola trailers preceding film screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. Aspiring Canadian film makers were given a Motorola movie-capable cellphone and two weeks to complete a short movie project. Motorola also sponsors the For the Reel program, with MTV showings, which encourages amateur film makers across the country to create Vanguard Progamme-themed short films on Motorola movie-capable handsets.

Some of the previous shorts we saw like Mathew Swanson’s Tic Tac Toe and Pam Mills’ Pat’s First Kiss, showed it’s not the equipment that matters, but what you can do with it.

A HIGH-TECH WEEK

HOW TIME FLIES

Check out my comparison of three new touch phones available in Canada at www.edmontonjournal/technology The iPhone 3G from Rogers, the Samsung Instinct from Bell and the HTC Touch Diamond from Telus. Is there a clear winner? Not exactly. And guess which smartphone can’t handle Canadian winters!

I was chatting it up with Greg Milligan from the Microsoft Canada Windows Mobile group for this feature. Although he was all excited about Windows Mobile 6.1 which many  smartphones today are running on, we reminisced on the good old days when Microsoft’s first Pocket PC came out…February 2003. Seems like a long time ago, but I remember when Microsoft employees wouldn’t even think of parting with their tiny BlackBerry devices that first introduced mass wireless instant email. Now they are two competing camps with some co-operative crossovers.

It’s interesting to note that the some 22,000 applications available for Windows Mobile devices, similarly-priced to the Apples App Store for the iPhone, work on a very different business model. While Apple collects a percentage of online sales, Microsoft makes most of its third party mobile softawre sales from the initial licensing sales of it Mobile OS. Milligan said that according to IDC stats, Microsoft, this fiscal year showed double the overall market growth rate (up 32 per cent) selling more than 18 million Mobile licenses in FY08.

But Apple is catching up. In the short time their online App Store opened up, since the launch of the iPhone 3G, there were more than 10 million applications downloaded in three days. Currently there are more than 2,000 iPhone applications online.

Two different business models…Microsoft’s third-party developers who have to go through old school (but still a money maker) investing time and money to become Microsoft developers and Apple’s “just bring your applications in and we take 30 per cent from the sale.” Let’s see where things stand a year from now, OK?

CUTTING THE CORD

Intel had lot’s of technology to show at their Developers Form in San Francisco last Thursday. The coolest technology was the wireless lighting of a 60 watt lamp using Intel’s “wireless resonant energy link,” similar to glass breaking ability of some singers. Although this was big news, credit is due for the early MIT work, announced in 2006, done on a similar project shown last year, where folks walked, unscathed, between an electrical energy transmitter and a similarly lighted bulb.

Can you imagine the possibilities? Justin Rattner, Intel’s CTO, saw a future where laptops would not need a battery. They would simply receive electrical energy wirelessly. So…think of a world with no electrical cords, just a whole pile of magnetic fields charging everything wirelessly. Hold that thought.

Check the chip maker’s other announcements, including its quest to keep Moore’s chip doubling Law alive, as the industry nears the physical limits on how small chip transistors can get. 

• Intel’s first-ever mobile-focused quad-core laptop workstation – the Intel Core 2 Extreme processor which contains four cores and uses only 45 watts of power
• Development of the interactive classrooms and whiteboards using Nintendo Wii technology, the Wii remote, which creates a low-cost interactive whiteboard
• Identification technology that uses mobile devices with a built-in camera and special software that reads the bar code on health ID cards to prevent identity-related medical errors
• A partnership between Intel and Yahoo to create a Widget Channel
• Announcement of Intel’s Media Processor CE 3100 using system on chips (SoCs) technology to fuse the Internet and TV experience
• Core i7 processor using turbo an energy efficient, high-performance server featuring Intel Hyper-Threading Technology
• Intel Corporation Chairman Craig Barrett announced Intel will award four $100,000 prizes to the most innovative ideas for unmet needs in education, health care, economic development, and the environment

MICROSOFT CHOKES

Microsoft Live Labs opened up an online site, http://livelabs.com/photosynth/ that stitches hundreds of uploaded related pictures, for free, into a larger photo you can zoom or pan across. This cool technology proved to be overwhelming for the Microsoft photosynth web site which had to temporarily close down from a massive influx of photos. Talk about causing your very own Denial of Service Attack with one smart photo idea!