With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/813780
1997: In its first year of operations, after Frank Giustra and Avi Federgreen launch it, Lions gate Films sees revenue of just $42 million; 20 years later, publicly traded Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. is making north of $2 billion a year, and has a licence to print money in the Hunger Games franchise. Giustra has moved on to min- ing, philanthropy–and making some mighty fine olive oil. 36 BCBUSINESS MAY 2017 BOTTOM CENTRE: PAUL JOSEPH WORK IN PROGRESS 1994: Construction begins on a new container terminal, known as Deltaport, beside the Roberts Bank coal port; opening in spring 1997, it effectively doubles capacity at Vancouver's port. Ten years later, the Fraser River Port Authority and the North Fraser Port Authority merge with the port to form Port Metro Vancouver–Canada's biggest port and North America's third largest. Crops raised using aquaponics actually tend to be more profitable than the fish, according to U.S. stud- ies. The key is marketing them to compete with other local and organic greens. Andrew Riseman, an associ- ate professor of applied biology and plant breeding at UBC, believes aquaponic produce is superior to both conventionally grown and organic. "But until there's product differentiation in the marketplace where they can get a premium for that specific product, they're just lumped in with organics or chemical-free or pesticide-free or whatever other generic grouping they fit into," he says. "Much like the land-based fish production—they're grouped in with farmed salmon." Matthias and Jutta Zapletal established their Prince George aquaponics operation, Northern Bioponics Ltd., in 2010. They produce about 80 kilograms of let- tuce, 10 to 20 kilograms of basil and 10 to 20 kilograms of microgreens each week, some of which they sell at the local farmers market to several restaurants and a small health store. They also sell 250 to 300 tilapia a year. "Aquaponics is a system where you have a decent- size greenhouse where you can grow a bunch of veg- etables, where you can make some money, but forget that you can feed the world with it," Matthias says. Iowa State University aquaponics researcher D. Allen Pattillo disagrees. In a March 2017 bulle- tin for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's North Central Regional Aquaculture Center, Pattillo claims aquaponics can be done on a wide range of scales, from a home aquarium to a multi-acre commercial facility capable of producing substantial amounts of fish and plants. Plus, he notes, aquaponics uses about 10 per cent of the land area and five per cent of the water needed for conventional agriculture, making it ideal for intensive urban gardening. —F.S. The Cat's Meow Kindred Systems wants to design artificial intel- ligence that learns like people do. No pressure t the recent BCTech Summit, visitors couldn't resist the Kindred Systems Inc. booth. No wonder: the company had a corral of furry robotic cats on display. On hand to supervise these strangely fetching felines were co-founder and CEO Geordie Rose, along with co- founder and chief scientific officer Suzanne Gildert. The cats are just one of a variety of robots built by Kindred, whose goal is to create machines with humanlike artificial intelligence. With AI, there are two key parts to a robot body, Rose explains: cameras and other sensors that perceive what's going on around it, and the physical actions it can take. "The core technol- ogy that we're developing is a software layer that sits between the perception and the action," he says. Unlike humans and other animals, most machines lack general intelligence; their actions are predeter- mined, so they can't adapt to changes in their envi- ronment. To create a so-called strong AI that will work on any machine, Kindred's software uses reinforce- ment learning. "You specify what you want as an out- come but not the process to get there," Rose explains. The robot then experiments, I'M BACK This robot belongs to one of several families developed by Kindred Systems 1998: Lululemon Athletica Inc. launches in Vancouver's Kitsilano as a design/yoga studio; by 2000, the store is selling a line of "yoga wear"–and a global retailing craze is born. Controversial founder Chip Wilson resigns as chairman in 2013 and helps his wife and son launch a "leisurewear" competitor, Kit and Ace, the following year. May the formfitting-est fashionista prevail!