May 2017
In this issue
Unless you peddle buttons, cardboard signs or television airtime, or you own a hot-dog stand near a polling place, this month’s provincial election is unlikely to influence what products you sell. And yet as politics becomes more polarized, not every company chooses to stay above the partisan fray. Nor can every business make that decision for itself.Vancouver’s Storm Crow Tavern/Alehouse...
I grew up in a small town, Kitimat, and my fiancée grew up in a smaller town, Harrison Hot Springs. We lived in downtown Vancouver for close to seven years. In 2013, we had sold the company, Marilynjean, and moved out to Coquitlam. We bought a house right on top of a mountain, and every single day I’d be walking...
In June 2014, Colin Pickell, a coffee shop manager in Ladysmith, set out to raise $7,000 on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter Canada. He wanted to publish his children’s book, called Who Will Tuck Me Into Bed?, and he needed money to hire an illustrator. After a 30-day campaign, Pickell had exceeded his goal by $221. A month later, Vancouver-based entrepreneurs Mark...
Auntie Kim’s Better Bickies are small-batch dog treats produced in Squamish using organic ingredients. Flavours include Peanut Butter and Jam (oats, peanuts, blueberries), Outback Snack (oats, kangaroo, blueberries, pumpkin) and Buffalo Cheese Puffs (brown rice, bison, cream cheese). HydroPaws Hydrotherapy and Wellness Centre in Maple Ridge has a heated 3.6-by-7.3-metre pool where certified hydrotherapists treat dogs’ injuries and chronic conditions, plus...
In late February at the Permanent, a venue hall in a restored 1907 downtown Vancouver bank, black-and-white-clad servers manoeuvre trays of short-rib mini burgers among groups of people gathered around paintings. They’re familiar works, including Irises by Vincent van Gogh, A Stormy Sea by Claude Monet and the curiously ugly Woman With an Umbrella by Edgar Degas. The evening feels...
As “chief dreamer” for Telus Communications Co., Allen Devine comes up with new ways to use technology. A concept may remain just that or end up being developed by Telus and/or another company. One area Devine is exploring is using the Internet of Things to prolong people’s independence as they age. For example, placing sensors around the house could monitor...
You probably know Britco for its tan-and-orange rental trailers, a fixture on construction sites. But the Langley-based company has other talents. The Britco Construction division recently married its expertise in modular building design with “passive house,” a building standard that is only now gaining traction in B.C. Although neither is a new idea, combining them allows swift construction of highly energy-efficient...
Mining companies everywhere are having a tough time finding high-grade ore because others have beaten them to it. At the same time, the industry faces pressure to clean up its environmental act. MineSense Technologies Ltd. seeks to solve both of those problems. Near its headquarters in South Vancouver, the cleantech company keeps a front-end loader retrofitted with ShovelSense, a data...
A small startup based in a Richmond office park is confronting an infirmity that has dogged Canadian medicine and presented around the globe—a shortage of pathologists.The specialized doctors, who diagnose diseases from tissue samples and tests, play a key role in determining treatment. As Canada’s population ages and cancer cases become more numerous and complex, there aren’t enough pathologists to...
An electric car is to a fossil-fuel car what the Internet is to a fax machine, says Jerry Kroll, CEO of Vancouver’s Electra Meccanica Vehicles Corp., which debuted its Solo one-person electric vehicle in September. “It’s less expensive, faster, cleaner, more fun,” Kroll explains. “The only difference between a fax machine and a fossil-fuel combustion vehicle is fax paper wasn’t...