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The tech industry in Canada has undergone radical changes in the last decade. As a founder of a seven-year-old startup, Ive been witness to the evolution of the landscape from a primordial soup of funding, leadership and opportunity to a thriving ecosystem making a major impact on the global stage.

With an improved funding environment, a tipping point in cloud technology adoption, and a rich pool of talent to choose from, our tech scene is growing at an unprecedented rate. Canadian companies are quickly gaining a reputation around the world, and startups grown at home now have access to many of the same resources as their Silicon Valley peers.

FUNDING LANDSCAPE

I had the unfortunate timing of starting a new business in 2007. If I had any idea of what the fundraising climate was going to be like in those early days, Im not sure if I would have embarked on the journey. But as they say, ignorance is bliss.

In the winter of 2008, the tech industry was hit hard in the economic meltdown. Many in the industry referred to that period of time as a nuclear winter for funding. It was a tough time for startups around the world trying to gain traction.

Renowned angel investor Ron Conway famously sent bleak instruction to the CEOs of his portfolio companies detailing how to survive the downturn, and leading Silicon Valley-based VC firm Sequoia Capital held an emergency meeting to deliver similar advice to its startups.

We took much of this advice and battened our hatches. We managed to make it through that period with a few battle scars, but overall stronger because we had to learn to do a lot with very little.

The recovery from the crash was not the only hurdle to overcome. Canada had a regulatory environment, namely Section 116 of our tax code, that made it cost-prohibitive for international venture capital firms to invest in Canadian companies. Even if investors had funds to give, we werent getting access because of these restrictions. However, this all changed in 2009, when Section 116 was removed in a bid to get Canadian companies the resources they need to stay competitive in global markets.

Since then, U.S. venture capitalists have already invested over $700 million in over 30 technology companies associated with the C100, a non-profit that connects Canadian entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley. At Clio, weve seen the impact of both the improved tax code and the thriving technology environment first-hand: over the last three years weve raised over $27-million, with Bessemer Venture Partners, a $1.6-billion Silicon Valley fund thats taken more than 100 companies to IPO, leading our latest round.

TIPPING POINT OF CLOUD ADOPTION

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The Canadian tech evolution: what Ive witnessed as a founder

11 hours ago Jul. 16, 2014 - 11:15 AM PDT

Sometimes it seems as though the future of online media is a fairly bleak one: an ocean of clickbait and shallow pageview-driven articles, all of them chasing the dwindling juice that social-network algorithms provide, with scattered chunks of longform journalism drifting aimlessly, unable to get the attention they deserve. But is that a realistic picture of where we are? Betaworks CEO John Borthwick says it isnt and says he has the data from services like Chartbeat and Instapaper to prove that things arent as bad as they seem.

As Borthwick notes in a post on Medium, the most recent debate on this topic flared up a couple of months ago, sparked by a post from Facebook product manager Mike Hudack that lamented the state of online media, and how much of the content that was being produced even by serious media outlets was shallow clickbait:

Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of just watching them from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy. And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them. Its hard to tell whos to blame. But someone should fix this shit.

In the hue-and-cry that followed, a number of journalists, bloggers and others (including our founder Om and me) noted that Facebook was part of the problem that Hudack was complaining about, since its algorithm has become one of the central points of control that determine what kinds of news people see online. And for all of the effort that the giant social network has put into trying to focus on promoting high quality content, the reality is that much of what people like to share just happens to be shallow, click-driven content.

In his post, Borthwick who has been involved in tracking the social web and online media world from a variety of perspectives, by investing in or starting services like Bitly, Chartbeat, News.me and Digg described one recent cautionary tale: the story about how a piece of software had beaten the legendary Turing test, by pretending to be a 14-year-old boy. As it turned out, the story was fatally flawed to the point where it was essentially not true, but by the time anyone pointed this out it had been shared and tweeted and linked to hundreds of thousands of times.

As the Betaworks CEO notes (and as Om and I have pointed out a number of times), the social-distribution system that has been built up around the news a system that is now arguably as important or even more important than search favors shareability, not analysis. Thats why Om has argued that we all need to be aware of what we share, and take the time to think about whether it deserves our attention or not. Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile has pointed out that his data shows that much of what people share is content that they havent even read. As Borthwick notes:

We have a dominant social distribution system that favors sharablility it is biased towards speed, and that bias is short circuiting fact checkingas the Turing example shows. And in the case of Facebook its mediated by algorithms that arent transparent. Algorithmically created news stories, mediated by algorithms, shared by people, people who are barely reading these posts. If we can all just get services like Socialflow to do our sharingwe humans can completely quit this loop.

Algorithmically created news stories thanks to services like Narrative Science and Automated Insights, which AP is now using for earnings stories mediated by the black-box algorithms of networks like Twitter and Facebook, shared as quickly as possible by people who havent even read them. It may not be Orwells boot stamping on a human face forever, but thats a pretty bleak vision. But Borthwick argues there is still some reason for optimism about media.

According to a chart from Upworthy, which tracks a metric it calls attention minutes, there is a significant burst of sharing that comes from people who have barely read a piece of content behavior that is likely driven by short-term effects such as a clickbait headline, catchy video clip or GIF, etc. Then there is a low point where many people dont make it all the way through a piece, and dont really share it much either. But there is also a large upswing on both reader attention (or time spent) and sharing that occurs at the far end of the graph, something Borthwick calls the hill of Wow, as opposed to the valley of Meh.

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The news about reader attention and the evolution of media isnt all bad theres the hill of Wow

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Sylvan Beach (WSYR-TV) Investigators in Oneida County have arrested two people after drugs were found at a home in Sylvan Beach on Wednesday.

44-year old Scott Leisner and 42-year old Chrystal Palmeter are charged with Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance and Criminally Using Drug Paraphernalia, after a search warrant was executed at a home on 15th Avenue.

Deputies say they found methamphetamine and heroin during the search.

The case sparked an evacuation of about 20 homes nearby when a suspicious item with wiring was found during an initial sweep of the home. The New York State Police Bomb Disposal Unit was called to the scene and determined the device was not a real explosive.

Several streets in the neighborhood were blocked off until detectives felt the area was safe.

Palmeter and Leisner were arraigned and taken to the Oneida County Correctional Facility.

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State Police questioning 2 people in connection with suspected meth lab in Sylvan beach

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