Tech & Science
Ascalade – which makes wireless phones and other devices – was one of the bigger players in a B.C. wireless scene that’s been exploding of late, with an ever-increasing number of competitors. While it appears Ascalade’s troubles are bigger than...
They began manufacturing firearms almost immediately and within 40 years had more and better guns than any other country. After a few decades, however, guns disappeared from Japan entirely. Why? The insularity and xenophobia of the day undoubtedly played a...
When two companies have been bitter rivals – competing in the markets and clashing in the courts – how do they forgive, forget and hold hands? Burnaby-based biotechs Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp. (TKM-T) and Protiva Biotherapeutics Inc. have played out a fierce family drama in recent years. Protiva was spun out of...
With the construction of a $14.7-million B.C.-Canada House Pavilion underway in Beijing, several of B.C.’s trade associations are assembling their delegations and hoping to expand BC business in China, using the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a convenient springboard. “China is clearly an emerging market for us, and this is a very good opportunity to kick down a few doors and learn more about it,” says Pascal Spothelfer, president and CEO of the B.C. Technology Industry Association (BCTIA).
Canada is doing a crappy job of protecting its web users from defamation suits – and that’s bad news for anyone north of the 49th who carries on conversations, hosts websites or does business in virtual space. The central problem...
A big bomb dropped on the sports pages recently when it was revealed that the Vancouver Canucks hockey team was talking to a consulting company about providing statistical analysis to the team. Jokes aside, old die hard hockey fans rolled in their graves, or on their couches if their sticks are still on the ice, at the news.
At the start of this decade, Canada was a leader in the Internet Age. Maintaining this momentum, in 2001 the National Broadband Task Force issued a challenging report, setting as a national goal the linking of all communities across Canada by 2004 through high-speed broadband of 1.5 million bits of...
It’s well into Sunday afternoon by the time Jonathan Rhone finally gets a spare minute to take a media call. These are hectic days for the president and CEO of Vancouver-based Nexterra Energy Corp. – a “clean-tech” firm (as environmental-technology...
On the Internet, dot-com reigns supreme. But expansion of the information superhighway has necessitated the construction of other domain suffixes, or top-level domains, such as dot-ca, dot-biz, dot-info and, more recently, dot-mobi (for mobile devices). Now comes dot-asia, a regional domain for Asia and the Pacific that opened to the general public in March.
BC Hydro is calling on yet another alt-energy sector to add its weight to the B.C. power grid with a recent call for bioenergy. It’s a good signal for the B.C. tech companies coaxing megawatts from wood chips and other organic waste, but it’s a fairly minor boost for a sector already doing big things outside the country.