Episode Description: This week: a German research team built a water contamination test that runs on a smartphone and gives you an answer in under a minute. A Cornell professor has a gardening trick that involves water, a paper towel, and one night. A Bristol startup figured out what to do with festival urine! Arielle…
The Government of Canada today announced $8.4 million in financial support for several Edmonton-area businesses, several of which will see funding accelerate automation. Edmonton-Centre MP Eleanor Olszewski, who is the minister responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan), announced the funding on April 17 at Flexxaire, an Edmonton-based manufacturer of fans for heavy-duty diesel engine…
NorthX Climate Tech announced more than $2.2 million worth of follow-on investments in a trio of British Columbia (BC) wildfire technology startups on Thursday. The recipients include Crwn.ai, Nova, and Skyward Wildfire Technologies. All three are building and deploying field-tested tech designed to detect, prevent, and manage wildfires. As Canada’s wildfire seasons grow longer, larger,…
Lauren Langbridge is the general manager for North America for FinTech payment platform Wise. Public data from Payments Canada shows that millions of Canadians send international payments each year, with outbound remittances and cross-border commercial activity steadily increasing year over year. Small and mid-sized businesses, in particular, are more globally connected than ever—paying suppliers abroad,…
Toronto-based online storytelling and social media platform Wattpad has undergone a key leadership change: president Aron Levitz is out and David Lee has taken over. Lee also currently serves as the CFO of Wattpad parent company and digital comic producer Webtoon Entertainment, which is owned by South Korean internet conglomerate Naver. BetaKit has reached out…
Someone bought a portfolio of 30+ WordPress plugins, waited eight months, and then flipped a switch. The WordPress plugin supply chain attack that surfaced in April 2026 is being reported as a malware story. It isn’t, really. It’s a trust architecture story — and that distinction matters enormously for how you respond to it. What…
Allbirds stock had one of the wilder two-day runs in recent memory. On Wednesday, April 15, the company — once a $4 billion darling of eco-conscious tech workers — announced it was abandoning shoes entirely and reinventing itself as an AI compute infrastructure business. The market loved it, briefly. Shares of BIRD surged over 582%…
One Canadian company is trying to lure talent back home—an effort that started with a holiday dinner. In October, Wealthsimple hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for a group of Canadians (and a few “honorary Canadians”) in San Francisco, the company’s chief people officer, Diana McLachlan, shared in a LinkedIn post at the time. Canada’s tech ecosystem…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Anyone who has ever gone hard at the gym on a Monday and then struggled to get off the couch on Wednesday knows exactly what delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is. You do not need a clinical definition. DOMS is the stiffness, the tenderness, and the specific regret of having…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM On April 22, 1970, roughly 20 million Americans took to the streets, campuses, and parks to demand that the government treat the environment as something worth protecting. At the time, rivers in the United States were catching fire. Lead was still in gasoline. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio had…
