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The Blackberry sign is pictured in Waterloo June 19, 2014.Mark Blinch/Reuters

Today is book launch day for Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Globe and Mail reporters Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. If you haven't already, read an excerpt.

Also today, Code Conference begins (May 26-28). That's the annual tech/business talkfest from the folks at Re/Code.com, the tech site founded by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, formerly of The Wall Street Journal. It's being held at Rancho Palos Verdes in California. As usual there are big names from the Valley like Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Ben Silbermann of Pinterest and Canada's Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack. There are also a few celebrities and politicians mixed in: Empire actor Terrence Howard, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and even old-media types like CBS boss Les Moonves. The good news: You don't have to be there to see all the interesting interviews; they post a lot of them on their site after the fact.

In other tech news, Online communication service Skype has been summoned to appear in court in Belgium after refusing to pass on customer data to aid a criminal investigation, a court spokesman said.

A court in Mechelen, just north of Brussels, had asked for data from messages and calls exchanged on Microsoft-owned Skype, arguing that telecom operators in the country were required to do so.

Also, a British Columbia university is now accepting the digital currency bitcoin at all of its bookstores, a move that staff claim is a first for Canadian post-secondary schools.

Simon Fraser University has also announced that automated bitcoin vending machines will soon begin operating on campuses in Burnaby, Vancouver and Surrey.

- With reports from Reuters and The Canadian Press

What is this?

Every day a million pieces of news fly at you. This daily Signal Boost is our attempt to give readers a morning head's up on the news that will matter to Canadians interested in media, technology and telecom.

Tips or suggestions for our calendar? Message sdingman [at] globeandmail.com

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