Earlier this week, Canada’s innovation ministry shared the results from the 30-day national consultation it held late last year to inform the country’s upcoming AI strategy. The consultation included feedback from 28 members of Canada’s AI task force, appointed by AI Minister Evan Solomon, which included representatives from industries and fields from tech to academia. …
Rade Kovacevic is the co-founder and CEO of PolarGrid, an edge compute company building a global, real-time AI inference delivery network. For the last decade, we’ve trained ourselves to expect the internet to feel instant. Pages load in milliseconds. Video streams without buffering. Real-time collaboration just works. That expectation didn’t happen by accident. Starting with…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Keeping up the pace in this hectic world is hard, so it’s no wonder we often find ourselves feeling stressed and down. Serotonin, a key neurotransmitter in the brain, is important for mood control and has considerable sway over how we’re feeling. Combining specific foods and lifestyle choices can…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In a landmark win for wildlife lovers and conservationists, Scotland will now require swift bricks to be installed in all new buildings, a move aimed at reversing the steep decline of swifts and other endangered cavity-nestingbirds. Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) voted to support an amendment by Scottish…
OpenText has beat analyst expectations in its latest earnings report, thanks to the growth of the Kitchener-Waterloo-based company’s cloud services. The company, which announced its Q2 earnings after market hours on Thursday, reported $1.33 billion USD in revenue, a dip of 0.6 percent year over year, but above the $1.29 billion USD expected. That’s contrasted…
Substack, the newsletter platform co-founded by University of Waterloo and Kik alumni, has added Mark Swierszcz as its first head of partnerships in Canada following “meaningful” organic growth in the country. “Canada has emerged as one of Substack’s strongest markets outside the US and UK.” Swierszcz, based in Toronto, joins Substack after six years as…
Two Canadian indoor farming startups are coming together as sticker shock in the produce aisle becomes more pronounced for Canadians. The two companies hope to create a “more resilient domestic food supply” and a way for Canadian innovation to enter international markets. Toronto-based Elevate Farms acquired Ottawa-based Fieldless Farms on Jan. 23, combining two AgTech…
Y Combinator has once again revised its standard deal terms, this time to add Canada back as one of its permitted sites of investment. The accelerator’s standard deal terms webpage was revised at some point following November to remove Canada as a supported country, which would have forced Canadian founders to reincorporate their startups in…
Moltbook, the Reddit-like online platform where AI agents appear to post freely and interact amongst themselves, took the internet by storm last week. The supposedly AI-exclusive social network spawned out of Peter Steinberger’s free, open-source AI assistant now called OpenClaw (it was formerly Moltbot, and Clawdbot before that). OpenClaw is designed to act as a…
Montréal-based Lightspeed Commerce is raising its yearly outlook for a second straight quarter after posting revenue of $312.3 million USD, slightly beating its internal forecasts. The e-commerce and point-of-sales firm announced its fiscal Q3 earnings before the markets opened today. During a traditionally busy quarter for retailers, Lightspeed’s revenue and profitability numbers met internal forecasts…
