January/February 2021
In this issue
If you’re at a loss as to where to allocate your savings in 2021, you’re not alone. All the mainstream financial asset classes seem set for a fall. There’s a glaring disparity between the recent performance of the stock market and that of the underlying economy, leading many market veterans to brace for a second COVID-induced crash. The bond market...
Tall buildings made of wood are having more than a moment–the number of such construction projects worldwide has taken off over the past five years, with no sign of stopping. And one of the leading global mass timber suppliers is Penticton-based Structurlam Mass Timber Corp. After nearly six decades developing proprietary products like glue-laminated and cross-laminated timber, Structurlam’s time appears to...
What’s innovative about flipping burgers? Well, what if those burgers aren’t made with meat? In the fall of 2018, A&W Food Services of Canada became the first fast-food chain in North America to add plant protein-based Beyond Meat patties to its menu, and unlike another chain with strong Canadian ties, Tim Hortons, they stayed there. But this was just one in...
When does a tool become a worker? That’s the fine line International Submarine Engineering is exploring with its autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), used for performing tasks in environments hostile to human beings, such as under polar ice sheets. Port Coquitlam–based ISE’s swimming robots are pre-programmed to do their jobs and even make decisions on their own. “There are no humans...
Good Spirits Ampersand Distilling was born in 2014 from a very passionate family: there’s Jeremy and Jessica Schacht’s love of craft cocktails, Jeremy’s father, Stephen Schacht’s, engineering training and Jeremy’s mother, Ramona Froehle-Schacht’s, organic farming know-how. They’re a dream team-turned-clean team, thanks to COVID. Their sani is as simple as it...
Intuitive AI founders and SFU graduates Hassan Murad and Vivek Vyas were looking for a way to help solve the waste crisis. To that end, they developed an AI application named Oscar (after the Sesame Street character) that attaches to any bin and uses a camera, an ultrasonic sensor and an algorithm to tell people which section of the receptacle...
When Aurora Cannabis bought Vancouver’s Anandia Laboratories in August 2018 for $115 million in stock, investors were still dangerously high on the federal government’s imminent legalization of recreational marijuana, which left many of them nursing an expensive hangover. (Since that deal closed, Aurora’s share price has plummeted from the $75 range to about $14 as of late February.) But the Edmonton-headquartered...
Smartphones, laptops, tablets–when it came to cybersecurity, Jake King had seen plenty of innovation for mobile devices. But server infrastructure? King and his business partner, Milun Tesovic, spotted a gap. “We hadn’t seen the same innovation in the cloud,” recalls the Australian expat, who was lead security engineer at Vancouver-based social media management company Hootsuite before founding cybersecurity startup Cmd...
When Vancouver corporate flagship Telus bought Montreal-based Emergis in 2007, the latter’s electronic medical records (EMR) business presented an intriguing growth proposition: a platform to spearhead the digitization of patient files across Canada. Telus Health is now the country’s leading EMR provider, with 1,800 employees and relationships with 94,000 practitioners. ■ SAY “AHA!” If the medical profession has been slow to...
It’s no accident that Lucara Diamond Corp. has, over the past seven years, unearthed a third of the world’s diamonds in excess of 300 carats. Granted, the Vancouver-based, Toronto Stock Exchange–listed company’s Karowe mine in Botswana is extraordinarily rich in such rocks. But where other diamond miners may have accidentally crushed their big stones before they ever got to the sorting...