Archive: November, 2007

This Sunday, eight or nine teams from Victoria’s tech community face off against each other to raise money for the Mustard Seed Food Bank. Organized by Metamend Account Manager Matthew Bowes, the first of what looks like a quarterly Metamend Floor Hockey Challenge easily reached its goal of raising a quick $5K for our local food bank.

The concept is fairly simple. Each team puts up a $500 entry fee, the entirety of which is donated to the Food Bank via VIATeC. The addition of a ninth team allows the sale of a by (or free pass) to a later round of playoffs and an additional opportunity to give to charity.

The event is being held at the Boys and Girls’ Club at 1240 Yates St. (beside the fire hall) starting at 10:00am.

Each game is made up of three nine-minute periods with a 90-second break between. Each team will have a minimum of $175 donated to the Food Bank in their company name with the winning team getting a $3600 donation made in their name.
The teams in the tournament come from:
Metamend / Enquisite | Osler Systems | ParetoLogic Inc | Schneider Electric | Reliable Controls Corporation | SEASTAR CHEMICALS Inc. | Telus Communications | Contech Inc

An incident earlier this morning has taught me a bit more about advertising through Facebook.

In case you’re interested, Chris Chan from Vancouver BC is selling his World of Warcraft account for a mere $900. I found out about it because his ad appeared against my Facebook profile which was weird considering I do not know Chris Chan and do not participate in WoW.

Consisting of, “70 mage BT/MH attuned,70 druid w/ rare kara mount!”, the sale of Chan’s WoW account has been broadcast to his friends and to the friends of his friends as well as being displayed in the Vancouver BC network marketplace. Though I have never played or even seen the multiplayer universe known as World of Warcraft, Chan’s advertisement was displayed to my Facebook account because a close friend of mine is an avid WoW gamer.

While it was sort of cool to see how the Marketplace system filtered an ad to my account, the PartyPoker pop-under that appeared after clicking Chan’s ad wasn’t so cool. It’s worth monitoring pop-under activity to see if Facebook relies on this type of advertising or if the folks working for PartyPoker have found a creative but spammy method of inserting their content-calls into the link-strings of Facebook profiles. (A third, more sinister scenario has PartyPoker adware on my computer but that is less likely as I use several adware scrubbers and virus scanners)