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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 ef

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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 I

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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 bi

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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?

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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 t

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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 ov

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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.

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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 to

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

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

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston

Industry committee  I've actually asked them some of that. One thing that drives them to stay is the work. We do really interesting work for clients, which they can be proud of and tell their friends about. The second is the quality of life. I think we've tried hard as a company to allow them to enj

June 13th, 2013Committee meeting

Michael Johnston