220,000 workers needed: That’s how vast Canada’s tech skills gap could be by 2020, according to Canadian government and industry experts.
If that gap isn’t closed, many tech companies will be forced to look for opportunities outside the country, Waveform CEO Kirk Simpson recently told CBC News.
“If we can find the talent somewhere else, we might open a second location in the U.S. market or in a European market,” he said. “And those jobs will not go to Canadians.”
Teaching young people to code and harness the power of cognitive computing could be the solution. Cognitive is, “beyond doubt,” our future, says Tanmay Bakshi, a 13-year-old developer, coding advocate and IBM Cloud champion.
“If we can get the youth involved in this technology, we’ll be creating more job opportunities for them. They’ll have (a better) chance of getting a better job in the AI field.”
In 2016 women held only 21.6% of board seats in Canada’s largest corporations by revenue, according to the Canadian Board Diversity Council.
While this is an improvement from 2015’s 19.5%, many companies still appear to be lagging behind adding women to their boards. A 2016 survey by the Ontario Securities Commission found that 45% of issuers did not have any women on their boards. Something needs to change.
Enter theBoardlist, a talent platform that engages the tech community to increase gender diversity on boards. Launched in the U.S. in 2015, theBoardlist currently has over 1600 board-ready women. For the past six months, I have relentlessly worked closely with founder Sukhinder Singh Cassidy and the team to support the expansion of theBoardlist to Canada.
If you know a board that needs more women check out theBoardlist to see how it can help. If you know a highly qualified woman who would be an asset to a board, why not nominate her right now.
If your company needs more gender diversity at all levels, you’re not alone. While working with companies of all sizes, I’ve learned these three steps can make a significant difference:
Visit community colleges to find potential employees instead of Ivy League schools.
When looking to fill a position at your company, demand that your HR department or staffing firm show you at least 50% female candidates for the role.
Be a voice for change by calling attention to the number of women at every meeting. When numbers are low, relentlessly ask what can be done to improve it.
Foreign innovation drives startup economies, and in the US alone, 51% of billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants.
Cities across the world have taken notice: encouraging the free movement of information and talent is crucial to tech sector success. That’s why Singapore, a longtime advocate of attracting foreign talent, has seen major growth as a startup hub. As Industry Leaders Magazine reports, this city-island-nation has the potential to become the next Silicon Valley.
Any doubts? Look at the numbers: VC investment in the tech sector in Singapore increased from less than $30 million in 2011 to more than $1 billion in 2013, with 10 local exits in 2014.
One of the driving forces behind this growth is Singapore’s attractive immigration policies. The government has actively encouraged startups to set up shop, with programs like theGlobal Investor Program. TheEntrePass—a specific employment pass targeting would-be entrepreneurs—facilitates the relocation process for foreign startups who want to set up shop in Singapore.
A new report from TechToronto, an organization supporting the city’s technology community, says over 400,000 jobs in Toronto in 2016 are related to the tech sector.
Ben Zifkin, CEO of Hubba, a B2B product information network for retailers, said: “This report corroborates what we already know and what the rest of the world is learning – that Toronto excels in technology and that we can develop globally disruptive companies.”
“What we can work on is developing an even more supportive innovation community, so that technology companies and jobs can flourish.”
The report made public policy recommendations including the following:
Make the Toronto-Waterloo corridor world-renowned for fintech and machine learning
Introduce fast track immigration visa for tech talents
Increase enrollment and diversity in post secondary STEM programs
Re-distribute government funds from incumbents to scaleups and startups
Solve civic problems and strengthen local tech companies via procurement.
Control and what we do with it is essential to maintaining good startup culture — whether it’s trust, respect and autonomy to perform daily work well, or letting go of the company’s reins in order to let staff explore and flourish.
“Everyone wants control in their lives. I don’t think anyone grew up wanting to be an executive assistant,” explained Vancouver-based entrepreneur Jonathan Bixby of Stanley Park Ventures at Tech Vancouver.
Nobody likes to be micromanaged. Founders know this, and having the freedom to create something new and exciting is what drove most of them to create a startup in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s an easy lesson for founders to forget once they’ve laid it all on the line.
Giving staff members more freedom over the work they do, as well as where and how they do it, can pay off in spades in productivity, growth and innovation.
As Bixby says, taking the time to uncover what employees care about when they’re on and off the clock helps founders establish relationships of mutual understanding and respect: “Get a Google spreadsheet, write down all your employee’s names and find out something cool about them that they are passionate about.”
And to most employees, respect is more valuable than foosball tables, a stocked beer fridge and pizza on Fridays, says former Netflix chief talent officer Patty McCord. “All those perks might make people happy, but they don’t make people happy in the same way that being on a great team and doing great work does.”
Good read on startup culture. "Your perks aren’t culture. They’re just perks." http://t.co/AA9ThNtoQ1
Designing intelligent personal assistants isn’t just a game for tech-sector titans anymore.
As The Verge reports, API, open-source tools and the ability to rent computing power are making it possible for more and more startups to leverage academic and industry developments — like natural language processing — to make apps tightly focused on a particular task.
X.ai is a startup based in New York City that’s raised almost US$35 million since starting in 2014. It makes a scheduling assistant, Amy Ingram. When ‘she’ is copied on an email, the software coordinates a meeting day and time.
EasilyDo, another AI-assistant startup, is specifically tailored to help with travel — an area already dominated by Apple’s Wallet and Gmail.
EasilyDo says its solution recognizes more travel companies than its biggest competitors, leading The Verge to ponder, “Does it matter if a startup is marginally better than Google or anyone else in a domain, when the bigger player is good enough?”
That question hasn’t stopped Viv, a startup founded by Dag Kittlaus, the maker of Siri. Viv’s AI can write its own programs, instead of relying on human coding. Kittlaus calls it a breakthrough in computer science: “It’s going to change the way programmers work with computers.”
Whether downloaded apps can replace baked-in personal assistants remains to be seen.
One thing’s for certain, though. As screen fatigue grows and more people seek out other ways of interacting with technology, intelligent personal assistants — whether it’s just a voice inside your smartphone or an actual robot — will be the future.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence Posted in In Brief | Comments Off on Startups Challenge Big Tech’s Hold on AI Personal Assistants
Many companies have narrowed their focus to the most profitable customers.
More new enterprises are leveraging artificial intelligence, robotics and virtual reality, “creating potential areas of growth for Silicon Valley technologists to build on next.”
Elimination of some employee perks. For example, Evernote ditched free housekeeping services.
“The startup world did heed the warnings,” Max Levchin, chief executive of lending startup Affirm, told the NYT. Levchin was a co-founder of PayPal.
The number of U.S. “IT practitioners” reporting annual salaries above $100,000 jumped by 11 percentage points, according to software engineering firm Puppet.
Released earlier this week, the 2016 survey results confirm just how valuable software and network engineers are. The percentage of IT practitioners making more than $100,000 rose to 58 percent this year after staying the same from 2014 to 2015.
Job titles in the Puppet survey’s IT practitioner category include “DevOps engineer,” “software developer or engineer,” and “cloud or infrastructure architect.”
Other highlights from the 2016 survey:
Highest earners: IT practitioners in the Australia/New Zealand region, the United States, and Canada.
Best industries: If you’re in the United States, our data shows that you’re more likely to make a better salary if you are a tech practitioner in technology, finance, or healthcare.
Lowest paid regions: Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Latin America/Caribbean region.
The company created incentives for in-house recruiters to bring in “diversity hires,” meaning prospects who aren’t white males or Asian males, but, as is the case with many tech companies the effort hasn’t necessarily led to offers from hiring managers.
“Former Facebook recruiters say they had mixed feelings about the extra-credit program,” according to the Journal. “Some were encouraged by the incentive, and identified a more diverse group of candidates. Still, they said it wasn’t enough to overcome a broader bias within Facebook and other tech companies for candidates who attended prestigious schools.”
Women and other “diversity hires” in tech have become a hot topic, and won’t go away soon because the industry has become such an important component of regional economies.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, high tech industries constitute 12 percent of all jobs, but produce 23 percent of all output.
Therefore, groups left out of tech industry opportunities face increasing economic marginalization.
Here’s Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with Y Combinator about the genesis of Facebook and the company’s “innovation culture.”
The Mad Men are not as far behind us as we thought.
The Elephant In The Valley survey polled over 200 senior women in Silicon Valley, and found that 60 percent of them reported unwanted sexual advances at work.
Of that group, 65 percent said these advances were made by higher-ranking colleagues. Another 60 percent of those who had reported an incident were dissatisfied with the response.
An informal survey we ran on Twitter surfaced the same theme: 63 percent said they have experienced harassment in their workplace, according to combined results from two polls taken in June.
Not that financial performance should be the first consideration in efforts to root out sexual harassment in the workplace.
Still, the situation isn’t completely bleak. Our poll about female founders and role models showed the largest proportion of respondents saying they could name at least two or three in the industry.
Taking an idea from concept to reality can be difficult for startups. Entrepreneurs with great ideas often struggle to get the attention of prospective customers, which can make it difficult for them to grow into robust scaleups that have a strong customer base.
In order to facilitate that transition, IBM has published the Bluemix Garage Method, an open design method to help startups take an idea from conception to execution. To support this initiative, IBM has created innovation spaces for startups and enterprise to converge.
One of the most significant contributions that this initiative will make to startups is to help them connect with IBM’s enterprise customers. Startups will be able to leverage IBM’s staying power to move from the startup to scaleup stage by offering their solutions to IBM’s enterprise customer base.
To learn more about this program, watch this short video:
Startups need visionary intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs, market analysts with foresight – and, of course, outstanding programmers. The skills that individuals bring to these fishbowls of innovation add up to nothing if the personalities don’t jibe with startup culture.
“You can’t motivate people, you can only create a context in which people are motivated,” Foundry Group Managing Director and TechStars Co-Founder Brad Feld, said in a 2012 blog post.
We are examining tech startup culture from as many perspectives as possible because if you don’t understand it, you can’t successfully launch, fund, or scale startups.
As part of our startup culture coverage, we’re focusing on:
In order to meet the needs and expectations of a newer generation of customers, fintech companies, banks, and regulators have to collaborate closely on developing and revising banking rules.
Adam Nanjee, Head of Financial Technology at MaRS Discovery District, talks in the video below about what consumers are looking for, and how MaRS is taking the lead on connecting entrepreneurs with banks and drive a new ecosystem.
BMO recently unveiled a Women in Leadership fund, which tracks companies with a female CEO and/or with women making up 25% of board members.
According to Julie Barker-Merz, President and Head of Wealth Direct investing at BMO, the fund is the first of its kind in Canada by a major bank and isn’t a diversity or a “social impact” play. It’s a product designed to fully perform in the marketplace, and outperform the index.
To hear more about the fund and the reasons behind its inception, watch the video below:
Banks will actively work directly with fintech startups to deliver innovation for their customers, so their legacy systems can converge with new technology, says Adam Nanjee, Head of Financial Technology at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.
Because of their size, most major banks only see a threat if there is a very large-scale economic impact on them. For startups, this means less competition, and therefore more partnerships are available. By 2019, 25% of retail banks will use startups to replace their legacy systems, says Gartner.
For more on the issues on banks merging brand new systems with their existing processes, watch this interview with Nanjee:
Saying your business is driven by data analytics is one thing. Using it to your advantage is quite another.
Brands often expect immediate benefits from data analytics, without using insights to help steer their marketing efforts.
About three quarters (74 per cent) of enterprise architects aspire to be data-driven, yet less than a third (29 per cent) say their companies are using it to generate measurable business outcomes, according to a report from Forrester. The report says data insight will be a “key competitive weapon” for companies this year.
This performance gap is driving an increase in demand for streaming analytics and what Forrester calls “systems of insight.” For most organizations, the best approach is a solution that captures customer insight and engagement in real time.
An example is the integration of IBM Cloud and Bluemix, which can deploy cognitive APIs to analyze a high volume of social media data in seconds using streaming analytics.
When combined with Watson’s Personality Insights, 40 calculated personality traits can show you if the people viewing your ads match the profiles of your target customers.
Analyzing continuous, incoming data and stitching that data together over time can also create something special: moving pictures of data that tell a powerful story. The bonus: It’s something companies can immediately act on.
Whether it’s in a tiny Swedish development drone no bigger than a slice of toast, or a lumbering garbage truck in the streets of Nairobi, Bluemix technology can be found on the move across the world. Check out these case studies:
The Bluemix cloud is used as part of the mechanism to pilot the drone, either through an app or a gaming controller, significantly reducing development time. “It really saved us a lot of work when we got started,” says Bitcraze co-founder and developer Marcus Eliasson.
Bluemix is then used to deliver the results of the analysis to officials, accessible on mobile and desktop. “For the first time, city officials have a clear understanding of where potholes and speed bumps are,” says Dr. Aisha Walcott-Bryant of IBM Research Africa.
Speedboat Racing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHGTmHEwr14
SilverHook designs high-speed racing watercraft reaching speeds of up to 200 mph. Pilots have access to real-time feedback about the race through IBM Watson Analytics and Bluemix was used to rapidly develop and deploy this infrastructure, cutting development time by 40 per cent.
Ian Taylor, CEO of Animation Research, which works with SilverHook, says that the speed boat’s pilot receives data in real time helping drivers make decisions on the fly.
Fear of the ‘unicorpse’ is mounting and, as it does, VCs are demanding better numbers from founders, reports Business Insider. With increased pressure to perform, startups are scrambling to demonstrate financial viability…even if that means redefining the word ‘profit’.
Based on data from the Wall Street Journal, The Verge reports that 15 of 50 IPOs showed sales figures that were far lower after going public, than what was initially reported to the SEC. Furthermore, “a total of $760 million simply vanished once these firms were subjected to more skeptical accounting.”
How is profit being redefined?
According to Bloomberg, using gross versus net margins and revenues, excluding equity grants and taxes, and including figures such as employee stock compensation are tactics being used to paint a rosier picture for investors.
Sean Behr, founder and CEO of Zirx, told Bloomberg, “No matter how many ways you say you’re kind of profitable, if your bank account ends up lighter than when you started—eventually, that doesn’t work.”
As VC skepticism continues to grow and valuations are tempered, ambiguity surrounding what is and isn’t ‘profitable’ will diminish. Startups will be required to present clear term sheets and profitability statements, and the metrics behind them could become standardized. When that happens, startups that can’t demonstrate profitability will join the unicorpses.
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While Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and HP CEO Meg Whitman are well known, the overall lack of female founders, executives, and venture capitalists limits the value of the tech sector.
Female entrepreneurs generate 20 percent greater revenue than their male counterparts, while receiving 50 percent less VC funding, according to a 2012 report in Harvard Business Review, citing Kauffman Foundation data.
Explanations for the under-representation of women in tech abound. Some cite an over-reliance by VCs on existing networks, who are mostly male. Others bring the problem back to elementary and secondary education, when girls may get less encouragement in STEM courses.
Whatever the case, the under-representation of women is an economic detriment, regardless of the industry.
$28 Trillion
A recent McKinsey report stated: “In a ‘full potential’ scenario in which women play an identical role in labor markets to that of men, as much as $28 trillion, or 26 percent, could be added to global annual GDP by 2025.”
Given the numbers, gender equality should be a funding priority in tech ecosystems across the world. So why isn’t it?
Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, argues that venture capitalists in tech ecosystems are not putting their money where their mouths are, citing issues such as a lack of female-led startups when the data doesn’t support those claims.
Though acknowledging the true problems is an important first step, systemic, measurable changes are needed: from STEM education, to recruitment processes, to funding. Otherwise, we hinder both social and economic progress.
