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Our top story for August came courtesy of Kik, whose mobile messaging platform was valued at $1 billion on news that Tencent Holdings had taken a $50-million stake in the Waterloo company. As China’s largest Internet company, Tencent owns WeChat, the popular messaging and commerce app that Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston has said he most wants to emulate.
Ecosystem
More billion-dollar companies could follow Kik’s success, and boost Canada’s global innovation footprint, if we built a more cohesive Toronto-Waterloo Region technology corridor, Communitech CEO Iain Klugman and BMO Vice-Chair Kevin Lynch argued in a Globe and Mail op-ed.
Governments have played a critical but often-unsung role in spurring such success, U.K.-based economist Mariana Mazzucato told us in the lead-up to her upcoming keynote address at the Waterloo Innovation Summit.
Apart from making direct investments in innovation, governments will also need to improve transit infrastructure if a Toronto-Waterloo Region tech corridor is to flourish, a point Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic raised at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference in Niagara Falls.
Startups
Of course, talent is another crucial component in Canada’s ability to compete in the global innovation race, and startups face a particular challenge in going up against tech giants, as outlined in this Globe and Mail piece.
In other startup news, the sun is shining brightly on Suncayr, a nanotechnology startup from the University of Waterloo’s Velocity Foundry, which is among 25 startups (four from Canada) to be nominated for International Startup of the Year. We featured Suncayr’s Rachel Pautler in our inaugural instalment of We Built This, a short-video series profiling Waterloo Region innovators.
Also nominated for International Startup of the Year is Sitata, based in the Communitech Hub, whose app alerts travellers to health and safety threats.
Varden Labs, launched by a pair of University of Waterloo students, focuses on travel of a different type: autonomous vehicles. Their self-driving golf cart underwent a successful test on the Waterloo campus, with no less than the university’s president, Feridun Hamdullahpur, riding shotgun.
A short distance away, in the university’s David Johnston Research and Technology Park, the Accelerator Centre opened Reactor, an 8,000-square-foot space for startups participating in the centre’s AC Momentum program. Among Reactor’s early clients are Alert Labs, an Internet of Things company, and O2 Canada, which is developing a respirator with a smart filter.
Meanwhile, in the countryside, Netflix users frustrated by the limited bandwidth and prime-time usage caps that often accompany rural life should be heartened by NightShift, a router developed by Waterloo-based Aterlo Networks. Their router downloads and stores Netflix content while users are sleeping, so that they can watch it uninterrupted later.
Youth
For kids, no summer is complete without a trip to camp. The Financial Post profiled Sarah Prevette’s Future Design School, which sold out its summer innovation camps for young people.
In Waterloo Region, meanwhile, Google Canada’s engineering headquarters provided space for the region’s first-ever Girls Learning Code summer camp.
On the topic of young coders, The Next Web profiled Soroush Ghodsi, the 13-year-old Waterloo boy who founded Slik, a tool that helps investors find the best new companies. You might recall that Soroush took part in a Startup Weekend at the Communitech Hub earlier this year. |
