Month: December 2022

Can advances in technology bring manufacturing jobs back to North America?

For years we’ve made manufacturing cheaper by moving it overseas to lower wage economies. That’s had some devastating impacts on our manufacturing economy. It’s decimated communities and towns. It’s been an environmental problem as we ship goods thousands of miles unnecessarily.

In a world where it’s cheaper to cut down a tree, ship the raw wood overseas and bring back chopsticks to be used in a restaurant in a town near you, something’s radically wrong!

But what if technology and the advent of what’s been termed Manufacturing 4.0 can actually bring high paying manufacturing jobs back to North America. Is that possible?

In this episode we discuss this and more with Eric Whitley of L2L. Eric has worked in manufacturing for his entire career.

Whitley was part of the Lean Manufacturing movement, ironically a movement founded on the work

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An online cybersecurity training program aimed at Canadian small and medium businesses debuts today, months after it was supposed to launch

Cybersecurity Academy, a gamification platform open to the 95,000 members of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), was first announced in March and promised to go live in either the spring or the summer.

“We spent a lot of time discerning the contents and making sure that it was the right tone and digestible for business owners,” Mandy D’Autremont, the federation’s vice-president of marketing partnerships, said in an interview. “We wanted to get it right.”

“We didn’t want to put something out there that was rushed.”

Screen shot CFIB Cybersecurity Academy home page
Screen shot of a CFIB Cybersecurity Academy user’s home page

Cybersecurity Academy is available in English and French.

Like many gamification platforms, participants can earn badges for successfully completing training sessions. Businesses can then decide how to reward top finishers.

As

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Cleantech company Climate Neutral, which develops digital tools to accelerate climate action, has been awarded the C$20,000 top prize from WEtech Alliance’s ScaleUP Accelerator program.

The four-month program provides mentoring, cohort sessions, and access to provincial, national, and global networks of programs and mentors valued at over C$78,000 for each participant.

The theme of this year’s program centred around adapting to uncertainty and building flexibility into business planning. Participants learned from experts how to apply financial modelling and global economic outlooks to their individual business circumstances.

“This program continues to be a shining example of the diverse companies creating a new face for our local economy.” said Stephen MacKenzie, president and chief executive officer at Invest WindsorEssex. “This year is no exception. With participants in Automobility, Healthtech, Fintech, and Greentech, Windsor-Essex continues to be a region of makers and growers. What we make and how we grow is evolving,

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The first Toronto edition of Trend Micro’s Pwn2Own hacking contest began Tuesday, with individuals or teams from a number of countries attempting to break into consumer products in hopes of winning a share of hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes.

Within two hours, two teams had each won US$20,000.

“This is event is going to be our largest ever, with 26 teams attempting 66 exploits against various targets,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, said in an interview.

Held at Trend Micro’s Toronto office, it is scheduled to last four days.

Entrants — who will try to crack home-office or mobile devices by creating unique exploits — will participate either on-premises or remotely from a number of countries, including Canada, the U.S., Germany, France, the Netherlands, Vietnam, and South Korea.

They are trying to break into a Canon multi-function printer, a TP-Link WiFi

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Last week at Re:Invent 2022, IT (information technology) services and consulting company Accenture launched Velocity, a jointly funded and co-developed platform with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Velocity is designed to improve business outcomes by eliminating the challenges associated with building and running enterprise scale applications in the cloud.

“We’re really excited. Really because it’s [Velocity] helping out clients compress that early cloud enablement and labour intensive stuff, how they use capabilities on the cloud and get them quicker on the business transformation they want. And we’re seeing it to be upwards of 50 per cent faster.” said Andy Tay, global lead for the AWS Accenture Group.

Accenture stressed that the development of Velocity is the result of learnings from thousands of projects with AWS over the past 14 years, and the shared vision to revolutionize the time, labour, and cost-intensive work that recurs at the start of every

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