Announcements like this are always fun. SmartSwipe 1.6.3 has been released. 1.6.3 has several enhancements over previous versions. Perhaps the most visible change is the fact that SmartSwipe now speaks French! Support for both of Canada's official languages is a big step forward for our product.

Other enhancements include a very strong and robust set of diagnostics/repair tools, an improved experience with those sites that are not in the SmartSwipe database, and some user interface enhancements.

I cannot believe it has been a week since I last wrote on this blog. However, I have some exciting news - our next release is almost ready to go live and there are some exciting changes afoot. When the release is live, I will tell you all about it, but for now, let's just say that SmartSwipe has learned a new language.

Those of you who follow this spot know that I am a big fan of Phonebusters - Canada's Anti-Fraud Call Centre. Frankly, I love any organization whose major mandate is to protect consumers. Phonebusters exists to raise awareness of and to protect people from fraud.

According to a study from Affinion Security Center, women pay more for identity theft.

61% of men get away with losing no money, but only 53% of women have the same fortune. And 17% of women have paid over $1,000.00 due to identity theft, while only 10% of men have.

From June 5th to 11th SmartSwipe will be on sale for only $59.95 on the Dell.ca site.

This is by far the cheapest SmartSwipe has ever been sold for, and it will not be this cheap again for a long time. If you are thinking of buying one (why woudn't you be?) then now is the time to buy.

In case you missed it, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 would be available for mass release on October 22, 2009. While Windows 7 has not joined the ranks of 'operating systems we support', initial tests have been very promising.

With one exception, SmartSwipe has worked perfectly on Windows 7. And, that one exception had nothing to do with SmartSwipe - rather, the individual in question had all third party extensions disabled. To deal with that kind of issue, we have built a new function into SmartSwipe - in our next release, SmartSwipe is going to check to see if third party browser extensions are enabled and, if not, we will pop up a warning message and give people the option to enable third party browser extensions by clicking 'yes' in the warning message.

On March 27, I wrote an article about my experiences shooting tutorial videos with a great, freeware tool called Wink. Today, I would like to announce that I put a new version of the tutorial online. While this new version is still not perfect (expect to see frequent changes over the next two days), this is a great way to show off our new one button interface.

Tutorials like this are at the centre of SmartSwipe's Customer Support philosophy. New technology can be rather scary and learning new technology with your credit card can be downright terrifying. We think that an interactive flash-based tutorial is the perfect way to demonstrate this kind of technology.