Tech & Science

Feb 1, 2009
The Fallout
Brent Holliday

“That don’t kill me, can only make me stronger” – Kanye West, “Stronger” For some technology companies created before 2000, this economic downturn is, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “like déjà vu all over again.” The B.C. technology sector contracted by more than 30,000 jobs in the aftermath of...

Jan 19, 2009
Why Nortel Fell
Tony Wanless

Left: CEO of Nortel Networks, Mike Zafirovski So Nortel Networks (TSX: NT) is issuing its last death rattles behind the door of bankruptcy protection. This, according to the pundits who always have something to say, signals hard times for others in the technology industry. Expect the fallout to affect...

Jan 2, 2009
Investing in Technology Startups
Brent Holliday

How does this sound? I want to start a business. It will not make a dollar of revenue for 24 months. It won’t be profitable for four years, at least. It has no assets whatsoever. In fact, the only asset...

Jan 2, 2009
Before Quantum Computers
Paola Quintanar

BCBusiness brings to you a short timeline of the evolution of computers. From Ancient Greece to Burnaby, British Columbia, computers have been solving problems and making regular people wonder, What's next? Image source: iStock/Lagui

Jan 2, 2009
Gaming for Good
Peter Severinson

Charity begins at home, says Electronic Arts – at home, on your duff, in front of the television, playing video games with your friends This may be the laziest charitable sporting event ever. Forget the relaxed saunter around the golf course followed by the token classy dinner; the BC Children’s Hospital...

Dec 1, 2008
Alternative Energy
BCBusiness D.B.

People in the wind turbine game are the aviation nuts of decades past. Like building airplanes, building turbines requires a love of design, an inventor's turn of mind, and an instinct for the passage of air over a wing. Who can look at the videos below and not recall crackling sepia footage of the early-model planes ‒ the midwing, the tandem propeller, the monoplane? Most of these designs were destined never to get airborne. Will any of these turbines succeed...

Dec 1, 2008
Here Comes the Sun
Brenda Bouw

John MacDonald, co-founder of local high-tech pioneer MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA), and Leonid Rubin, former biophysics professor at Moscow State University and one of Russia’s former top physicists, were supposed to be long retired by now. After decades of success in business and academia, respectively, both should be...

Dec 1, 2008
Reality Bytes
Dee Hon

It’s a hazy summer day when I tour the former Western Star truck factory in Kelowna with Brian Fry, vice-president of RackForce Gigacenter. As we talk, Fry’s teenaged son and his girlfriend skip down to the other end of the cavernous 150,000-square-foot building, practically disappearing into the horizon. Ghosts of...

Dec 1, 2008
Timing is Everything: Gem of a Deal
Brent Holliday

In tech deals, timing is everything. When an economy melts as spectacularly as it did in the fall of 2008, stories begin to emerge of incredible timing, of deals that closed shortly before things went horribly awry. The deal of the year in B.C.’s technology industry is one of those...

Nov 21, 2008
What does the Internet look like?
BCBusiness Online

A long time ago, Tim Bernes-Lee developed a way computers could communicate with each other. It became the Internet. For many of us the way cyber-communications work is still a mystery. In an effort to understand the nature or the Internet, many people have tried to map-out or represent graphically the "network of networks."

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