I have some exciting news.

On Saturday, October 30, SmartSwipe won the TIA New Saskatchewan Product Award at the 26th annual ABEX awards. To those of you unfamiliar with the ABEX awards, the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce introduced the Achievement for Business Excellence Awards in 1984. The awards are meant to celebrate all of the business success stories that take place in our province.

Now that our Firefox version has been released, I am going to get back to blogging regularly. Since our Firefox version is so new, I am going to start a series of usability tips and tricks that will help you get started with SmartSwipe in Firefox.

For my first article in this series, I am going to cover installing SmartSwipe all the way from downloading the installation package to running it and making sure that the toolbar appears where you want it to appear in Firefox. In doing so, I will also (hopefully) show you some interesting tricks to make your overall Firefox experience more pleasant.

In one of the most perfect moments of my career, yesterday, at just after 4pm Saskatchewan time, I got to upload a brand new installation package to our web site. The moment the upload finished marked a wonderful milestone in our company's history - for the first time, we had a version of SmartSwipe that would run on Mozilla Firefox. If you would like to download this new version, please visit our downloads page

However, that is not the only change in this new version. Our development team made some architectural changes so SmartSwipe is faster than ever before.

Update - SmartSwipe now officially supports Firefox. For more information, please read our blog article, or to download our Firefox version, please visit our downloads page.

My name is Daniel McCann and I am the President of NetSecure. I understand that many of you have been patiently waiting for a Firefox compatible version of SmartSwipe, and I want to write to apologize for the many delays in the project.

Phonebusters published some interesting information on their web site and I thought that I should share it with all of you. They released their statistics for December 2009 and those stats include a snapshot of the year in identity theft. Those statistics seem to indicate that fewer people fell victim to identity theft, but the average loss was much greater.

In 2008, 11,511 reported being the victims of identity theft. These people were victimized out of a total of $9,697,199.05. In 2009, only 11,135 people reported being the victims of identity theft but they lost a total of $10,993, 348.72. If you do the math, this means that in 2009, the average identity theft victim lost $987.28.

It is time to take our swiping discussion to the next level. I wrote part 1 way back in July of 2009 – please refer to it for basic swiping techniques and safety. I am going to break up part 2 into 2 parts. Part one of part 2 will cover more elementary advanced techniques, while part 2 of part 2 will cover middle, advanced-advanced and trick techniques. Then second half of part 2 of part 2, the advanced-advanced techniques, I will begin part 1 of my own past professional exploits. This will likely take 3 parts. The first part will be included in the second half of part 2’s second half – my amateur start and progression into the first part of my professional career. Part 2 of this 3 part series will focus on the second and most exciting part of my 3 part career, professional competition. Part 3 of the 3 part series will talk about the third part of my 3 part career, the last part of my competitive career and first 2 parts of my teaching career. I believe I still have one part of my third part of my 3 part career left to be told.

In the first part of part 1 we will be discussing elementary-advanced techniques and in the second part of each of the parts I will share some memories I have of these wonderful swipes.

I have some great news from world swipe quarters - SmartSwipe version 1.7.3 is now available for download! This version is a major step forward in the history of SmartSwipe and we encourage all of our users to upgrade. To upgrade, you can either use the pop-up that appears in your version of Internet Explorer, or you can go to our downloads page to download the full version.

Happy holidays!