Five Canadian companies made CNBC’s 2019 Upstart 100 list unveiled on Tuesday: Attabotics, Calgary; Cmd, Vancouver; Deep Genomics and Nobul, Toronto; and RenoRun, Montreal.
Collectively, these promising start-ups raised more than $77 million in venture capital.
The entrepreneurial ecosystem is booming in major cities in Canada, thanks to government incentives, a growing tech talent pool and access to venture capital.
As the world evolves to embrace the 4th industrial revolution, our workplaces are changing. Just as other industrial revolutions transformed the skillset and experience required from the workforce, we can expect the same from this revolution. Only five years from now, 35 percent of the skills seen as essential today will change according to the World Economic Forum. While we’re not able to predict the future, yet, here are the ten most important job skills (plus a bonus one) every company will be looking for in 2020.
The rate at which a startup grows has long been a big determinant of startup success. While growth matters, over 70% of startups fail because of premature scaling. This finding and 10 more listed below will help you make wiser decisions based on previous failures, successes and data-backed conclusions.
HireVue claims it uses artificial intelligence to decide who’s best for a job. Outside experts call it ‘profoundly disturbing.’
This video by HireVue explains the tech firm’s artificial intelligence-driven assessments for potential job candidates. (HireVue)
An artificial intelligence hiring system has become a powerful gatekeeper for some of America’s most prominent employers, reshaping how companies assess their workforce — and how prospective employees prove their worth.
Designed by the recruiting-technology firm HireVue, the system uses candidates’ computer or cellphone cameras to analyze their facial movements, word choice and speaking voice before ranking them against other applicants based on an automatically generated “employability” score.
HireVue’s “AI-driven assessments” have become so pervasive in some industries, including hospitality and finance, that universities make special efforts to train students on how to look and speak for best results. More than 100 employers now use the system, including Hilton and Unilever, and more than a million job seekers have been analyzed.
MuleSoft has released the report ‘Top 7 Digital Transformation Trends Shaping 2020’ which outlines the most timely digital transformation trends for 2020 and explores their impact across industries.
Digital transformation has become a catchall term for reimagining business in the digital age: it can refer to any process that uses digital technologies to solve for changing business and market requirements.
A recent Wall Street Journal article focused on the steep decline in elite MBA program applications. In an era of an increasing divide between the economic haves and have nots, you’d think that the vaunted Masters in Business Administration degree would be valued more than ever. After all, with the recent boom in the stock market coinciding with a steep reduction in corporate taxes, big corporations are awash in profits to reward their highest achievers. Though there has been only slight progress in wage increases for rank and file employees, the top brass is enjoying greater compensation than ever. And a quick look at the CEOs of the companies with highest market caps reveal at least one thing in common: both leaders obtained MBAs from prestigious institutions. Apple’s Tim Cook graduated from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, while Satya Nadella of Microsoft received his MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
Yet MBA applications are down sharply, even at the most celebrated institutions. The Journal article has highlighted declines between 5-20% in applications to the top U.S. MBA programs. What gives?
Venmo announced today its plans to launch its first-ever credit card. The card is being issued in partnership with Synchrony, already the issuer behind Venmo parent company PayPal’s Extras Mastercard and Cashback Mastercard. The move is meant to help Venmo, a still unprofitable arm of PayPal’s larger business, generate more revenue.
PayPal’s plans in this space were reported in April of this year by The WSJ, which said the company had been taking meetings with various banks since late 2018 to discuss a Venmo-branded credit card. The report said PayPal was then close to selecting Synchrony as its issuer and would likely announce the card sometime later in 2019, as it now has.
Public and investor-owned utilities alike are facing a dilemma: Americans are using less energy. Increasing efficiency and the shift to a service-oriented economy have combined to reduce electricity consumption on a per capita basis for several years running.
It’s a trend that’s weighing on utility companies, and their bottom lines.
Eight U.S. utilities had debt in excess of $2 billion, according to recent financial statements, led by The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) $20.3 billion. So far this year, the credit ratings of four utilities with significant debt were downgraded to a negative outlook by the major rating agencies.
As a result, publicly owned and publicly traded utilities alike are looking for new sources of revenue.
Fortunately, there are several ways to minimize these tasks or eliminate them from your company.
There are thousands of books on time management, and thousands more on work/life balance, but almost all of them either nibble around the edge of the problems or pretend they don’t exist. So, here’s the straight skinny: The reason most people are stressed for time is that they are wasting more than half of each working day on time-wasting tasks.
Life in Silicon Valley during the dawn of the unicorns.
The first time I looked at a block of code and understood what was happening, I felt like a genius.
Depending on whom you ask, 2012 represented the apex, the inflection point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley’s startup scene—what cynics called a bubble, optimists called the future, and my future co-workers, high on the fumes of world-historical potential, breathlessly called the ecosystem. Everything was going digital. Everything was up in the cloud. A technology conglomerate that first made its reputation as a Web-page search engine, but quickly became the world’s largest and most valuable private repository of consumer data, developed a prototype for a pair of eyeglasses on which the wearer could check his or her e-mail; its primary rival, a multinational consumer-electronics company credited with introducing the personal computer to the masses, thirty years earlier, released a smartphone so lightweight that gadget reviewers compared it to fine jewelry.
Technologists were plucked from the Valley’s most prestigious technology corporations and universities and put to work on a campaign that reëlected the United States’ first black President. The word “disruption” proliferated, and everything was ripe for or vulnerable to it: sheet music, tuxedo rentals, home cooking, home buying, wedding planning, banking, shaving, credit lines, dry-cleaning, the rhythm method. It was the dawn of the unicorns: startups valued, by their investors, at more than a billion dollars. The previous summer, a prominent venture capitalist, in the op-ed pages of an international business newspaper, had proudly declared that software was “eating the world.”
LaunchBio CEO Joan Siefert Rose leads a tour of life sciences co-working lab, BioLabs NC.
The growing popularity of co-working spaces like WeWork could pose a risk to the US economy in the next economic downturn, a Fed official warned on Friday.
Boston Federal Reserve Bank President Eric Rosengren, who has publicly dissented with the Fed’s recent interest rate cuts, said lower rates will boost risk in “unexpected places.”
“Evolving market models, along with low interest rates, are creating a new type of potential financial stability risk in commercial real estate,” he said at an event in New York City. “One such market model is the development of co-working spaces in many major urban office markets.”
The home in Menlo Park, California, where Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998. Paul Sakuma/AP
Like Detroit with automobiles or Pittsburgh with steel, Silicon Valley is synonymous with technology. In her new book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Margaret O’Mara casts a historian’s eye on the contradictions of this pivotal place in modern American history.
Although it is known as a hotbed of entrepreneurship, O’Mara shows the important role played in Silicon Valley by government spending, funneled through research universities such as Stanford or dispensed as federal contracts to tech firms. She charts how the Valley continually remakes itself, creating cutting-edge industry after industry—from semiconductor chips and personal computers to biotech, mobile devices, the Internet, and social media. She traces it from its birth in the military buildup of the 1940s and the Cold War, to the rise of entrepreneurs steeped in the Bay Area counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, to now, and the backlash against tech.
