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 announcement of Visa's new digital wallet service is being heralded as the best bet for mobile payments to enter the mainstream. Privacy concerns don't seem to play into it. After all, the bills serve as a reminder that there's essentially no such thing as a confidential electronic purchase. Yet.

Still, how much about their shopping habits are people willing to reveal when presented with a choice based on their precise positioning?

Loyalty programs offer rewards in exchange for consumer disclosure, although that requires an actual purchase being made, rather than the browsing that draws people to retailers.

The new wave of shopping applications, however, are designed to keep tabs on consumer movements from one aisle to the next.

These developments could be seen as an opt-in equivalent of the involuntary ways in which online retailers can chase your business around the web — it's never a coincidence that you keep seeing banner ads related to products you recently researched. Bringing these methods between the walls of a mall — which is still generally perceived as a public space — might be a different challenge.

For now, the companies behind location-based shopping apps are either being cautious about presenting these innovations to the public, or have some lengths left to go before they catch on. Bee Media, which first tested its surveillance at the downtown Toronto location of Canadian Tire, has stated its ambition to go global.

When it comes to the Canadian economy, Tim Hortons is like the Beatles — to the point of being able to adopt new systems of information delivery in its own sweet time.

Case in point, the chain's Facebook page was up to 1.7 million followers before it committed to Twitter. The easy ride Tim's has received in the national media no doubt contributed to the lack of hurry.

Yet the recent corporate turmoil — which led to the cushioned exit in May of chief executive Don Schroeder — also reflected a lack of success at interacting with customers. After all, they were counting on more Roll Up the Rim to Win prizes to offset any social media backlash. A profit slip was subsequently blamed on the giveaways.

While Tim Hortons could still count on a steady flow of stories for opening in Dubai or introducing lasagna, it faced a potential public relations snag last month when it was learned that a reverend apparently had an overly amorous lesbian couple ejected from a location in Blenheim, Ont. The company seemed to let the outcry run its course — by saying as little about the incident as it could.

Stepping into the public arena of Twitter, though, might also be an invitation to blunder. No doubt, given the effort to plant a Tim's or two in every neighbourhood in Canada, people will eventually expect responses about issues more complicated than a latte.

Does the Canadian music business need a spoonful of Sugar Crisp? Cereal company Post Foods has promised studio time, producer support and $5,000 for the most popular song submission to a contest called "The First15."

The official explanation for the venture, though, is a relatively nonsensical reflection of how cautious many are about stepping into this arena.

Presumably, the company was inspired to link itself to independent home recording artists after being approached by rapper Ish Morris to use the vintage 1960s "Can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp" jingle in a harmless ditty that itself sounds like a commercial that would air between Saturday morning cartoons circa 1989.

No doubt it would've been easier to just exploit the association with a viral video aimed at kids. So, why go through the hassle of trying lure musicians to upload their own tune?

The fact that Post has been forced to stop skewing its sugar cereal to children — while maintaining that 40 per cent of its eatership is over 18 — might have something to do with it.

"The track is allowed to incorporate the Sugar Bear jingle," stipulate the rules, "but this isn't required."

Big box discount stores are generally glum places by nature. The more aesthetically pleasing the environment, after all, the more it feeds the perception that the cost is being handed down.

Walmart just pushed this cheap philosophy so far that it provided room in the U.S. for a fashion-conscious alternative.

The positioning of Target was further validated when it secured its first 105 locations across Canada. No longer would the country be stuck with so many of those bleak Zellers stores that the Hudson's Bay Company never quite knew what to do with.

And, in the run-up to the $1.8 billion handover of about half of its 273 stores from one U.S.-based owner to another — Walmart will get 39 of them, actually — Zellers has seized permission to publicly admit that it became the last place Canadians wanted to shop at.

The lack of need for traditional advertising in the two-year transition period has reportedly helped HBC make more money off the dying stores. Now, the company has accelerated its use of social media to entice customers through irony.

Movember has served as a case study of how to ping with the modern monoculture — a fundraiser for prostate cancer awareness flecked with just enough ironic entertainment value. Moustache maintenance might as well replace breakfast auditing as status update fodder for a month.

Plus, it puts a fuzzy face on cause that used to never be spoken of in mixed company.

What happens, though, if the novelty value runs its course? The number of Canadian companies looking to align themselves with the campaign foreshadows an inevitable burnout.

For now, advertisers seem eager to attach themselves to something perceived as authentic. But this isn't as much about furthering the potential for social enterprise as trying to reach a demographic that much mass media has given up on.

This year, Movember Canada branding has been attached to Rickard's beer, Speed Stick deodorant, Schick razors, Bread & Butter skincare and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Basically, the campaign has swept in to provide a more ethical platform than a wet T-shirt contest would.

I'm just going to come out and say it: I really don't like viral marketing. I don't like the term and I certainly don't like the practice. And I'm not alone.

Yesterday, a video purporting to show a young woman folding a Starburst wrapper into an origami paper crane using her tongue went "viral" online. After an initial viewing, I wasn't surprised that users were suggesting the video was either a fraud at best, or a poorly concealed ad for Starburst (which, by the way, is a division of Mars Inc., the fifth largest privately held company in America) at worst. "Obvious viral marketing is obvious. Srsly GTFO the internet if you think this might be real" wrote one Tumblr user, while others commented on the surreptitious camerawork or the conspicuous use of product placement.

I'll leave you to judge for yourself, but I'm certain that this video was cooked up in the pretentiously furnished lounge of some ad agency. How can you tell? Aside from the fact that oral origami is probably impossible, there's two things that led me to my conclusion.

“One plays only if and when one wishes to. In this sense, play is free activity. It is also uncertain activity. Doubt must remain until the end, and hinges upon the denouncement. In a card game, when outcome is no longer in doubt, play stops and the players lay down their hands. In a lottery or in roulette, money is placed on a number which may or may not win. In a sports contest, the powers of contestants must be equated, so that each may have a chance until the end. Every game of skill, by definition, involves the risk for the player of missing his stroke, and the threat of defeat, without which the game would no longer be pleasing. In fact, the game is no longer pleasing to one who, because he is too well trained or skillful, wins effortlessly and infallibly.”

This was written in 1932 by the Dutch historian and Orientalist Johan Huizinga, in his work Homo Ludens. In it he lays out his project as one that endeavours to make sense of the concept of play, and the massive historical role that it has played in the rise of human civilization. Huizinga makes the case that play makes up the most creative and exciting parts of culture – an oddly pre-human activity that we engage with in fluid, structured and complex ways. This work has gone on to influence a large number of videogame scholars, due to his typology of what makes a game. Certainly since he published Homo Ludens many have elaborated on the work, but his book is nonetheless an entertaining theoretical look at what makes play so damn exciting.

A fascinating and thorough look into Silicon Valley and one of its key arteries, Y Combinator, in "The Viral Me" by Devin Friedman in GQ Magazine. Here are some key quotes:

YC lesson one: Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world... YC lesson two: Fuck the business plan. Throw your thingy up as soon as possible, see how people use it, and change it to fit what they want.

Devin does a superb job of immersing himself into valley culture and language while maintaining his critical distance. Some of the best parts of the article are classic reporting from conversations where you wish you could be the fly on the wall to hear more than the snippets we get such as:

"FB can already tell when you're about to break up with someone: certain communication patterns emerge"

As wireless technology gets smaller and smarter, it is used in all kinds of innovative ways. Researchers in Japan have developed microscopic RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags that are smaller than a human hair, 0.05mm by 0.05mm. RFID chips in many ways resemble bar codes - they broadcast identification information of one sort or another about whatever it is that they are attached to. The signals from these tags can be used to track products, people, and information. The usefulness of the new micro RFID tags is limited because even the smallest antennas are about eighty times larger than the chips. As antennas shrink in size, this kind of technology will become ubiquitous, embedded anywhere and everywhere.

Initially RFID technology focused on inventory management and logistics: RFID are currently widely used to keep monitor transport of containers at ports, on ships, trains, trucks and their eventual arrival in warehouses. This is by no means the only use of RFID technology, and these new microscopic chips have a much broader potential use - RFID could even be used for paper. Imagine a bureaucracy or records system in which each piece of paper emitted a radio signal that made it possible to digitally track every piece of paper (record) in real time. It would become practically impossible to lose paperwork. And if RFID tags were included in paper money, just imagine the effect on conspiracy theorists around the world.

As smart phones explode in popularity they are prompting the development of new kinds of social media services, notably "location-based services" that reward people for actively sharing their physical locations, a process called "checking in". Now a new wave of similar services will accomplish this automatically, with little or no input from us. Does this demonstrate our newfound comfort with surveillance, and are we getting enough in exchange for the privacy we're discarding?

Briefly, location-based social media services are a rapidly emerging kind of application largely driven by smart phones. The use of these apps on smart phones helps connect the web to the physical world: the stores, places, and communities around us. Some of these services are game-like, such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Others are tied into review sites like Yelp, or map services like Google Buzz, Places, and Maps. Twitter and Facebook are also actively getting into the location-based services game, adapting their services and apps to take advantage of the world around you and help you connect not only with friends, but the places and business that are nearby.