This week, a glimpse at the 25 companies being showcased at the next celebration of innovative B.C. companies, NextBC. Also: what makes Flickr the best option for your photos and why you don’t need to worry about driverless cars.

Get tickets for NextBC, at Science World on May 21

Despite the fact that Christie Clark is hell-bent on staking the future of B.C. on liquid natural gas, the truth is that our province’s technology sector generates more revenues than all resource sectors combined.

Celebrating the innovation that is happening right under our noses is why the NextBC event began. Produced by DigiBC, an industry association representing new media and wireless companies, the second NextBC takes place next Thursday, at Science World.

At the inaugural event last year, quantum computers and fusion reactors were among the innovations being celebrated.

This year, there are five categories being showcased:

• Innovative business solutions
• Innovative digital media companies
• Innovative entertainment companies
• Innovative start-ups
• Disruptive innovations

Five companies from each category will be on hand showing off their technology during a casual, catered convention-like setting. The awards portion of the program will see a top company in each field being announced, after which representatives from each company will participate in a fun, question-and-answer session with a judging panel deciding on a “most innovative company of the year”.

Tickets for students are only $35 (they are $40 for employees of DigiBC member companies and $65 for the general public). Get your tickets for NEXTBC 2.

Flickr becomes the best choice for your photos online, and elsewhere

I’m currently struggling to get my iPhoto library to migrate to the new Photos application that Apple has made the new default for computers running on the Yosemite version of the OS X operating system.

So I’ve begun investigating options for my more than 70,000 photos.

Adobe’s Lightroom is one, but it costs US$120 a year, and does way more than I really need.

Plex, which I talked about a couple of weeks ago, also manages image files. But it requires that I do a bunch of file renaming, something I can’t do because I can’t access my photo library.

Dropbox can do photos, too, but with the number of images I need to manage, I’d use up all my storage space with pictures of my kids.

And then I remembered that a couple of years ago Flickr gave users 1 TB of cloud-based storage. That’s more than enough space for me to store my numerous photos (it’s enough for up to half a million images, actually, depending on the specific image sizes). But the problem was how to get the images out of the iPhoto library and uploaded to Flickr?

They must have been reading my mind.

Last week, Flickr released apps for both OS X and WIndows that will scour your computer hard drives, identify existing photo libraries, and automatically upload them to your online Flickr account. Any photo uploaded this way is automatically labelled “private” so you don’t have to worry about anyone seeing them, unless you choose to share.

And Flickr is using “advanced recognition technology” to help you organize, sort, and manage your photo library.

Another benefit is that Flickr is effectively a backup for your photo library.

It won’t be an option for serious amateurs or pros who are working with RAW image files and manipulating images with tools such as Photoshop. But for the average person, Flickr has become an ideal choice for your photos.

You should be mindful that using a cloud-based service like Flickr will impact your mobile and home internet data plans. Keep an eye on your bandwidth.

The accident record of Google’s self-driving cars

An Associated Press report published on Monday got people all in a tizzy about Google’s autonomous cars having been in some fender benders.

And that’s all they were. Fender benders.

Google took the opportunity to reveal that, in fact, the self-driving cars have been in 11 accidents in the past six years.

Seven of those accidents were caused by human drivers rear ending the Google car.

Chris Urmson, the director of the program for Google, wrote about what his group is doing, and showed some great examples of how the self-driving cars are preventing more accidents than they are involved in.

I’m ready for cars to do all the driving for me. As soon as all the other humans, that are the real causes of accidents, agree to do the same.