GameStop shorts Canada, Microsoft’s eureka moment, a Raptor returns to Toronto

Canadian Patent 2497122, which protects the keyboard for mobile devices, expired last weekend. This patent was one of several that helped Research in Motion grow into Canada’s largest tech company at the time, with around 80 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide in 2011.

Toronto Tech Week will take place from June 23-27 and feature the BetaKit Town Hall and a variety of events designed to cement the city’s reputation as a global tech powerhouse. Led by a new volunteer-run, non-profit organization, Toronto Tech Week has received financial backing from presenting sponsors Shopify, Google Cloud, and the City of Toronto.

Harris, who has an engineering background and experience in investment banking on Wall Street, spent long hours building complex financial models in Excel. Frustrated by the error-prone process, she used Python to create a faster solution for deal analysis.

This week, Glassbox announced its pre-seed funding, which has been used to grow its team from two to four employees and advance product development. The startup is now shifting focus to go-to-market efforts.

St. John’s-based Kraken Robotics claimed the top spot this year, driven by a 323 percent surge in its share price and a $587 million boost to its market cap. The marine technology company, known for its advanced subsea sensors, batteries, and robotic systems, saw significant growth over the past year.

The announcement comes alongside the passing of Kraken Robotics founder and former CEO Karl Kenny, who died on Feb. 11 at age 64.

Têtu likened the AI regulation debate to adjusting your tie while swimming with alligators, noting that Canada is too focused on ethics and regulation while ignoring the urgent need to adopt AI for economic growth and competitiveness. Also on the podcast, Têtu also shared his thoughts on what he believes to be AI’s new moat and Canada’s productivity issues.

Clio’s investment will fund an entrepreneurship and innovation hub inside the building that will serve as the formal home of the Creative Destruction Lab-Vancouver. Through CDL-Vancouver, ventures will have access  to students, faculty, and industry leaders in a new space supporting workshops, seminars, and accelerators to help startups scale.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen posted to X that the two business arms were for sale, adding that wokeness and DEI, as well as high taxes, liberalism, socialism, and progressivism, would be “included at no additional cost if you buy today.” GameStop, which was at the centre of the “meme stock” craze on Wall Street in 2021, said it intends to pursue the “as part of its evaluation of its international assets.”

Murati joins former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. last year, and Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic in 2021. Andrej Karpathy, another former OpenAI researcher, also started Eureka Labs, focusing on AI education.

WIth her new startup, Murati, who briefly took over as interim CEO of OpenAI following the removal of Sam Altman, aims to develop AI systems that are more comprehensible and customizable for the public.

Microsoft claims to have created a fourth state of matter, beyond solid, liquid, and gas, to advance quantum computing. The company built topological qubits on a hybrid chip combining semiconductor and superconductor properties. When supercooled, the chip remains stable, which Microsoft says could tackle problems beyond the reach of classical computers.

Toronto Metropolitan University’s technology incubator DMZ has joined forces with former Toronto Raptors power forward Pascal Siakam to start a new accelerator for early-stage EdTech startups.

Founded by PS43 (Siakam’s not-for-profit foundation) and DMZ, the Siakam EdTech Engine is a 12-week virtual accelerator for companies across Canada and the United States that are developing products designed to transform K-12 education.