Leo Adler, national affairs director of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center has been appointed as a member to the Federal Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security. The group will work with the federal government to develop measures relating to national security. Its first meeting will take place in early March in Ottawa. The Friends group has been very active in highlighting online instances of hate and racist material.

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CBC Radio 3 sees overhaul
CBC Radio will undertake a comprehensive restructuring of CBC Radio 3 to give it an increased focus on radio programming while maintaining a history of innovation on the web. As part of the re-alignment, according to a media release, Radio 3’s web strategy will change. Its NewMusicCanada.com, RootsMusicCanada.com and JustConcerts.com will be merged and re-launched as part the new online home for Radio 3. CBCRadio3.com will be discontinued in its magazine format after publication of its March 4 issue.

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Macromedia has unveiled a new version of its ColdFusion software, codenamed Blackstone, to ease the creation of web-based, interactive applications for mobile phones and other handheld devices

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A Toronto start-up company is hoping to strike deals with cablecos and oth-ers to rapidly move its interactive set-top box into North American homes. Following a trial with a Virginia-based wireless cableco, SBS Interactive Inc. is pursuing a dual licensing/retail strategy for its Duo technology – hardware and application software that put users into virtual environments. The system is touted as having extensive educational and entertainment potential, and SBS executives are now trying to put the product into enough homes to make it worthwhile for third parties to create compelling content.

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Digital signage – networked advertising screens that catch consumers’ eyes indoors and out – is set to become mainstream as prices for the technology plummet, participants at a recent conference heard. At the Digital Signage Inaugural Summit in Toronto on February 9 and 10, speakers from national manufacturers and small advertising shops outlined their successful case studies. The past year and a half has seen an explosion in the number of digital signage marketing campaigns, fuelled in part by a growing awareness of the cost savings possible by networking in-store advertising and eliminating the need to manually change paper signs or replace DVD/VCR in-store promos.

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The constitutionality of the levy scheme on blank CDs may again be debated judicially if the Supreme Court of Canada opts to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling by the Retail Council of Canada (RCC), supported by a phalanx of deep-pocketed retailers. The large chains of stores filed a leave to appeal application with the highest court on February 14, two months after the Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) found that the royalty scheme that applies a hefty levy to blank media such as CDs to compensate music copyright holders was not a tax. On the same day, the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), which administers the levy, filed its own application for an appeal of the same December 14 ruling, arguing that the earlier court ruling improperly removed the levy on a broad swath of devices, including a $25 surcharge on appliances such as the Apple iPod.

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A delay in securing a carriage agreement has likely benefited Jeffrey Elliott, who will soon launch BiteTV, a short-form entertainment digital specialty TV channel that will rely heavily on mobile video content and SMS to beef up its interactivity. Elliott has inked a distribution deal with Rogers Communications Inc. for the channel, originally called Glassbox (CNM, Feb. 7/02).

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