Metaviews Media Management Ltd.

Campaign School was created as a cornerstone of our Hacking Reality series after Idil Burale, a charter member of the Academy of the Impossible, expressed a desire for a program that could enhance her ambitions to run for office in her riding of Etobicoke North.

With a next election not guaranteed to happen until the municipal vote in October 2014 , focusing on such a goal might have once seemed premature — yet social media has transformed the narrative. This new direct pipeline to any politician worth heeding means that campaigning can no longer be limited to the five weeks before voters cast their ballots. Now, it is a permanent state of mind for anyone who wants to hang on to their claims to serve the public.

So far, the most popular Sunday afternoon sessions of Campaign School have featured guests, including MPs Andrew Cash, Carolyn Bennett and Peggy Nash, city councillors Shelley Carroll and Adam Vaughan, plus a talk with Brian Mulroney's press secretary Bill Fox. The next visitor in this series on Sunday (May 6) will be Paul Ainslie, who has emerged as an intriguing personality in the current Rob Ford administration at Toronto City Hall, both as chair of the management committee and prolific presence on Twitter.

A small startup in Waterloo is testing the waters with an online service that aims to bridge the digital-analogue divide by turning the weekly checkins, photos, tweets and blogs of social media savvy parents into a printed story sheet delivered by mail to their children's grandparents.

The service, dubbed Flockwire, is Inflolabs second attempt to closing this particular gap. The company won a number of awards with their debut offering photoflo which allowed users to send digital images directly from their computers to their grandparent's TV by deploying an interesting an inexpensive piece of equipment called Raspberry Pi. But despite testing well, the group ran into some trouble during deployment with their core demographic. Many retirement residences are still slow to adopt WiFi — the backbone delivery mechanism for the service — into their operations. The availability of WiFi, the reliability of onsite technical support and installing the hardware ultimately forced the group to rethink their offering.

Kickstarter has gained considerable steam in 2012, as reflected in its 70 per cent annual growth in pledges in the first three months, a period in which videogame designer Tim Schafer took in a $3.3 million advance for his project Double Fine.

Not only it is now considered realistic for an idea to exceed $1 million in advance crowdfunding, but more physical spaces are certain to surface on the website, after a proposal to build LowLine, the first underground park in New York City, met with mass media enthusiasm.

The concept has been slower to catch on in Canada, though, partly because Kickstarter remains inaccessible to those who lack access to a U.S. bank account. But anyone imaginative enough to raise money for a project from scratch can figure out a workaround.

While controversy surrounding federal election robocalls has just been stirred up over the past two weeks — largely due to the tenacity of a couple of Ottawa Citizen reporters — Brian-Michel LaRue has actually been wondering out loud about them since after the election last May.

The name of LaRue's blog, Unfuckwithable, may limit the number of broadcast media references to his efforts, although notice has been growing. Right now, the 29-year-old native of Montreal — a current contributor to Le Monde who previously worked for the CBC — also happens to be living in Miami. But he was asked to take a quick trip to Ottawa this week to give evidence to Elections Canada.

Links to the Tumblr-hosted website have appeared with increasing frequency on Twitter, where @unfuckwithabIe (the second last letter is capital-'I' not 'l') has a relatively modest follower count, although increased attention is being paid to references to tips about "Julian Fantino's Spiro Agnew moment" — based on an apparent affidavit although summed up for now as a one-act play.

While a number of members of Anonymous woke up to the sounds of an FBI raid yesterday, the rest of us woke up to the news that one of the group's most prominent members was acting as a government informant.

When the dust had settled, Sabu, a prolific hacker associated with LulzSec, Anti-Sec and the broader Anonymous community, was revealed to be a 28-year-old unemployed father of two from New York named Hector Monsegnur. After being arrested secretly last June and threatened with the loss of his children and a possible 124-year prison sentence, Monsegnur agreed to cooperate with law enforcement. The information he provided led to yesterday's arrest of six additional Anonymous members and further charges against those who had already been caught.

Live events were our primary form of interface in January and February as we established operations at the Academy of the Impossible at 231 Wallace Ave. in downtown Toronto, under the umbrella of Hacking Reality, which has covered a range of topics related to social media and tactical technology.

Campaign School has proven to be a draw on Sunday afternoons — with MPs Andrew Cash and Carolyn Bennett and city councillor Shelley Carroll joining new and returning students to discuss what was involved in their successful bids for public office. Bill Fox, who was at the forefront behind the scenes for Brian Mulroney throughout the 1980s, will drop by on March 11. Future sessions will alternate between special guests and participatory forums.

YouTube School is another Sunday afternoon fixture, in which we look into how the evolving online video platform serves both consumers and producers of media, through browsing on a screen rather than a retail store. The new channel-focused strategy, Super Bowl commercials and other forms of advertising, the evolution of viral videos and the role of music videos have been starting points for sessions, at which anyone can have a say in what is shown.

"ReCivilization is a five-part series that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world," reads the official description of the new CBC Radio series hosted by Don Tapscott. "It charts a path to the future enabled by the revolutions underway in communications, innovation and learning in this new, post-industrial, digital age."

Mostly, though, it's all about Don Tapscott.

The program was introduced with an ominous drumbeat as the author of the 1992 book Paradigm Shift assured the audience that things are still in flux 20 years later. Next, an uncredited voice — a self-penned bio written in the third-person, obviously — provided assurance that Tapscott was the rare person who could be trusted to shed light on how everything is on the verge of becoming new. Perhaps the target audience would rather not know that we are already there.

Programs that acknowledge that we are several thousand miles along in this "path to the future" seem to be doing quite well in the boomer orbit of public radio: NPR's staple On the Media assumes the audience is fully engaged with technology and CBC's five-year-old Spark doesn't seem to need to footnote every term that was foreign five years ago. (Disclosure: Metaviews president Jesse Hirsh is a technology columnist for the public broadcaster.)

Mobile credit card readers have started to proliferate in Canada with at least one sufficiently provocative spin — becoming available in the country before Twitter creator Jack Dorsey's well-funded startup Square.

Does being a few steps ahead of such a hype-driven competitor assure any kind of long-term adoption? Last week, GoPayment announced its plan to debut north of the border. But any news that Square has completed Canadian paperwork would quickly overshadow such momentum.

So far, promotion by GoPayment owner Intuit seems to coast on being ahead of the curve. This evidently requires making it clear that the pricing model — a 3.7 per cent cut when manually entering credit card information into the device and 2.7 per cent for a swipe — is not setting out to pinch small businesses.

Yet another newcomer, NetSecure, is squarely focused on the Canadian market. The founder, Dan McCann, conceded to the Financial Post that a face-off with Dorsey's firm is inevitable. But the winning solution will be the one that can assure actual security.

The ongoing transformation of YouTube is a feature story in the current issue of The New Yorker — a reflection of the fact that Google has developed more plans for it than just hosting user videos in perpetuity. Getting people to watch its content with the same dedication still granted to cable TV is the next natural step.

A growing consensus is that all the platform needs to show itself worthy of many billions more in annual advertising dollars is the first must-see smash hit series. Where exactly the breakthrough is going to come from remains a bit of a mystery.

While the company has developed partnerships with amateur content producers, the bigger news has been a $100 million investment in the rollout of professional channels, designed to hook in viewers for more than an occasional distraction. Whether that means an increased potential of exposure for independent productions, or if the most oddball ideas will have to work harder to draw eyeballs, also remains to be seen.

The first day of 2012 was also the first day of formal operations at the Academy of the Impossible, located at 231 Wallace Ave. in downtown Toronto, whose programming will include the Hacking Reality series presented by Metaviews.

Please consult our calendar page for detail on regular events that are either open to the public or exclusive to subscribers.

How will emerging technology affect the medical system? Will social networking evolve into a more effective outlet to discuss health issues? Will doctors be able to fulfill a growing demand for virtual patient consultations?

These will be some of the questions addressed in the Metaviews major research project for 2012: "The Future of Health."

Dialogue about communication trends has tended to overlook the area that will ultimately be of interest to everyone — how to stay alive and well. But demand for services that effectively connect people to this information will only grow.

How these options can successfully integrate with the existing system remains to be seen. The adoption of basic eHealth programs has proven enough of a challenge. Yet any disruption will also have to consider the ongoing need for physical examinations.

"The Future of Health" will also look into topics like the marketing of pharmaceutical drugs, the ways in which digital media is being used in proactive promotion of wellbeing and lobbying efforts to maintain or shake up the status quo. Debates over medicine during the U.S. election, the challenges facing Canadian provinces and other examples from around the planet will be on our radar.

The recent "MineCon" conference in Las Vegas saw the official 1.0 release of MineCraft, a 3-D "Lego world" immersive sandbox online multiplayer game (mentioned previously at Metaviews). The release was expected by everyone of the millions of players who had already played in many beta versions, all downloaded and played on the internet. A sizeable Minecraft community, including celebrities (though not for skill at play, but for reinterpreting worlds in their videos that take place in Minecraft) has emerged — some videos have above 10 million views on YouTube.

The decision to not seek a new corporate sponsor for a storied Toronto stage, which will be named instead after the late impresario Ed Mirvish, was announced with an uncommon comment from his son.

"They were good partners and I would work with them again in a minute," said David Mirvish upon news that the Canon signage would be coming down. "But I never felt that sponsorship should drive a theatre. It should be the icing on the cake."

The position is an increasingly radical one, particularly in a town where expenditures for public libraries and other attractions are under unprecedented scrutiny, and the idea of selling names of subway stations has entered the realm of reality. Do dramatic arts benefit from being seen as more sacred?

For the renamed Ed Mirvish Theatre, the shows booked for the 2,200-seat palace depend on the optimum level of commercial marketing clout, primarily achieved through mounting productions of musical movies like the current Mary Poppins. So, a Japanese camera company is just one additional branding layer.

The potential for Twitter integration on all revamped Government of Canada websites made for an intriguing Globe and Mail online headline this week — even if the actual news could be encapsulated in the form of a tweet.

Certainly, the item did its job of riling up the commenters, who are mostly blind to the fact that a social media platform supplies more freedom to rage about Treasury Board of Canada president Tony Clement than a newspaper website does. But who would be paying attention?

Bureaucrats being reliably reached in the future via 140-character rants would be a leap indeed. Customer service departments of service industries have fielded Twitter-based feedback with mixed results. No doubt, any reports of a smooth conflict resolution via social media is seen as good publicity.

Whether civil servants are really prepared to have their interactions aired is one of the challenges of Open Government. Frustration would ensue if much of the bureaucracy used Twitter in the vein of Cap'n Crunch — whose account @RealCapnCrunch depicts a breakfast mascot who is too eager to acknowledge every mention.

Canada Post has been accused of ignoring requests to not drop off admail — presumably because of the increasingly crucial revenue represented by the likes of IKEA.

With the recent attention granted by the Ottawa Citizen, though, the pseudo-Swedish furniture chain may not have to pay for any advertising at all. A front-page story, plus six other features, were dedicated to its existence.

Perhaps the fact that IKEA and the Citizen are neighbours contributed to the perception of importance. The overkill coverage might have been a cynical gesture by editors under pressure to perform for owner Postmedia Network.

Regardless, a more subtle approach wouldn't lead to any tweets questioning the motivation. You could always find plenty of interesting non-IKEA news to read on Saturday — even if the Citizen didn't deliver it.

Being bombarded by fluff pieces about one topic seems to be less about catering to the featured company, though, than a display of what a publisher is willing to do.

Citizen sister publication the National Post linked itself to the marketing of The Muppets, with a tournament that engaged social media users, even though it wasn't a paid promotion. How these Muppet metrics connected to generating future enthusiasm for the Post itself was less clear.