Industry committee  Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, every company in every sector uses IT at some level. The more ready the access those companies have to cloud services, to other options to help them drive and grow their business, the more readily they'll be able to experiment and build efficiencies and grow.

Industry committee  I may not have the most concrete answers in that regard. Most of our clients are outside the region, most of them are large international companies in major urban centres. Speaking from my perspective, I moved back here 13 years ago—as old as my firstborn—and we couldn't get an Internet connection 15 minutes outside of Halifax.

Industry committee  For the sort of direct services work I do for media companies, no. It may have a trickle down effect for me, but not directly. For the gaming projects that I'm part of and the original IP, yes, I think so. Most of our growth is in mobile. Almost every project we get asked to bid on has a mobile component.

Industry committee  I honestly think in some ways I've tried to avoid that by selling to non-Canadian clients. We do competitively bid on projects to our American and European clients with other Canadian firms. We've lost a couple of jobs to some great companies. Sorry?

Industry committee  I think in many ways we're all part of the near shore trend. None of us can win on price on the global stage, so we compete on the specialized value we can bring. A lot of the competitors in my space don't build finished product. We're services players that offer a specialized skill in the supply chain.

Industry committee  Yes and no, honestly. We have a couple of different lines of business. One, we're building original product ourselves, games that are our IP, in which case, yes, I fully agree with you. Finding the right cost base for the infrastructure we use, it doesn't matter where we find that.

Industry committee  I think we've touched on a couple. We spearheaded some of the announcements at E3 by the Entertainment Software Association of Canada. We know that group well and we're part of that survey process, so some of those results reflect some of our information as well. I like to think that sectors like video gaming are in some ways a bit of a bellwether for the future of the entertainment and IT sectors in this country.

Industry committee  Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the digital economy touches every sector of our national economy. Point to any company now that doesn't have a billing system, an e-mail system in the cloud, and laptops, tablets, and smart phones, they need people who can understand how to get value out of them.

Industry committee  Xpage is actually a Java-based framework that IBM has built. It allows for a sort of Java script front-end ability to build a more structured webpage to communicate with others.

Industry committee  I'm sorry. Could you repeat that? The beginning was cut off.

Industry committee  That's right, yes. For example, the Xpages framework from IBM is something that if a client invests in back-end server infrastructure, we'll build the custom applications for that client on top of that technology, such as a learning management system, a corporate collaboration tool, a workflow system, using those building blocks.

Industry committee  Here in Nova Scotia, there is a digital media tax credit administered by the Nova Scotia Department of Finance. It's called a digital media credit, but really it's a video game development credit. It's a labour-based credit that allows us to claim labour expenses, providing an overhead uplift, and some marketing expenses for a qualifying project that is really a stand-alone video game.

Industry committee  Right. A lot of the games we build tend to have local client installs that only use services in the cloud for things that aren't sensitive to the time response. We'll build games that run on your mobile device, but only then push your top score to the cloud, or allow you to post something to Facebook, the kind of service where it doesn't matter if it takes an extra half-second of lag time.

Industry committee  Right. That's true. You mentioned some of the announcements at E3, I suppose, hadn't you?

Industry committee  Quite honestly, my wife and I had our one-month-old baby, our life packed up in a one-way moving van, and literally the day before we were deciding whether or not to turn left to Toronto or turn right to Halifax. I set up a services company serving U.S. clients. Quite honestly, it didn't matter at all where I sat.