Mark Mann

It's not quite cool yet, but hardware is taking over from pure software plays in Waterloo's tech hothouse. When Pablo Molina and Faizan Sheikh graduated from the University of Waterloo and moved to Ottawa in 2011, they wanted to apply their new…

Tsunamis, cyclones, mudslides, pandemics, mining disasters, rebel uprisings, and volcanic eruptions—Krizo has seen it all. Life is hard on Krizo. The small Pacific island has seen it all: tsunamis, cyclones, mudslides, pandemics, mining disasters,…

Scott Hassan has made a robot for everyone to go everywhere. "Here" is a funny word. So says Scott Hassan, the media-shy Silicon Valley billionaire who once set out to build the first fully autonomous humanoid robot, and ended up hawking what looks…

Scientists at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography have spent 15 years trying to domesticate Atlantic bluefin tuna, one of the ocean’s greatest apex predators. The atmosphere in the new tuna-rearing facility in the small coastal town of Mazzaron, in…

Call center jobs are about to get a lot "friendlier," and maybe a lot more creepy too. If there was ever a real-life workplace dystopia, it is the modern call center. Employees spend their shifts interrupting strangers with surveys and sales pitches,…

Decluttering probably has never had more fruitful a moment than when Montrealer Tami Zuckerman, preparing for the arrival of her first child, surveyed what needed selling in her household and turned to Craigslist. Popular though it may be, the…

Affective computing is gaining momentum, but technology is still a barrier. Jean-Philip Poulin was feeling "joyful" and "excited" when I interviewed him recently in Montreal. I know this because he showed me his real-time emotion metrics during our…

Richard Gelfond doesn't believe in coincidences. An investment banker, Gelfond had just seen his first Imax film one long weekend in 1993, on a visit to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., with his family, and he was…

Vin Diesel's goofy grin has never looked better. When it comes to watching expensive cars tumble through the stratosphere, arguably no film format does it better than IMAX. The company's 70mm projectors have offered better resolution than its…

Roger Simard likes wearables. When I met the digital health entrepreneur and pharmacist at a downtown office building in Montreal, he was wearing four on his right arm: two name-brand fitness trackers and two prototypes. After showing off his…

Meet the self-tracking smart patch that magically sticks to your skin. One of the inventors of a self-tracking smart patch wants to talk to me about magic. Alexander Mosa and I are sitting in a boardroom at the MaRS research centre in Toronto, where…

A new generation of Canadian tech companies is proving you don't need to be in Silicon Valley to reach "unicorn" status. Ottawa-based e-commerce software-maker Shopify blew past the magical $1-billion mark when it went public last year. Hootsuite,…

The Ontario government spends approximately $5 billion a year on business support programs, many of which don’t stand up to cost-benefit analysis. So say Jamison Steeve and Sean Speer in a new paper published by Ontario 360, a public policy research…

Even though the existing crop of plant-produced drugs is small, there is potential to make virtually any biological drug. Are cigarettes the new cure for cancer? No, definitely not. But thanks to developments in genetic engineering, tobacco farming…

Building dams means making lakes and making lakes means covering lots of stuff with water. There's got to be a better way. The problem with renewable energy isn't getting it—it's having it around when we need it. Renewables are abundant, but they…

Its mavens say it will get you rich quick. Others say it’s the way of the future. The reality of Bitcoin remains to be seen In the 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland, Alice was trying to find a party when she fell down the rabbit hole. Perhaps…

At the recent annual meeting of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy (AICan) in Montreal, where CIFAR announced its first cohort of artificial intelligence chairs, I met an AI researcher from the local ecosystem, and we fell to talking about the main subtext…

Hidden away in the large appropriations bill signed by then-President Donald Trump on December 27, 2020 was a bold plan to create a new industry in the United States, centred on nuclear fission and fusion energy. Title II of the Energy Act of 2020…

If graphene were a superhero, its catchphrase would be, "Stronger than steel, thinner than paper." Indeed, graphene is often referred to as a "supermaterial" because it is the strongest material yet discovered, even at a thickness of only a single…

Many in Canada’s innovation ecosystem were disappointed to learn last week that Element AI, the technology company once seen as a pillar of Montreal’s AI ecosystem, had been acquired by California’s ServiceNow, which offers workflow technology over…