Digital Digest: Headlines
Keith Daser
Founder @ Deliver Digital | Host of Sell Me This Podcast | Helping you get more from your technology partnerships
In our fourth edition of the Digital Digest, we pivot back to some topical news from the past weeks. Here is a wrap-up of the three headlines to pay attention to and what they mean for you and your teams.
Enjoy!
The Abrupt Ending of the Funding for the CDAP program
What is happening?
In 2022 the federal government created the Boost Your Business Technology grant, through the Canadian Digital Adoption Program (CDAP). This program was aimed at providing small businesses (under 500 employees and over $500k in annual revenue) funding to digitize their operations to drive efficiency, security and most importantly have a digital strategy to execute. This program provided businesses with:
This program was targeted to serve 160,000 businesses and was assigned a $4 billion budget.
Abruptly, much to the surprise of both the business community and the advisors, the program was halted two years before its target end date with the statement of being oversubscribed.
Why Does it Matter?
Two elements of this story are very important to understand. One is the demonstrated need for digital adoption support to propel Canadian businesses forward. A recent report ranked Canada as one of the leaders in the G7 in terms of AI talent concentration, growth and innovation; however, on the contrary, there is still great demand for ‘non-tech’ companies to simply get many of the basics in place from cloud modernization and security before transforming their business with emerging AI tools like ChatGPT or CoPilot.
The second is the confusion created by the program which created market uncertainty. Many organizations seemed to be completely unaware of the program’s existence and had limited trust in the multitude of businesses that sprung up simply to take advantage of executing this framework. However, this flurry of activity has created much conversation around the possibility of 'what can be' and has opened the door to many conversations previously stagnant.
What Can We Do About It?
The oversubscription of the program signals a desire for change. Ensuring programs that are in place to facilitate the digital maturity of Canadian business is a good thing and will only help to propel our economies and innovation ecosystems forward. In addition to this, continuing to march forward the technical literacy of business leaders to understand the intersection of technology and business is a trajectory that needs to continue.
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Nvidia Is Officially Now More Valuable Than Amazon and Google
What is Happening:
A recent surge in the Nvidia stock price led it to overtaking two giants in one week making it the 4th largest company in the US. Nvidia Is now more valuable than both Amazon and Google with a market cap of almost $1.83 trillion on the heels of record earnings (593% growth) and a massive sales spike (206%). There is lots of speculation whether this growth trend will continue.
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Why Does it Matter?
The Nvidia surge in both sales and earnings can be led back to a phenomenal long play by Nvidia in investing heavily in leading the GPU market which is the fuel for the Artificial General Intelligence boom. The key thing to note (even as AMD and Intel both look to play catch up) is that to run the complex workloads needed to push forward AGI research, stronger and stronger chipsets will be required.
What Can We Do About IT?
There will be lots of competition among these key players as the R&D and supply race continues for high-end chipsets. It will be important to pay attention to the investments and supply chain around traditional computing requirements that are still important in many of the other electronics we use such as CPUs. Finally (and this is not investment advice) the demand for high-end chipsets and the arms race to supply AI-heavy companies and cloud computing buildouts across the rest of the tech giants will only continue to speed up.
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Facial Recognition Vending Machines Found in the University of Waterloo Campus
What is Happening?
At the University of Waterloo, a vending machine displayed a software error code, alerting students to the vending machine also having the ability to send back estimated age and gender information to Invenda (the Vending Machine company). Although the machines are stated to be compliant with GDPR practices (in terms of how information is anonymized, stored and transmitted), it leads to some important ethical questions.
Why Does it Matter?
This is a localized case leading into some of the moral dilemmas that are knocking on our door when it comes to tracking, technology and privacy. As technology is embedded into products that interact with the public the disclosure requirements are starting to increase and people become more and more aware of the risks that are posed by having your information, stored, monetized, or analyzed. It can sometimes lead to better customer experiences, but especially if people are unaware of exactly what they are sharing, there will be very polarizing reactions. Similar to notification that is happening in the digital world, as these technologies cross over into the physical world the question needs to be answered of what is the right of notification and privacy. For example, if I go into a store and know that I am being filmed for security purposes is that different than if that same video is being uploaded to a cloud platform to track my buying patterns and movement around the building?
What Can We Do About It?
Awareness is a key first step. There are digital tracking mechanisms in our physical world at an increasing pace. Everything from smart doorbells to smart store monitoring and smart vending machines can track and store our personal data. Educating yourself and having an opinion is key, but more and more it looks like additional legislation will be required to moderate our physical and digital footprints.
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