WeaveSphere

11/28/2022

All women in tech do not look the same or do the same type of job, explained Jillian Shealy, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Talkdesk, during 's panel. She encourages young to find a mentor that exemplifies the type of work they're interested in.

And to combat imposter syndrome, added digital executive Sumika Singh, be your own "inner champion," rather than an inner critic. Coach yourself through career challenges the way you would support a friend.

11/28/2022

Jack Baker of Agnostiq, which develops software for the quantum era, met lots of students in 's Innovation Valley — and they brought plenty of great, insightful questions 🙌

11/26/2022

Data centres worldwide consume 200-250 TWh of energy, says Marcel Mitran, IBM Fellow and the CTO for Cloud Platform for zSystems and LinuxONE. "Digital transformation strategies amount to compute-intensive, AI workloads."

What does that mean for companies? It translates to energy-intensive businesses.

Mitran shared data that showed 51% of CEOs have named sustainability as the greatest challenge to their organization over the next 2-3 years. But only 40% have identified initiatives to close their sustainability gaps or sustainability drivers for change.

11/25/2022

Shout-out to presenter Sonia Singh for channeling The Thirteenth Doctor from Doctor Who, during her session titled '(Doctor) Mx Who - Building Out-of-this-World Leadership Capability' 🙌

11/25/2022

A PhD student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, Priyanka Verma came to to network and connect with people in the space.

"I have research ideas," she says.

11/23/2022

"In the 21st century, we have to innovate and learn new things," says Mohawk College student Shrijan Sharma.

The most interesting topic he's learned so far at ? Learning about collaboration at the Education Day slate of programming.

11/23/2022

"We need to create STEM learning environments that are messy. You may not know exactly what students will learn, but whatever it ends up being will offer tremendous value." — Marcellus Mindel, head of at IBM Canada.

11/21/2022

We've had computers and even for a long time now.

What's different, explained Gillian Hadfield, Director of University of Toronto's Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, during her keynote, is that it's evolved to include , combined with mass digitization and huge computing power.

However, it's critical to understand that machine learning is NOT like conventional programming, she said. With conventional programming, the program is written by humans, but with machine learning a computer writes the rules — presenting regulatory challenges.

With machine learning, the machine solves problems and build patterns that we can't see. As a result, Hadfield outlines, there can be a value alignment problem, as the machine might solve problems in a way that we don't want it to.

Another challenge with regulation, Hadfield said, is that sets are massive and constantly evolving. The speed of innovation is very rapid — can regulation keep up?

Hadfield also proposed that AI regulation, as a sector, poses a tremendous business opportunity. Regulatory tech could be developed in Canada, then marketed and sold to other regions around the world — you just have to meet local governance standards.

11/20/2022

For IBM Canada's Masoud Ataei (with fellow IBM-er Dickson Chau), innovation means finding a "meaningful" problem and putting the tools you have to use to solve it.

And the most important factor, he says, is the problem. "It should have impact in the real-world."

11/19/2022

Nancy Chahal, a Master's student in Computer Science at University of New Brunswick, shared her research at , which looked at how we can increase the efficiency of autoscaling decisions for Node.js applications.

11/18/2022

Responsible computing is a systemic approach addressing current and future challenges in computing including sustainability, ethics, and professionalism.

It is a holistic approach to redefine how businesses approach IT, by ingraining sustainable impact in architectural thinking, technology and innovation.

Responsible computing advances the quadruple bottom line, explained IBM Canada's Marcel Mitran, opening Day 3 of WeaveSphere with a keynote:

👩🏽👦🏻 People
🌏 Planet
📈 Prosperity
🤝 Participation

11/18/2022

During his session called 'Wins & Learns: Competition, Innovation and Entrepreneurship,' Anthony Lacavera shared the lessons he learned throughout his journey as a founder/co-founder of 12 ventures ⤵️

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/four-lessons-fellow-founders-from-globalives-anthony-lacavera-/

He's the founder (or co-founder) of 12 ventures (including WIND Mobile), and Anthony Lacavera says three of them were "spectacular failures" and six were successful exits. Today, he runs Globalive and is an investor in early-stage tech companies.

11/17/2022

The need to be consistent and constantly deliver wins in corporate environments can kill innovation, says Marcellus Mindel, head of at IBM Canada.

Why? Because people do what they have always done — or say what they need to say — to get the win.

"How many decisions have you made that were evidenced-based?" he asked the audience, prompting attendees to think about their patterns and if they pursue new paths in their work, or just repeat the same steps.

Mindel suggested a different approach to innovation: "Instead of pursuing consistency, we should be encouraging authenticity."

11/17/2022

The traditional securities lifecycle is so inefficient and ineffective that it reduces profiles and limits offerings, explained Graeme Moore, Head of Tokenization at PolymeshNetwork.

"Blockchains can solve this, but only if the blockchain is purpose-built."

11/17/2022

They came, they pitched, and today we have a PitchStadium winner.

Drumroll, please...

A big congrats to Iman Bashir and Nicole Lytle of Crafty.AI Copywriter, who take home a $50,000 cheque to grow their business 🎉

Craftly.ai is a copywriting assistant that uses AI to generate original content.

11/17/2022

Uncertainty is still a big challenge with , says Lijia Hou, a Blockchain Systems Engineer with DraftKings:

Despite being around for a long time, blockchain has only gained more mainstream notoriety in recent years, and three critical problems still exist:

🔘 Investors want to understand how to mitigate risk in a volatile market.

🔘 Developers who come from traditional software development need a shift in mindset when dealing with decentralization.

🔘 Everyday users need to use metamask (a blockchain wallet). In Web2, you would click a button, but with and decentralization, the tools are used differently — not always immediately evident to people unfamiliar with new ways of doing things.

11/17/2022

Congratulations to the winners of Developer 30 Under 30 of 2022, representing the best of the best among young developers in Canada ⤵️

Alexander Newman
Anakha Chellakudam
Anthony Langford
Arshdeep Saini
Aryaman Rastogi
Bohdan Senyshyn
Charlie Mackie
Charmi Chokshi
Colin Lee
Daniel Marantz
Francisco Hodge
Hassan Djirdeh
Jerry Fengwei Zhang
Julia Paglia
Karandeep Bhardwaj
Kathryn Kodama
Khushbu Patel
Lianne Lardizabal
Lucas Giancola
Mathew Mozaffari
Maz Mandi
Oleksandr Kostrikov
Rishab Kumar
Samantha Lauer
Sarah Syed
Stan Petley
Tanmay Bakshi
Tim Romanski
Xiaole Zeng
Yash Kapadia

11/17/2022

The first thing that comes to mind when you're trying to build out a successful sales pipeline may not be (artificial intelligence).

But actually, different applications of this tech can play a key role — and offer up a competitive advantage — in helping to close a sales deal or improve your product marketing, said Shilpa Sharma, co-founder of workflow automation platform Flyte, when she presented at today.

From Conversational AI and benchmarking to predictive analytics, here's how your sales process can be improved by tech, according to Sharma:

✓ Tracking conversion rates at every stage of a deal
✓ Identifying both sales process and customer risks that can put a deal in jeopardy
✓ Tracking and revealing the reasons why a deal is won or lost
✓ Forecasting revenue and growth opportunities to improve how you coach your sales team

11/16/2022

There's lots of talk these days about what can be done with emerging tech platforms like and the . But not much action, said digital strategist Matt Everson of Fuel Media, in his session at .

He thinks what should be happening is developers should just...start building, and suggested they can draw on video game virtual markets as a model for other digital platforms.

Everson used sci-fi strategy game, EVE Online — which has one of the largest virtual economies in the world — as an example of how virtual economy design can be translated for use in other markets.

For instance, his review of EVO's operational data reveals a complex system performance roadmap of:

- Experience (user confidence, investments etc.)
- Production (market price and Gross Virtual Product)
- Wealth (total value of goods in an economy)
- Monetary Policy (available virtual currency, exchange rates)
- Inequality (unemployment, well-being, satisfaction)

With a model like this, "a strong data team can drive insight to action, from gaming systems, for what future meta markets will look like," said Everson.

11/16/2022

At 's Education Day, students from around the GTA are learning how to use Enterprise Design Thinking to take a human-centric approach to solve problems.

Students explored strategies such as As-Is Scenario Mapping, Empathy Mapping, Hills (i.e. a positioning statement), and Hopes and Fears.

The problem they're solving? Helping 4th-year university students find their first job 🙌

11/16/2022

Our Day 2 keynote, ethicist, futurist, and educator Dr. William Barry has worked with robots as teaching assistants in his classroom for the last five years.

Meet Mariabot, a digital version of an AI being that assists Dr. Barry. Over time, his students accept her not just as a tool, but as a classmate.

As Dr. Barry explains, AI can become real to us, so you must teach them to be ethical. How? He says to teach them to accurately describe what they see, then check in with the morals and ethics. AI will become as caring and moral as we make them, he elaborates, so the information we provide or give them access to informs how ethical they will be.

11/16/2022

Why should you care about ? According to IBM Canada's Vio Onut:

a) A potentially massive cost to your organization, operationally and economically
b) A massive skills gap between privacy and security experts increases vulnerability

According to the latest research conducted by IBM Security, it takes 287 days to identify and contain a data breach. The annual cost of on the global economy is a whopping $1T. As a result, there's an extensive need for talent and training to address these problems that negatively affect how well enterprises can enhance their cybersecurity protections.

Separately, both industry and academia have a lot of insights, but the two don't often overlap, Onut explains. Enter: uOttawa's Cyber Hub multi-year partnership with IBM Canada that delivers security training/interdisciplinary cyber safety research. This immersive, interactive, and experiential learning facility is training the next generation of experts.

11/15/2022

There are 3 phases of , says Jakob Pizzera of OneVest.

The first, FinTech 1.0, was in-house-built websites where you could access your financial accounts and do basic online banking.

FinTech 2.0 was the unbundling of financial services, around which an entire standalone business was built, he explains. It offered a better user experience and competitive pricing.

Finally, "in the last few years, embedded finance — or 3.0 has emerged," he says. You embed your financial services and products in a third-party application — meaning you get automatic access to all their customers.

An example of embedded finance is purchasing a clothing item through Instagram, using an app that allows you to complete your purchase within the platform. This approach can be applied to retail, insurance, wealth management, and more.

As Pizzera explains, FinTech has grown slowly as an industry because it handles people's money — and they tend to be cautious when adopting new tech related to financial management.

11/15/2022

How well does your sales team close? Do you know what they could be doing better? Have you considered using artificial intelligence (AI) to coach your sales team?

If not, there's lots of opportunity to increase sales performance, says Chhavi Singh, Co-founder of Flyte.

Presenting today at , Singh said AI can be used to help win over customers by focusing on:

• Understanding their challenges
• Showing curiosity about their business
• Engaging conversation
• Handling objections & concerns

Flyte's AI can track data and share it with salespeople so they can tweak their messaging or time their outreach to be more effective with closing.

To understand challenges, can be used to learn to spot instances where customers complain and the emotions they have when doing so.

Engaging in conversations is important, Singh says, so AI can also be used to take notes and document customer challenges in meetings. That frees up time and effort for people to connect on a human level, and post-meeting reporting can measure how well the prospect was engaged.

In addition, AI can be used to track how a salesperson addresses customer concerns and can coach the individual to handle objections or questions differently.

In the end, Singh says his company aims to augment human capabilities — not replace them.

11/14/2022

We're 24 hours away from the kick-off of 🎉

Over the next three days, we'll have snapshots and key takeaways from the mainstage, from within our DeepTech Zone and inside our Innovation Valley. We can't wait to welcome you all tomorrow!

11/14/2022

With nearly 20 different streams featuring some of the hottest topics in tech — including the , and other emerging technologies — you're guaranteed to find something that piques your interest at .

Will we see you Tuesday in Toronto? ➡️ http://ow.ly/xztm50LAy7z

11/11/2022

A big thank you and shout out to Microsoft for supporting the developer community in Toronto as a sponsor of .

To see featured resources for developers attending this event, including virtual training sessions that dive into:

🔘 Adopting GitHub in the Enterprise World
🔘 Building New Age Business Apps with Low-Code and Traditional Development

Register here ➡️ http://ow.ly/xplm50LAwRy

11/11/2022

Despite some early hiccups, the tech world is still betting big on the — one of the many top-of-mind topics that will be discussed at .

According to a recent report, the global metaverse space is expected to become a $1 trillion industry by 2030.

The metaverse has gained momentum as hybrid workplaces continue to see widespread adoption, resulting in , , and partnerships that aim to create new experiences in this immersive digital realm.

Learn more ➡️

The global metaverse space will grow to a $996.42 billion industry by 2030 surging ahead at a compound annual growth rate of 39.8 percent over the next eight years, according to a new report by analytics and consulting firm GlobalDat.

11/10/2022

A big thank you to Sun Life for sponsoring this year's conference taking place Nov. 15-17 in Toronto.

Join us Nov. 1-17 in Toronto to meet the team from Sun Life and learn more about how the company embraces new digital tools and innovation ➡️ http://ow.ly/7zU750LAwrF