Stifel Nicolaus Canada analyst Blair Abernathy says business from Macdonald Dettwiler’s massive recent acquiition of Space Systems/Loral is rolling out more slowly than he expected.

Macdonald Dettwiler will report its second full quarter containing contributions from SSL on July 31st, when its Q2, 2013 is due to be released. The company follows on a Q1 in which it earned $2.2-million on revenue of $428.6-million.

Abernathy says he will be focusing on MacDonald Dettwiler’s outlook for its Communications segment. In order to maintain revenue of more than a billion dollars a year, he says Space Systems Loral needs to book more than seven satellite wins each year. He notes that on its Q1 conference call, the company said it needed several more wins in this area, and since that time SSL has booked only one additional win, for a total of two, year-to-date. The Stifel Nicolaus analyst says this slow pace will put real pressure on Macdonald Dettwiler’s fiscal 2013 revenues and, left unchecked, could begin to impact fiscal 2014 as well.

In a research update to clients this morning, Abernathy maintained his HOLD rating on Macdonald Dettwiler. He points out that the company is currently trading at 9.3x his estimate of its fiscal 2014 EBITDA, which is higher than the 6.9x its peers trade at, and 12.2x his estimate of fiscal 2014 EPS, which is in line with comparables. He believes the fair value range for the stock is $62-$65.

Abernathy’s forecast for both top and bottom-line for Macdonald Dettwiler’s Q2 are below consensus. He thinks revenue will come in at $421.6-million, versus the street’s expectation of $452-million, and that EPS will total $1.19, versus the consensus $1.22.

Shares of Macdonald Dettwiler closed today down .6% to $69.35.

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Cormark analyst Richard Tse believes the enterprise market could come back in a big way for BlackBerry because of its new BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES10).

Cormark analyst Richard Tse says BlackBerry’s (TSX:BB) story has become even more compelling than the simple product cycle play he first expected.

BlackBerry will report its Q1, fiscal 2014 numbers next Friday, June 28th. The report follows a number of surprising quarters under CEO Thorsten Heins, including a recent Q4 that saw the company report operating EPS of $0.22 on revenue of $2.7-billion, beating the street.

Tse says he expects BlackBerry will report earnings of $.12 a share on revenue of $3.8-billion in their Q1. His estimate is higher than the street consensus of $.04 in earnings on a topline of $3.4-billion. He believes the company sold 7.5-million handsets, consisting of 4-million BlackBerry 10 sales, and 3.5-million BlackBerry 7 and older.

In a research update to clients this morning, Tse today reiterated his TOP PICK rating and $20 one-year target on BlackBerry. But he says there is a new development not yet factored into his or consensus estimates; a potential resurgence in enterprise services revenue.

Tse says the prospect of fading services revenue in its consumer segment has rightfully created skepticism about BlackBerry’s prospects, because it accounted for more than 75% of BlackBerry’s absolute gross margin. He expects that with BlackBerry 10, the company’s average-revenue-per-user will drop from an estimated $4.29 last year, to $3.31 in fiscal 2014 and then $2.51 in 2015.

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But here’s the surprise: Tse believes the enterprise market could come back in a big way for BlackBerry because of its new BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES10). The Cormark analyst says the bring-your-own-device movement looked to have kicked BlackBerry’s traditional strength in this market to the curb as people were, increasingly, taking their iPads and iPhones to work. BlackBerry’s previous enterprise service, he notes, was not designed to provide enterprise mobile device management to Android or iOS.

Tse says he believes the pricing per year on each enterprise subscriber is between $100 and $150. At 10-million subscribers, he notes that this could add up to $1.50 EPS to BlackBerry. What’s more, he believes there is an equal or better number of iOS and Android phones in the enterprise, and thinks another 10-million subscribers could come from there. This additional $1.50 EPS upside is not in Tse’s forecast, he says, but soon could be.

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We go ballistic when the Guardian and Wall Street Journal publicize a data dump by a disgruntled NSA employee, but seem positively bored when presented with facts about the collection of our personal data by anyone other than government. But data surveillance carried out by private companies is far more invasive and promiscuously abused than what the NSA is fishing for, without even the pretense of enhancing public safety.

The existence of PRISM, a comprehensive electronic surveillance program operated by the U.S. National Security Agency, was revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowdon, a former NSA employee, earlier this month. The revelation has shocked privacy advocates. But most of the righteous outrage expressed in the time since is naive and mistargeted.

Three months after advocates for tech freedom celebrated the issuance of President Obama’s Executive Order on Open Data, the English newspaper the Guardian tore the American establishment a new one, crafting a narrative of an ex-employee of the NSA blowing the whistle on the government’s classified PRISM surveillance program, which had been tracking huge quantities of data from various types of telecommunications in the name of preventing terrorist attacks and otherwise keeping tabs on threats to America.

To the reader who gleans information by scanning headlines or watching TV news, Obama was now as great a threat to personal liberty as Big Brother. Sales of “1984” have spiked.

All of the major email, search engine and social media giants have issued carefully worded categorical denials of having cooperated with, or even known about, PRISM and the NSA’s snooping. The denials are no doubt sincere in a legal sense. However, as Marc Ambinder illustrates, the process for the NSA to monitor Facebook et al. is such that the companies need never know about the surveillance, thereby furnishing them with a deniability alibi and all of their users with a slight case of the creeps.

Will people stop using Facebook? Absolutely not. Their rage is directed not at the compromised privacy they have accepted in exchange for the freedom to post and comment on photos of each others’ children, meals and drunken party pictures, but at the government’s efforts to protect them from terrorists.

The dynamic of outrage is strange and runs in counterintuitive patterns. When the stakes are high, people have no opinion; when the stakes are low, they’re furious. The same person who shrugs noncommittally when outrageously huge CEO salaries are publicized (“It’s determined by market forces.”) will become outraged over petty-larceny stuff like high cable or phone bills (“Those greedy monopolies!”), or other people’s driving habits.
Similarly, people go ballistic when the Guardian and Wall Street Journal publicize a data dump by a disgruntled NSA employee, but seem positively bored when presented with facts about the collection of their personal data by anyone other than government.

Data surveillance carried out by private companies is far more invasive and promiscuously abused than what the NSA is fishing for, without even the pretense of enhancing public safety.

Data surveillance carried out by private companies is far more invasive and promiscuously abused than what the NSA is fishing for, without even the pretense of enhancing public safety. No, we willingly click “accept” on those EULAs and “agree” on all our social media. We’re dimly aware that these transactions, made in their millions every day, involve compromising our selfhood in exchange for “free” access to a music player or a platform on the internet over which I can spew anti-government views. But nobody reads those EULAs. They just click “accept”.

Rationalists will point out that almost anything is more likely to kill you than terrorism: automobiles, airplanes, building fires, being shot, attacked by a shark, struck by lightning, drowned in a bathtub, diabetes, food poisoning, etc. And yet no one particularly adjusts their lives to prevent these things. Perversely, when safety can be shown to be improved by technology, such as replacing automobiles with self-driving cars, speeches about the death of freedom will be made and applauded.

Terrorism, by its nature, doesn’t play by the rules of rationalism. Its objective is to terrify, and can only do so in a surprising context. The ancient fable of the scorpion telling the frog, “It’s in my nature,” as they both drown after the frog believes it has negotiated a peace agreement with the scorpion illustrates the point nicely. If you’re walking down the street and are hit by a car, you can rationalize it as something that was bound to happen eventually, given the odds. You don’t expect to die violently while dancing in a nightclub or running a marathon. That would be terrifying.

David Simon:  “For us, now — years into this war-footing and this legal dynamic — to loudly proclaim our indignation at the maintenance of an essential and comprehensive investigative database while at the same time insisting on a proactive response to the inevitable attempts at terrorism is as childish as it is obtuse.”

We can tightly regulate certain of these dangers, such as the automobile, airline and food industries, and require licenses and permits for gun owners. All of this requires the collection of data by government for the purposes of regulation, and the data is stored in government databases.

Search re-targeting agencies, on the other hand, sell your social media and browsing habits to advertising clients so that you can see an ad for “divorce lawyers” when you yourself haven’t been searching for anything of the kind. Your wife, on the other hand?

David Simon, creator of “The Wire”, has waded in to the debate, shocking his Guardian-reading base slightly with an analysis that tastefully evokes the spectre of Claude Rains’ crooked policeman character in Casablanca (“I am shocked, shocked!, to find that gambling is going on in here!”). Simon says, “Frankly, I’m a bit amazed that the NSA and FBI have their shit together enough to be consistently doing what they should be doing with the vast big-data stream of electronic communication. For us, now — years into this war-footing and this legal dynamic — to loudly proclaim our indignation at the maintenance of an essential and comprehensive investigative database while at the same time insisting on a proactive response to the inevitable attempts at terrorism is as childish as it is obtuse. We want cake, we want to eat it, and we want to stay skinny and never puke up a thing.”

The indignation is, at the very least, a healthy if misplaced indication that we live in a democracy. But why is so much pixel-ink spilled over the NSA when scientists are muzzled by an ostensibly democratic Canadian government? The outcry just doesn’t seem to fit.

Simon’s insight jibes with a kind of skepticism to do with the government’s relative degree of competence in dealing with crisis. For the conspiracy theorist, government controls every hidden aspect of life. In reality, not only can they not intercept a fairly unsophisticated attack cooked up on the fly by a pair of brothers, but also handling extreme weather such as Katrina or Sandy appears to be a problem. Unless you’re the type of conspiracy theorist who believes that such crises are frame-ups. In which case, there’s no helping you.

Meanwhile in India, the largest and most pluralistic democracy in the world, a “Central Monitoring System” has been in development since 2009, designed “to help central and state-level enforcement agencies intercept and monitor communications.” In China, a Weibo user named CNKK-Sky joked, “Compared to what we have here, PRISM is nothing!” CNKK-Sky is correct. The Chinese government operates, in an unofficial but widely known capacity, a total surveillance state which not only monitors its citizens, but also actively sabotages the governments, corporations and citizens of any nation it feels like messing with. Neither of these governments has anything like the concept of checks and balances that exists quite robustly in the United States. Where are the outraged commentators over either of these cases? A meeting could be arranged in a small restaurant with all of them. The bloviators vexed about the NSA, on the other hand, could fill virtual stadiums.

For those who really can’t abide the government poking their noses in their business, you might be consoled by the fact that a lot of freedom-loving, government-hating types known as preppers (Google the term if you need to know what it is. It’s too depressing for me to write about these people.) have endorsed the Canadian tech company Hushmail. Hushmail is an excellent company for all kinds of other reasons, and the prepper endorsement shouldn’t diminish their product. But it is a little funny that the preppers evidently don’t trust Google enough to discover that Hushmail will sing like a bird when asked to by the authorities.

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Shuttleworth says yesterday’s acquisition of of its suppliers, PrairieFyre Software, comes at a time when Mitel’s peer group multiples are expanding dramatically. He thinks Mitel has a real leg up on its hardware oriented peers because it has its channels can deploy more quickly because of the company virtualized platform.

Yesterday, Mitel announced it would acquire privately held PrairieFyre for $20-million. PrairieFyre, like Mitel is based in Ottawa, and has been the OEM for most of Mitel’s contact center suite since the nineties.

CEO Rich McBee says the deal makes sense, considering industry trends.

“Mitel’s strategy centers on delivering profitable growth to our customers, partners and shareholders. In response to customer demand, many of our IT resellers have started building out specialized contact center practices and are asking for a solution tightly integrated and aligned with Mitel’s product development and roadmaps,” he said. “We believe the highly integrated nature of our existing OEM relationship with prairieFyre prior to the acquisition makes this a low risk, high reward and compelling opportunity to immediately capitalize on market demand, expand revenue and margins, and positions Mitel for ongoing growth.

Shuttleworth says because PrairieFyre was already tightly integrated into Mitel’s business, the topline effect will be negligible, at least initially. But he says the acquired business should have a more meaningful impact on margins, and he thinks those margin improvements should flow almost directly to earnings. He thinks an increase in net sales, combined with margin expansion, should add about $4.5-million of adjusted EBITDA to his fiscal 2014 forecast, which would increase EBITDA to $111.4-million, up from his previous forecast of $105.9-million.

Shuttleworth says yesterday’s acquisition comes at a time when Mitel’s peer group multiples are expanding dramatically. He thinks Mitel has a real leg up on its hardware oriented peers because it has its channels can deploy more quickly owing to the company’s virtualized platform.

In a research update to clients this morning, Shuttleworth maintained his BUY rating on Mitel, but raised his one-year price target by two dollars, to $7. He says there is also room for this target to move higher, as Mitel will reports its Q4 and fiscal 2013 financials next Monday, at which time his measurement year will roll forward to fiscal 2014.

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Tor, an acronym for The Onion Routing Project, blocks access to any individual user’s location by directing traffic through a free, worldwide volunteer network consisting of thousands of relays that encrypt and re-encrypt data multiple times.

As it turns out Facebook wasn’t intentionally doing this, and a post on Tor’s blog explained what had happened.

“A number of users have noticed that Facebook is blocking connections from the Tor network. Facebook is not blocking Tor deliberately. However, a high volume of malicious activity across Tor exit nodes triggered Facebook’s site integrity systems which are designed to protect people who use the service. Tor and Facebook are working together to find a resolution.”

Tor, an acronym for The Onion Routing Project, blocks access to any individual user’s location by directing traffic through a free, worldwide volunteer network consisting of thousands of relays that encrypt and re-encrypt data multiple times. The software launched more than a decade ago, but has become more popular of late because it has become a key tool to those involved in Arab Spring protests.

Two years ago The Tor Project was awarded the Free Software Foundation’s 2010 Award for Projects of Social Benefit on the following grounds. The foundation explained the reasoning behind the prize.

“Using free software, Tor has enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity. Its network has proved pivotal in dissident movements in both Iran and more recently Egypt.”

The use of social has been considered a key factor to those observing protests in places like Libya, Egypt and Syria, and Tor’s rise has paralleled the increasing use of Twitter and Facebook as people look to communicate anonymously on popular platforms.

Phillip Howard, author of “Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring” says this is a historic development.

“There was a longstanding democracy movement in these countries that for many years tried many tactics but none of them worked,” says Howard. The University of Washington communications professor says Arab Spring movements that “involved a networked public of generally younger folks” were different than previous movements that were centered around a charismatic leader.

But is Tor absolutely secure? That is an issue of some debate. Several groups have claimed successful attacks against the network, including French researchers from National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, who claimed to have documented an attack capable of revealing the IP addresses of BitTorrent users using Tor.

In May, the Australian Attorney-General’s Department has claimed it would be “trivially easy” for its intelligence services to break into Tor.

But Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum says this would not be possible, in part because the network’s encryption keys are temporary and not know even to system operators. Applebaum scolded those who might try to break Tor’s encryption, and clarified why he thinks Tor is an important social tool.

“I’m sorry to hear that Australian politicians are interested in joining the ranks of China, Russia, Iran and Belarus to name a few,” he said about the Attorney-General’s claims.

Applebaum said such efforts would be counter-productive to society as a whole.

“If they wish to break such services, they ensure that when they use such services, they will also be insecure this ensures again that only criminals will have privacy, regular people, including the police fighting crime they will be left out of having strong privacy. This opens business people up to industrial and economic espionage. It also promotes the idea that to make ourselves more secure, we should weaken our networks and add the very backdoors that most attackers work day and night to create,” he said.

“This isn’t just a civil liberties argument, I might add though to be free from suspicion is a key part of the civil liberties battle. This is a matter of economic security as well as national security. Data retention presents a very large attack surface and the larger the attack surface, the more valuable the target, the more damage an attack will rain down on those impacted by such data retention. This is true for surveillance and censorship as much as the data collected from such systems. This in itself is threat to national security when an attacker may know what every politician, every kid, every business person what everyone is doing and thinking online.”

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Stone Men from Saturn are a constant menace, but with its new “THOR” patent, RBC is looking to level the playing field against another foe: high-frequency traders they say are “gaming the system”.

RBC is looking to level the playing field against high-frequency traders who they say are “gaming the system”.

Patent application No. 13281486, “Synchronized Processing of Data by Networked Computing Systems”, has been approved in the U.S. The technology, nicknamed “THOR”, is designed to level the playing field against high-frequency traders. THOR has operated in beta, but has been tested by several North American clients.

RBC Capital Markets, the corporate and investment banking division of Royal Bank, first deployed the smart order-routing technology in 2010, in an effort to solve the “market structure challenges” posed by the nanosecond frequency of the average logarithm engaged in trading. It began marketing the software to clients as an “anti-gaming technology”, gaming in this case meaning to eliminate the time advantage obtained by competitors who effectively “game the system”.

“We developed THOR because our clients rely on RBC, as their broker, to develop solutions and strategies that level the playing field on their behalf in today’s complex marketplace and achieve best execution,” stated Robert Grubert, head of U.S. Equities at RBC Capital Markets. “The allowance of a patent by the USPTO is a testament to THOR’s ingenuity and uniqueness.”

While high-frequency traders operate in a sequential fashion, sending orders to trading venues according to which offers the steepest rebate, THOR operates by a “spray” method, sending orders to multiple exchanges simultaneously regardless of rebate.

In 2011, Toronto-based Hillside Investment Management, which handles $500 million in equities, gave the technology a thumbs-up. Kelly Reynolds, Hillside’s director of investment, praised the technology’s “real-time latency adjustment for orders”. RBC filed with the U.S. Patent Office for THOR in December of 2009, and has applications pending in Canada, Australia and the European Union.

Aside from employing quotidian methods like monitoring Twitter and news feeds and executing trades based on keyword frequency, high-frequency traders have also developed algorithms to execute trades based on the footprints created by the typical pattern of institutional investing. High-frequency traders have earned the ire of these institutions by executing orders based on these footprints. THOR provides a method of sweeping these footprints away, making it more difficult for HFTs to sniff out a pattern that might trigger a cluster of short-term trades.

In the U.S. high-frequency traders constitute about 2% of all investment firms, but account for 74% of equity order volume. That, coupled with the fact that very few people can contemplate the lightning speeds and complicated nature of algorithmic trading, has given high-frequency trading a bad reputation and extra scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Not everyone believes high-frequency trading to be quite the menace the SEC, among others, portray it as. The advent of HFT has been found to lower commissions and trade processing fees. One HFT firm claimed a 10-fold increase in trading efficiency, stating plainly that its methods represent progress towards ever-increasing benefits for all investors: “Progress is almost always accompanied by an increase in efficiencies.”

Steve Wunsch, writing in Tabb Forum, believes that HFT has a bad rap based on perception rather than reality. “If institutions would simply recognize that it is pointless to try to compete with high-frequency traders under the guise of lowering trading costs, they would save themselves a lot of headaches, and probably trading costs, too. And retail individuals, however incensed they may be at the unfairness of the HFT world, would do themselves a big favor by coming back into the market, which has never been better designed or more favorably arranged to accommodate their trading needs.”

While Europe contemplates banning high-frequency trading altogether, RBC’s THOR presents a means of mitigating what it perceives as the market distortions induced by trader algorithms. Not without controversy, though. Advocates for high-frequency traders have pointed out that THOR itself is an algorithm, and provides at best a stopgap solution to a problem that is likely here to stay. The patent will be valid until 2029.

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New Jersey casinos such as the Golden Nugget Atlantic City, the Tropicana Casino & Resort Atlantic City, and the Trump Taj Mahal have yet to announce a partnership with an online vendor, which the New Jersey Gaming Enforcement Division says they must do by July 29th.

On June 14, the New Jersey Gaming Enforcement Division communicated to Atlantic City’s twelve casinos that they should arrange Internet gambling deals by June 30, 2013, in order to go live by November 26, 2013.

Under the arrangement, online vendors who form partnerships with the casinos have until July 29th to file their applications for Internet licenses.

Amaya Gaming, says Garcea, is in great position to compete for these partnerships, given the product offerings it has acquired of late, including the $167-million acquisition of slot machine maker Cadillac Jack last September. He expects Amaya shareholders will see announcements come out of New Jersey in the near term.

New Jersey casinos such as the Golden Nugget Atlantic City, the Tropicana Casino & Resort Atlantic City, and the Trump Taj Mahal have yet to announce a partner.

Garcea says the regulatory changes are bringing about a resurgence in a casino industry that has been on the downswing for years. Much of the rebound, he says, reflects the introduction of Internet gaming.

In a research update to clients this morning, Garcea reiterated his BUY rating and $10, street-high target on Amaya Gaming. The analyst notes that Amaya is currently trading at a 2014 earningss EV/Sales of 3.1x and and EV/EBITDA of 8.3x against industry comparables at 2.4x and 8.5x, respectively.

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Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson: “Technology is now a critical part of Vancouver’s economy. We have more jobs in technology than we have in mining, oil and gas, and forestry combined.”

For most of the nineties, residents were reminded that we were part of a province that wasn’t business friendly, if not by the media then by someone who was actually picking up and heading to Alberta. But those types of scenes don’t play out as much anymore, especially since a wave of Asian immigration began to redefine Lotusland. Today, more than 17% of the approximately 2.5 million people living in the Vancouver metropolitan area are ethnic Chinese.

But there’s another marked change to Vancouver’s landscape. The city is, increasingly, being paced by its technology sector. Most of the old names that people have associated with Vancouver tech are still here; Macdonald Dettwiler, Electronic Arts, cleantech holdover Ballard Power, but newer names are now driving the bus.

Ask someone under thirty to name a Vancouver tech company and they are as likely to mention Hootsuite, Vision Critical or Elastic Path, who collectively employ hundreds in the city. This sweeping change is not lost on the rest of the world and this fact was punctuated when earlier this year the world-famous TED Conferences announced they will move to Vancouver from California.

Still not convinced Vancouver is already a tech mecca? Check out these six reasons the city is Canada’s best for tech.

1. It starts at the top

Mayor Gregor Robertson, who once made his living by founding organic juice company Happy Planet, may be controversial in some circles, but he’s all about forward thinking solutions, such as implementing bike lanes in Vancouver’s downtown core. That progressivism extends to his view on tech.

“Technology is now a critical part of Vancouver’s economy,” he said in a popular YouTube video about the city’s tech scene. “We have more jobs in technology than we have in mining, oil and gas, and forestry combined. Over 80,000 technology jobs. We have amazing clusters of talent here and it is driving the economy of the city now.”

How important does Robertson think tech is? Consider that Hootsuite’s new office is a 33,000-squarefoot, two-story office building was formerly used by the Vancouver Police Department. The building is owned by the City of Vancouver, who felt it was best to help out the company rather than risk watching it leave.

2. Proximity

Just a short drive from Seattle, home to tech heavyweights Amazon and Microsoft, and a short plane ride to Silicon Valley, Vancouver is the natural extension of the west coast tech scene.

Vancouver native Yen Lee, who worked in Silicon Valley for the better part of the last two decades returned home recently because he says Vancouver can now match the talent and experience of Silicon Valley. “When I start my next startup, I’m going to make sure I create a product and engineering team in Vancouver,” he told Canada.com’s Russ Martin recently. “In general the quality of talent is very, very good,” he added. “The passion is there.”

It seems the folks at Facebook think along the same longitudinal lines. In a statement accompanying the announcement of a new Vancouver office, the social media giant said Vancouver was a logical choice because the city is close to its engineering office in Seattle and corporate headquarters in Menlo Park.

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Click here to learn more about Kelowna, BC-based QHR Technologies, a emerging leader in the Healthcare Information Technology sector.

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3. The “Maple Syrup Mafia”

Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes says a formidable group of young entrepreneurs might soon form in Vancouver mirroring the famed “PayPal Mafia”, the group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, that spun off from PayPal to found or invest in companies such as Facebook, Tesla Motors, YouTube and Yelp.

Holmes says there are a few hurdles to overcome, such as universities that still aren’t producing grads with the requisite skills, but there are also benefits to being just left of the spotlight.

“While Silicon Valley may enjoy a formidable concentration of capital and talent, it hardly has a monopoly on ambitious ideas and capable entrepreneurs. Investors willing to bet on opportunities outside the Valley will discover it’s far easier to get in on the ground floor. Margins are considerably higher. There’s far less hype and spin to wade through, making it easier to identify real gems. Plus, local governments can be very helpful with tax breaks and other subsidies for companies committed to high-tech jobs.”

4. China

The Chinese investment into Canada hasn’t been all about driving home prices sky high, although that has been a side effect. The larger picture is that the city is growing by leaps and bounds, outpacing the national average considerably.

In 2011, Canadian exports to China reached $5.1-billion in 2011, five times their 2001 value. What has this meant to Vancouver? Two major airport upgrades in the past twenty years, and an economy that is much less susceptible to recession because of its exposure to multiple geographies and economies.

5. New Office Space

Despite the fact that not many new tenants are entering the market, there is about to be a ton of new office space on the Vancouver market, including the forthcoming $750 million Telus Garden, which will highlight the estimated 1.5 million square feet of new office space set to enter the market by 2015.

Sandy McNair, the president of market data firm Altus InSite, says U.S.-based firms are unlikely to scoff at the $40 to $50 per square foot price tag that top office space commands here, because the prices in San Francisco can be as much as double that.

“They are coming to Vancouver and looking to replicate what they’re already doing elsewhere. They’re not looking for a deal,” he told the Globe and Mail recently.

6. It’s, um, kind of nice here…

Constantly named one of the world’s most beautiful and most livable cities, Vancouver is such as knockout on a warm summer day that its almost makes you forget about all that rain. But a lifestyle that famously enables one to golf and ski on the same day also allows companies to get a leg up in attracting talent.

For comment on this we go back to the presumed Don of the Maple Syrup Mafia, Hootsuite Founder Holmes, who recently compared his adopted city to other options.

“With all respect to Palo Alto, life in a semi-arid industrial park isn’t for everyone (even if you can get some really good tacos). I have a feeling that my hometown — which just so happens to be one of the world’s most liveable cities, chock full of mountains, ocean, progressive politics, and some exceptional street food of its own — might make an attractive alternative.”

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Saeed El-Darahali, CEO of SimplyCast

“It’s almost ready. There’s only one last thing to be finished and it’s the baseboards,” said CEO Saeed El-Darahali in a recent interview. Baseboards? SimplyCast is also moving offices this week, at the same time as the product launch, to a space that can accommodate up to 100 employees. They currently have 30, which is a big step up from 2009, when they employed five people.

So to fill that new office space, SimplyCast is betting that the work of three years is about to pay off.

On Friday, the Maritime-based startup launched the 360 Automation Manager, a platform-as-a-service marketing tool designed to consolidate and automate every aspect of a marketing campaign, including email, SMS, voice messages and sign-up forms, in one dashboard.

In marketing, relationships are everything. Satisfied customers often cite personalized service or a company that goes the extra mile to answer a question or handle a complaint. Nothing creates customer loyalty than feeling valued or remembered.

SimplyCast 360 promises to automate a lot of the detail around marketing to each client to enhance the sense that they are being specifically addressed. According to the launch website, “Customers receive personally targeted messages, so they are more engaged with the information and offers they are getting. Targeted messages consistently have higher open and response rates than mass messages, as customers are responding to content that is relevant to their own unique needs and interests.”

The platform can also serve as a real-time responder for the customer service branch of an organization or for municipal or government emergency services.

“This product has been our vision since day one,” said El-Darahali. “Three years of dedication and hard work have paid off and the world now has access to the most comprehensive tool in the marketing industry.”

SimplyCast’s proposition is no longer virtual; it has a large new office space to fill, pending baseboards, that will rely completely on the work of the last three years being a success.

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Elastic Path CEO Harry Chemko.

Elastic Path, which was founded in 2000, supplies its ecommerce platform to clients such as Google, Time Inc., and Virgin Media. The company now has more than 150 employees, and is recognized on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ecommerce.

Wellington CEO Mark McQueen said Elastic Path is a company with global reach.

“Elastic Path’s success has been recognized on the PROFIT 100 list of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies for four consecutive years. With impressive customers such as Google, Pearson, Symantec, and Virgin Media, Elastic Path has developed an advanced platform that is helping hundreds of enterprises worldwide. We are proud to continue to back many of Canada’s best innovation companies,” said Mark McQueen, President and CEO of Wellington Financial.

Elastic Path CEO Harry Chemko said the capital infusion will allow the company to speed its course.

“As digital commerce moves quickly beyond websites and mobile apps into a new era of APIs and smart devices, there is tremendous demand for technology that will help businesses keep pace. With the support of Wellington Financial, we can now accelerate our innovation as we develop the software platform for this next generation of commerce. We look forward to working with them.”

The API (application programming interface) landscape is clearly changing. A recent article in Retail Week talked about how U.K. retailers such as Tesco, John Lewis and Asos are following the lead of Facebook and Google and staging “hackathons” that open up their API , to combine their sites with others. One Tesco experiment resulted in an app that allows customers to buy ingredients for recipes featured in its own magazine.

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