Archive for February, 2005

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Home sales drop in January

Friday, February 4th, 2005

Potential buyers get more time to consider their purchases

Bruce Constantineau
Sun

Lower Mainland housing sales dropped off last month and the number of homes for sale went up, giving potential buyers more time to consider their purchases, the Greater Vancouver and Fraser Valley real estate boards reported Thursday.

Greater Vancouver Multiple Listing Service sales fell to 1,681 units in January, a 14-per-cent drop from January 2004, while the Fraser Valley board reported an even steeper decline, with sales falling 18 per cent to 842 units.

“It’s a good healthy balanced market now, and there’s nothing to indicate it’s taking a turn in the other direction,” said Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver president Andrew Peck. “It’s just not as panicky as it was at this time last year.”

The number of new Greater Vancouver listings increased by nearly 90 per cent, from 1,766 in December to 3,342 in January, while Fraser Valley listings grew by almost 50 per cent to 1,874.

Peck said the falling sales volume should not be considered unusual since it follows a period of record activity.

“It’s absolutely normal to see the market pull back a bit from the record activity we saw a year ago,” he said. “There’s just not as many buyers out there who are lining up, but there are still buyers out there.”

The MLS statistics show purchasers usually take more time to look around the market before committing to buying a property.

The average time it takes for a downtown Vancouver condominium to be sold on the MLS has risen from 19 days to 31 days during the past year, while it now takes an average of 41 days for an East Vancouver condo to sell, more than double the 20 days it took a year ago.

Both boards said prices have remained steady, with the average price of a detached Fraser Valley house rising by 7.1 per cent during the past year to $351,000, and the benchmark price of a detached Greater Vancouver home climbing by 8.6 per cent to $482,200.

Peck said second- and third-time buyers are driving a significant portion of the market now, with many buying mid-priced and higher-priced homes.

While Greater Vancouver housing sales fell in January, the market still had a few hot spots. There were 110 Burnaby apartment units sold during the month, a 55-per-cent increase over the same month last year, while the number of East Vancouver townhouses sold rose by 54 per cent to 34.

Most Fraser Valley markets experienced year-over-year volume declines in January.

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Red-hot housing market shows signs of slowing down

Friday, February 4th, 2005

Province

Real-estate markets in Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley are beginning to cool, according to January sales figures released yesterday.

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reports that overall sales of detached, attached and apartment properties declined by 14 per cent last month to 1,681 units, compared with 1,954 sales during January 2004.

Apartment sales decreased by 11.2 per cent to 741, but the benchmark price increased by 11.7 per cent to $238,523. Sales of attached properties declined by 16.6 per cent to 277 units compared with 332 units in the previous January, while the benchmark price increased 13.9 per cent to $309,798. The sale of 663 detached properties represented a 15.9-per-cent decline, while the benchmark price of $482,233 represented an 8.6-per-cent increase over January 2004.

Despite the sales declines, board president Andrew Peck says the market is balanced, with active sales and a “healthy supply” of listings.

Meanwhile, the average price of a single-family detached home in the Fraser Valley rose by seven per cent in January to $351,500, compared with $328,099 a year earlier. The average townhouse price was $232,916 (up 13.8 per cent); the average apartment price was $136,143 (up 11.6 per cent).

JANUARY HOME PRICES

Detached house Townhouse Apartment

Jan-05 Jan-04 change Jan-05 Jan-04 change Jan-05 Jan-04 change

Abbotsford $264,000 $249,000 6.0% $166,000 $142,000 16.9% $109,000 $101,500 7.4%

Burnaby $445,000 $421,000 5.7% $310,000 $272,000 14.0% $206,400 $174,500 18.3%

Coquitlam $419,000 $367,000 14.2% n/a $207,900 – $188,000 $143,900 30.6%

Delta – North $313,500 $287,500 9.0% $185,000 $145,000 27.6% $68,500 n/a –

Delta – South $391,750 $413,000 -5.1% n/a n/a – n/a n/a –

Langley $335,000 $298,900 12.1% $240,000 $205,900 16.6% $147,000 $130,000 13.1%

Maple Ridge – Pitt Meadows $332,500 $305,000 9.0% $192,250 $185,000 3.9% n/a n/a –

Mission $245,000 $228,900 7.0% $120,000 $84,500 42.0% $75,000 $78,000 -3.8%

New Westminster n/a n/a – n/a n/a – $161,900 $119,900 35.0%

North Vancouver $607,500 $510,000 19.1% $382,500 $337,000 13.5% $269,500 $229,000 17.7%

Port Coquitlam $349,000 $339,000 2.9% n/a n/a – n/a $123,000 –

Richmond $463,400 $426,000 8.8% $295,000 $305,000 -3.3% $175,000 $184,000 -4.9%

Sunshine Coast $284,000 $220,000 29.1% n/a n/a – n/a n/a –

Surrey $351,000 $328,000 7.0% $232,000 $194,000 19.6% $124,000 $116,913 6.1%

Vancouver East $412,500 $384,000 7.4% $358,000 $258,000 38.8% $187,000 $136,000 37.5%

Vancouver West $835,000 $729,000 14.5% $540,000 $350,000 54.3% $300,160 $272,000 10.4%

West Vancouver – Howe Sound $847,500 $863,000 -1.8% n/a n/a – n/a n/a –

White Rock $477,500 $410,000 16.5% $272,000 $285,000 -4.6% $175,000 $171,000 2.3%

Sources: fraser valley real estate board, real estate board of greater vancouver

© The Vancouver Province 2005

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These folks weren’t made of money — but their house was

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

John Mackie
Sun

VANCOUVER – Be careful when you’re tearing down an old house. You never know what you’ll find in the walls.

Recently I went with my friend Murray Bush to see an old house in Kitsilano that had been sold. Another friend had said there were a couple of old stoves in which I might be interested.

The stoves were indeed old, but they were heavy and seemed to be a little too much hassle to move. The house was a small, nondescript stucco job from the 1930s, and didn’t have any outstanding architectural features. But the interior was brimming with all sorts of stuff, partly because it had been occupied by the same family since it was built.

I wound up buying a car-load of old magazines from the 1930s to the ’70s for $10, then bought an old bicycle seat for another $10. There were so many magazines, the back end of Murray‘s Volvo sagged visibly from the weight.

On the way out the door, I asked if we could look upstairs. The homeowners said sure, and I climbed the stairs and found more cool old junk, including a couple of old wood- cabinet radios.

Alas, the radios were pretty trashed. But one of the homeowners said there was another old radio shoehorned into the rear of the attic. I climbed in and found a tall Lyric radio, probably from the 1920s.

It was wedged in pretty tight, but I managed to move it near the door to the attic. But a wooden brace got in the way, and it looked like it might be impossible to get it out.

Murray said “Let me at it.” He proceeded to rip out some insulation, then shimmied the radio into a bedroom. I offered one of the homeowners $20 for all three radios.

Murray came out of the attic and said: “I think you should give it to us for free.”

The homeowner looked at him, and Murray said: “This fell out of the insulation.”

Murray handed him a stack of money, encased in a clear plastic bag. As it turns out, the family that owned the house had found $156,000 hidden away in the house by their parents, who are now deceased.

Apparently, the parents didn’t trust banks so they kept their money hidden in the nooks and crannies of their house, which was built by their contractor dad.

The homeowner had a very happy look on his face when we left.

He gave us the radios for free.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

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Wal-Mart pitches new ‘green’ store – doc.

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

Windmills, geothermal heating proposed in bid to appease council

Bruce Constantineau
Sun


Proposed Wal-Mart leaves a greener footprint

Big-box boom Source: Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart Canada has unveiled a $30-million-plus, environmentally correct design — with windmills, geothermal heating and 250 dogwood trees — for its controversial store on Vancouver‘s Southeast Marine Drive.

The design aims to appease Vancouver city council members who in 2003 told the U.S.-based retailing giant to come up with the “greenest” design possible if it wants a chance to build its first store in Vancouver.

“It’s an earnest response to the challenges council put before us and it’s certainly a design that recognizes the sensibilities of Vancouver,” Wal-Mart representative Kevin Groh said in an interview.

Vancouver architect Peter Busby spent 22 months on the unique plans, which were submitted Wednesday to city officials. Public hearings and city council consideration are still months away but Busby said he’s excited at the prospect of Wal-Mart building its first green Canadian store in Vancouver.

“It’s a breakthrough project,” he said in an interview.

“It’s one thing to do an expensive demonstration building for a university, but to bring it right down to the ground where people touch and feel it every day is very satisfying.”

Busby said Wal-Mart has built three green U.S. stores in the past decade but none of those has all the features found in the proposed Vancouver store, which are expected to cut energy use by 37 per cent while reducing water use by 48 per cent and carbon dioxide emissions by 40 per cent.

The Wal-Mart proposal in Vancouver has generated considerable public debate for years.

On Wednesday, those opposed to the project said the new “green” design does little to alleviate their basic concern: That the result would still be a mega-

store drawing customers away from the city’s small neighbourhood shopping centres and generating a huge amount of traffic.

But Shirley Chamaschuk, 75, a resident of the area since 1963, was among several who welcomed the proposal Wednesday. “I think it would be great,” she said. “It’s too far [to get to other Wal-Marts].”

The proposed new 120,000-square-foot store features geothermal heating and cooling from a series of 60-foot-deep wells that will be drilled beneath the store. Three windmills on the site will provide about half the power necessary to drive the geothermal system.

The building’s roof features skylights that will reflect daylight back into the store, reducing the need for artificial light. The roof will collect water, with a cistern and pool that will store water for domestic use inside.

Rainwater on the site will drain into the ground naturally, as the parking lot for 755 cars will be made of permeable asphalt that allows water to pass through. Wal-Mart says the development will have an “orchard-like” setting because 250 mature, six-metre-high dogwood trees will be planted throughout the project.

Project developer Darren Kwiatkowski said the new design proves Wal-Mart will do everything it can to gain city approval.

“It’s about retail land use, and whether it’s Zellers or Canadian Tire or Wal-Mart on the label shouldn’t enter into council’s decision,” he said. “The only issue is if this is a good urban design and a good building for the community.”

Groh said the cost of the Vancouver project will be “significantly” higher than other Wal-Mart stores in Canada, which normally cost about $20 million to develop. (The $30-million-plus cost of the proposed new Vancouver store includes $20 million in land costs, so the building itself will cost more than $10 million.)

Groh said some of the expense can be justified by the sales the new store is expected to generate and by the value of being able to monitor the effectiveness of the sustainability features.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the U.S. parent company, recorded global sales last year of $256 billion US — a sum larger than the gross domestic product of Austria.

Last month, Surrey council approved plans to build a Wal-Mart in South Surrey following a stormy public hearing that stretched into the following morning. Wal-Mart has also been rejected in Surrey, with a proposed Scott Road store turned down in 2000.

Canadian Tire, meanwhile, has proposed building a new 130,000-square-foot store near the Vancouver Wal-Mart development — on the old Chrysler Canada property on Southeast Marine Drive between Ontario and Manitoba streets. The project would feature a Canadian Tire store and about 125,000 square feet of other retail stores.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE PROPOSED WAL-MART SITE?:

I don’t need any more shopping around here. It’s a lot of garbage you don’t need.

Alice Gmuer, 58

Nurse and local resident

I think it would be great. That traffic coming back [from other Wal-Marts] is horrible.

Shirley Chamaschuk, 75

who has lived in the area since 1963

If people can get what they want at affordable prices, who am I to tell them where they can shop?

Erin Gorby, 28

Arborist who works in the area

Vancouver needs a Wal-Mart, especially here at Main and Marine.

Khurram Butt, 28

taxi driver who lives near the proposed Wal Mart

We have lots of traffic here. More traffic will be coming [if they add a Wal-Mart].

Bhupinder Dhillon, 62

building supply warehouse worker whose house looks onto the proposed site

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

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New South False Creek Development Worth $1.2 Billion

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

City’s 20-year plan envisages parks, a boardwalk, shopping, community centres

Joel Baglole
Sun

An architect’s drawing shows the proposed Athletes Village in southeast False Creek for the 2010 Winter Games

VANCOUVER – The City of Vancouver has put a price tag of $1.2 billion on the cost to transform southeast False Creek from an industrial area into an urban waterfront community over the next 20 years.

The city’s financial planning office has published a report detailing the cost to redevelop 32 hectares of land in the southeast area of False Creek, including the construction of the Athletes Village for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

The report, which will be presented to Vancouver city council on Tuesday, forecasts that it will cost as much as $1.2 billion to overhaul the aging industrial area along False Creek and turn it into a residential centre complete with parks, community centres, daycare facilities, a boardwalk, a boating area and commercial shopping.

The report is an updated financial plan for the False Creek project, which has been on the drawing board for about 25 years, said Ken Bayne, director of financial planning with the City of Vancouver.

“The market will ultimately determine how quickly the site is developed, but the expectation is that this neighbourhood will take 15 to 18 years to build out,” he said.

Vancouver city council was presented with an official development plan for Southeast False Creek on July 26 last year, but requested changes to the plan, including a more attractive waterfront area and the construction of low and mid-rise buildings on the site instead of high-rise towers.

The City of Vancouver owns 20 of the 32 hectares to be developed. The remaining 12 hectares is owned by the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority (TransLink) and private developers.

The financial plan estimates it will cost the city $250 million to build the area’s amenities such as parks, as well as service the 20 hectares of land the city owns with sewers, roads and street lights.

A further $900 million will need to be spent by private developers to service the remaining area and construct a mix of housing in the neighbourhood — from high-end condominiums to homes for low-income residents.

Bayne said the city forecasts it will make a profit of about $85 million by selling the land it owns to private developers after it is serviced.

However, all profits will be put toward the cost of building community amenities such as daycare centres and parks, making the project revenue-neutral for the city.

Private developers welcomed news of the financial plan Thursday, saying it is a step forward.

“We’ve waited patiently year after year for something to happen with this project,” said Michael Audain, chairman of Polygon Homes Ltd., which owns 60,000 square feet of land in the 300 block of West First. “This area is a jewel in the crown of Vancouver, and we’re pleased that the Olympics has finally spurred on this development,” he added.

But developers shouldn’t get too excited. Bayne said the city’s priority is to first rezone and begin building on the tract of land that will house the Olympic Village.

“Most other areas will not be rezoned until after the Olympics,” he said. “This is something that will happen over 18 years, not by 2010.”

When the Olympic Village’s construction will begin, and which developer will build it haven’t been decided, said Bayne.

Public hearings into the proposed financial plan will begin at Tuesday’s city council meeting, said Bayne. Council has scheduled Feb. 14 as a date to continue with the public hearings.

Bayne said he doesn’t know how long the public hearings will take, or if council will approve the financial plan in its current form.

“All I can say is that I don’t expect any decisions will be made on Feb. 1,” he said.

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Downtown Edgewater Casino opens at the Plaza of Nations

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

Marke Andrews
Sun

The new Edgewater Casino at the Plaza of Nations, which opens Thursday, is housed in the old Enterprise Hall building.

CREDIT: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun Edgewater Casino owners, Len Libin (left) and Gary Jackson prepare for Thursday’s opening.

With 30 years between them in the casino business, and a downtown location which should entice city folks to stop driving to the suburbs to gamble, the owners of the new Edgewater Casino are expecting big things from their new venture, which opens Thursday at the Plaza of Nations.

“One big advantage we have over all the casinos here is that, because of the quality of the facility we’re opening, for the first time a casino in Vancouver will appeal to the tourists here,” says Len Libin, who will run Edgewater Casino with partner Gary Jackson.

“Having slot machines, this will be the first time we will have a real opportunity to take advantage of the tourist trade.”

Libin and Jackson have put $20 million into the first phase of the Edgewater facility. Phase Two includes plans to use the 500-seat theatre, once part of Expo 86’s B.C. Pavilion, for film, entertainment, pay-per-view sports events and public speakers. The outdoor plaza stage will also be used for entertainment events.

Libin ran Grand Casino in south Vancouver, which closed just before the Edgewater opening. Many of the Grand Casino employees will be at the new casino. Jackson previously ran Royal Diamond Casino, which closed three years ago.

When Edgewater opens Thursday, it will only be the third casino within city limits. Smaller casinos are located at the Holiday Inn on West Broadway, and at the Mandarin in Chinatown, although Libin says the Mandarin will soon move to Langley. Slot machines will be installed at Exhibition Park, likely in the summer, but the racetrack will not have gaming tables.

Edgewater’s biggest competition comes from suburban gaming houses, in particular River Rock Casino in Richmond, which has 1,000 slot machines, 70 gaming tables and a poker room with 20 tables.

By comparison, Edgewater has the same square footage as River Rock (70,000 square feet), but fewer slots (600), gaming tables (48) and poker tables (four).

“Frankly, I don’t know if you compete with [River Rock],” said Libin. “What we’re going to do is open and offer the best product we can.”

Edgewater is housed in the old glass-exterior Enterprise Hall building at the Plaza of Nations. Because the city has designated the building a legacy structure, which means no changes can be made to the building’s exterior, Vancouver architect Patrick Cotter faced a difficult task when he embarked on a $14 million renovation.

Cotter’s solution was to create an inner membrane, set five feet inside the exterior glass wall, which housed a new heating and ventilation system that would keep the building from acting like a greenhouse.

It would also permit the gaming area to be properly lit inside the membrane.

“In order to meet the operating requirements of the casino, we created a second skin within the building,” said Cotter, who has also designed the Great Canadian Casino in Coquitlam and View Royal Casino in Victoria.

The architect also installed a computer-controlled LED lighting system within the membrane, which can produce various effects, from simulated Northern Lights to strobe effects.

“This was a way we could enclose the space and leave the glass transparent,” said Cotter.

Whereas the Coquitlam and Victoria casinos were theme-oriented, Edgewater is more contemporary.

“We wanted to work with the essential characteristics of the building: downtown location, water, glass, light,” said Cotter. “We wanted it to be fairly crisp and contemporary, and that is not a traditional approach to casino design.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

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Computer transistors’ days may be numbered

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

The devices that replaced vacuum tubes could be succeeded by even smaller crossbar latches

Matthew Fordahl
Sun

 

CREDIT: Eric Risberg, Associated Press

Researchers Duncan Stewart (left), Phil Kuekes and Stan Williams have demonstrated a technology much smaller than today’s tiny transistors at Hewlett-Packard’s company labs in Palo Alto, Calif.
 

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Challenging a basic tenet of the semiconductor industry, researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. have demonstrated a technology that could replace the transistor as the fundamental building block of all computers.

The devices, called crossbar latches, could be made so small that thousands of them could fit across the diameter of a human hair, enabling the high-tech industry to continue to build ever-smaller computing devices that are less expensive than their predecessors.

For years, engineers have been able to pack more and more smaller transistors onto a fingernail-size silicon chip. The rate of integration, first predicted by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, has driven computer performance and prices for more than 30 years.

But the pace of Moore‘s Law can’t continue forever, and the high-tech industry has been scrambling to develop workarounds for the day — expected in a decade or so — when transistor dimensions become too small for the materials commonly used today.

“If we’re going to extend Moore‘s Law for another several decades, we’ve got to have an alternative strategy,” said Phil Kuekes, one of the paper’s authors at HP Labs. “This is the final piece of the puzzle in what HP has been putting together as such a strategy.”

The smallest features of today’s silicon-based transistors are about 90 nanometres long, a nanometre being roughly one hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair. The crossbar latch, by comparison, can work in a space of about 2 to 3 nanometres.

The HP research, reported in Tuesday’s Journal of Applied Physics, scraps the transistor entirely. In its place is basically a series of platinum wires crossed in opposite directions. At the junctions are molecules that in the HP research happen to be steric acid.

“It’s metal and molecules. Nothing else,” Kuekes said. “We’re getting away from the physics of silicon.”

Like in a transistor, an electrical signal that passes through a crossbar latch is manipulated to perform logic functions. The latest research shows that the technology also can be used for amplifying a signal, allowing multiple functions to be applied.

“The power of this device is not when it’s by itself. It’s when it glues together other pieces of logic,” said Duncan Stewart, another HP Labs scientist and study co-author. “As soon as you’re able to do that, we call that a computer.”

The researchers have not glued together multiple crossbar latches, though they say it’s something they’re continuing to pursue. They expect it to be commercially viable as early as 2012. The latches are formed through a specialized stamping process for nano-sized imprints.

They also must persuade an industry built on transistors that an alternative technology can be just as effective, said Stan Williams, director of Quantum Science Research at HP Labs and another of the paper’s co-authors.

“There came to be a mantra that you have to have transistors to build computers,” he said. “A latch is a different way of achieving that same function, but it turns out it has significant advantages over a transistor.”

The crossbar latch not only works at a much smaller scale than a transistor but also can do more, he added.

“In order to do the same thing that a latch can do, you actually need many transistors,” Williams said.

In fact, other researchers have been focused on building molecular transistors, which are much more challenging to build at such a small scale, said James C. Ellenbogen, principal scientist in the Nanosystems Group at the MITRE Corp.

“This may enable the field to proceed toward nanoprocessor demonstrations and applications more rapidly and at lower cost,” he said.

It also could prove to be less expensive to build because engineers can more easily work around defects that arise during manufacturing than with those that occur during silicon fabrication, where defects are avoided at great cost.

But crossbar latches aren’t going to replace today’s silicon chips anytime soon. At first, they would likely be used for memory and later for specialized devices. They also will have to integrate with today’s silicon chips, which

“Transistors will continue to be used for years to come with conventional silicon circuits,” Kuekes said, “but this could someday replace transistors in computers, just as transistors replaced vacuum tubes and vacuum tubes replaced electromagnet relays before them.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

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Microsoft takes on Google, Yahoo with new search engine

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

Gillian Shaw
Sun

After almost two years of developing and testing its own technology, Microsoft launched a new Internet search engine Tuesday in 25 countries and 10 languages.

The move boosts Microsoft’s position in a highly competitive market dominated by Google and Yahoo and while industry analysts say the new search service has some catching up to do, Microsoft promised Tuesday’s launch is only the beginning.

Until it developed its own product, Microsoft was relying on Yahoo’s Inktomi search technology to power searches on its MSN (Microsoft Network) sites. The new search engine fills that gap with Microsoft technology and paves the way for the software giant to challenge the competition in a market that is expected to grow in the U.S. to $3.2 billion US this year, up from last year’s $2.6 billion. By 2009, advertising revenue is expected to reach $5.5 billion.

Niki Scevak, an analyst with Jupitermedia Corp., said the new search engine is “leaps and bounds ahead of the almost Frankenstein approach they had with the partnership.”

“The technology is now under Microsoft’s control,” he said. “The pace of their catch-up is remarkable but it is still catch-up rather than leaping ahead of Yahoo and Google.”

Scevak said search engines are unlike other media in terms of competitive space. While television networks can charge ad rates depending on where they stand relative to competitors in the ratings, money is made selling online advertising when a consumer clicks through to the advertiser’s website.

“It is very democratic,” he said. “The more volume you have directly correlates to how much revenue you have. In search engines it is simply the volume of traffic times the cost per click. There is no premium for being number one.”

The price per click-through on the new MSN search site for ads ranges from 50 cents to $5 US per click. The average click price in the sector is rising, with Jupitermedia predicting it will reach 47 cents in 2009, up from 29 cents in 2003.

Stephen Evans, manager of information services and merchant platform for MSN Canada, said the launch marks an important step for the company.

“This is a first step for Microsoft. We are just starting and we will be investing heavily in doing a lot of new things.”

Evans said it is a key part of Microsoft’s integrated online offerings.

“Our focus is to answer people’s questions quickly and efficiently,” he said. “It’s about the potential of search, that is important for Microsoft.

“Our main goal is to provide consumers with great online experiences and search is a part of that.”

Microsoft has spent some 20 months and $100 million US developing and testing the technology. It has been operating a beta version in recent months as it tested and tweaked the service.

“We have an index of over five billion Web pages and we refresh that index every couple of days,” said Evans.

“We are in a competitive market, but we have built a foundation on which to innovate and we plan to announce a lot of new innovations in the next few months.”

In Canada, the service is available at sympatico.msn.ca, at search.sympatico.msn.ca, or simply by pointing your browser at msn.ca which redirects to the Sympatico/MSN home page.

WHAT THE ENGINE RUNS:

Among the features of the MSN search site:

– A link to Encarta, allowing users to search Microsoft’s online encyclopedia, allowing a free two-hour pass (each visit) to all of Encarta’s premium content.

– A search builder that Evans suggests you “think of as advanced search on steroids.” It offers a number of ways to filter results, to increase the relevance of the sites that are served up.

– In beta testing is a desktop search link, following the lead set by Google’s desktop search function.

– A ranking of results geared to the country you are in.

– Image search allowing users to filter on the basis of such factors as size, colour or black-and-white, and filter out images that are deemed objectionable.

– Searching from other MSN channels, including from MSN Messenger 7 beta in which users can highlight a key word in a message to launch a search.

– News bots in beta that build a page with the most commonly read stories at the time, along with an individualized offering, based on the user’s interests.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

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Mobile MUSE looks to embed worldforum in city streets

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

MARKET I Hand-held devices will

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Identity thieves hit Canadians more often than Americans

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005

Experts unsure of reason, especially since Canadians tend to be more cautious

Michael McCullough
Sun

Canadians report a higher incidence of identity theft even though they are far more cautious than Americans about sharing their personal information, according to a new survey.

Ten per cent of respondents to an EDS Canada Inc. poll in January said they had been victims of identity theft or had experienced a cyber crime resulting from unauthorized access to personal information.

Yet Canadians were far more likely than Americans to demand that companies go the extra mile to safeguard information, a similar EDS poll taken in September in the U.S found. For example, 80 per cent of Canadians said an organization should validate at least three pieces of identification before issuing a client a new password to access an account, compared to just 13 per cent of Americans.

“How come Canadians get ripped off more often? We just can’t explain it right now,” said Michel Brazeau, business leader for EDS in eastern Canada.

He noted Canadian consumers and organizations — including governments — are ahead of their American counterparts at e-banking, applying for services and otherwise sharing information online. As a result, information may be more valuable in Canada, and therefore more attractive to criminals.

Also, “in the U.S. there is a whole lot more in-home marketing,” Brazeau said. Such activity has been severely restricted in Canada since new federal and provincial privacy laws came into effect between 2002 and 2004. Americans are more familiar and comfortable with legitimate telephone and Internet solicitation.

An overwhelming majority of Canadians, 86 per cent, preferred to have their access denied rather than compromise the security of their accounts if an organization cannot verify their identity.

Respondents rated banks and credit card companies the best at safeguarding their identity. Retailers and travel agencies and consumer electronics companies were perceived as the least trustworthy with personal information.

Still, consumers give away their information too freely. Although Canadians are very protective of their social insurance numbers, 61 per cent will give out their postal code when asked; 54 per cent, their address; 12 per cent, their account numbers; and 10 per cent, their passwords.

“I’m surprised there are that many people who will hand out their passwords,” Brazeau said, cautioning against disclosing information even when you call an institution directly,. “Be wary of what you share, even if you have a relationship with the organization.”

When you’re not sure who is on the other end, seeking to “update your account information,” don’t feel you have to be polite.

“The best advice I can give to people is to hang up,” Brazeau said. “If it’s really your bank, they’ll call back.”

The EDS survey, conducted by Internet between Jan. 13 and. 17 by Ipsos-Reid, drew responses from 1,735 Canadians.

The results are considered accurate within 2.4 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

TOP 10 TIPS FOR PROTECTING YOUR IDENTITY:

– Never provide any personal information in response to an unsolicited request.

– Always ask or look for contact information on unsolicited requests. If you believe the request may be illegitimate, try contacting the company yourself.

– Review your account statements regularly to ensure all transactions are in order.

– Check your credit report regularly to ensure no new credit accounts have been opened in your name. This can be done through the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian and Trans Union) or through a third party such as Fair Isaac (http://www.myfico.com).

– Do not use information that can be used to steal your identity — such as SINs, account numbers, birth dates, names, e-mail addresses or telephone numbers — as passwords or account numbers.

– Limit the amount of personal information you divulge over the phone or to websites, and be sure you know how this information will be used.

– Review the privacy policies or statements posted on websites of the companies with which you do business to ensure you understand how the information you provide will be used and shared with other organizations.

– Be sure you are applying patches and updates to your personal computer’s operating system on a regular basis. If using a Windows operating system, be sure to use the automatic updates feature.

– Ensure you have current anti-virus and firewall software installed on your PC and enable the automatic update feature. Run virus scans regularly and remove any spyware found.

– If you are the victim of identity theft, go to the Identity Theft website set up by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner at http://www.privcom.gc.ca/fs-fi/02_05_d_10_e.asp. There you will find a list of resolution steps to take if your identity has been stolen.

Source: EDS Canada

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

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