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Innovation Update, Join Applied Innovation and Happy Holidays!

I hope all of our Challenge competitors have had a good exam period (if that’s possible…). I wanted to update the Challenge competitors and supporters on a number of things from the Challenge to a few projects we are working on in the Applied Innovation Lab to the GiftPass status.

In the Applied Innovation Lab:

At any time we have a number of projects in the Applied Innovation lab, hoping to develop ideas which will transform the way we do business here at RBC. Over the next few months I will report on some of the things we are working on. You may have seen press releases related to the Visa Paywave project, which is starting off in our lab and will be growing to a staff trial and then customer trial in the near future. See the news release. The lab is also working on developing one of the ideas from last year’s Innovator Challenge into viable technology with a real business case. Here’s a lab project you can participate in- try this and tell us what you think!

Be a part of Applied Innovation!

RBC Applied Innovation and IBM has partnered together to trial IBM Easy Web on this very site. Easy Web is designed to improve the web browsing experience for persons with limited vision or hearing. Keep in mind this is very much a beta, but we have done our best to build this site with accessibility in mind, and have worked closely with a great team from IBM to work out any initial bugs.

From our friends at IBM:

“IBM Easy Web Browsing is a solution that helps novice users, seniors and people with limited vision or eye fatigue to access Web site information. It allows users to enlarge text and characters and change background color, which can help improve Web page readability for people with low vision. Using IBM text-to-speech technology, Easy Web Browsing can also read text aloud with adjustable speed and volume control. Users point the mouse to select a sentence and the system reads it. Sound effects can be assigned to events such as download completion to help people with low vision more easily exchange online information.”

To automatically try Easy Web click on either link below (French and English versions avaialble). If you have trouble loading it (remember it is a beta!) try the manual loading process available at:
Easy Web Manual Installation

Try it, think about what it would mean to you if you had limited vision or hearing, and post your feedback in the blog comments or email. Feel free to circulate the link, the more people evaluating it the better.

For English:
click here

For French:
click here


Challenge Update:

We are just completing the second round of Judging. The 105 completed proposals have been narrowed down and this round will decide which of those proposals will be evaluated by the Innovation Council. It’s all hush-hush right now, we will announce the Council’s choices for the top 4 finalists and peer voting candidates on Jan 16th.

We have been testing the Peer Voting mechanism so that when we announce we can open the voting for you to choose the 5th finalist!

We are in the midst of planning the final competition day, including the introductory event, the presentations and the gala awards ceremony. We're aming to create a fantstic experience for the finalists!


GiftPasses

Finally, we are processing the GiftPasses for all students who submitted entries on time. The codes will be released soon and emailed to each of you in early January. If you did not receive the general confirmation email sent December 6th, please email nextgreatinnovator@rbc.com to confirm or correct your email address.

Happy Holidays from RBC Applied Innovation and the Innovator Challenge team!


Posted by Timothy H. on December 19, 2007 11:20 AM

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