Tech & Science
In January you may have missed the 200th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, celebrated American writer. One of his more famous stories was “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a gruesome tale about a dungeon made of a deep pit and...
When confronted by a huge and aggressive competitor, most small business operators simply fold up and go away. But not Gary Fung, 25, of Richmond. He turns the aggression into a marketing moment. Fung runs a small company called IsoHunt...
A smart technology-industry observer here in the Northwest had a great saying when he spoke of the dot-com companies that flashed and fizzled last decade: Profits: Nature’s Way of Saying You Belong. Mark Anderson made and sold T-shirts and bumper stickers that tech geeks like me thought were hilarious. The...
“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...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...