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
BCBUSINESS.CA MAY 2017 BCBUSINESS 37 1999: Shareholders approve the sale of B.C. forestry icon MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. to U.S. giant Weyerhaus- er. A round of layoffs ensues–the begin- ning of a seven-year stretch in which B.C. will lose an estimated 30 per cent of its head-office jobs. On the positive side, the Arthur Erickson–designed MacBlo building on Georgia endures as one of Vancouver's architectural jewels. and the things that work stick: "It continually gets bet- ter and better and better at the tasks that you've given it, even complex tasks." If that sounds daunting, don't bet against Rose, who holds a PhD in theoretical physics from UBC. Before launching Kindred in Vancouver in 2014, he co-founded Burnaby-based D-Wave Systems Inc., developer of the first commercial quantum computer. Kindred, which is backed by Google Ventures, has since moved its head office to San Francisco, where most of the 40-strong team work. The company's eight Vancouver staff handle the bulk of AI research. Kindred makes humanoids as well as quadrupeds, but its biggest robot family consists of one-armed, one- handed machines suitable for dextrous manipulation and grasping. In March, the company was preparing to launch a product based on that body type. From supermarkets to factories, grasping objects and mov- ing them is a core function for much of the workforce, Rose notes, but such tasks are tough to automate. "Those are the ones that we're focused on as a busi- ness, to go after the things that are physically easy, that require thinking and judgment and care, delicacy when it's needed, but strength and power and speed when it's needed." Kindred wants to start by deploying its software platform in a specific vertical industry. Once that product gains traction, the plan is to do the same in other verticals. "There are hundreds or thousands of opportunities to build machines with general intel- ligence," Rose says. "Each of these is a multibillion- dollar opportunity." Although he concedes that predicting the future is difficult, Rose doesn't think robots will make humans redundant anytime soon. "The type of work that is going to be automated in the short term opens up all sorts of other possibilities," he argues. Automating certain tasks at a warehouse will boost profits, Rose says, so the owner can hire more people to do things that machines can't. "There's going to be a net job gain in the manufacturing and distribution centre businesses." —N.R. Imitating Art Arius Technology plays a key role in creating reproductions of landmark paintings that are dead ringers for the originals n late February at the Permanent, a venue hall in a restored 1907 downtown Vancouver bank, black-and-white-clad servers manoeuvre trays of short-rib mini burgers among groups of people gathered around paintings. They're familiar works, including Irises by Vincent van Gogh, A Stormy Sea by Claude Monet and the curiously ugly Woman With an Umbrella by Edgar Degas. The evening feels like the opening of a gallery exhibit, but small signs on the frames of the artworks tell a different story: "Please touch the paintings." If you do touch them, you can feel the surface tex- tures of the artist's brushstrokes. It's not paint, though; it's UV-cured polymer ink. The event marks the Van- couver launch of Verus Art, a partnership between local startup Arius Technology Inc., U.S.-based cus- tom framemaker Larson-Juhl and Océ-Technologies B.V., a Dutch division of Canon Inc. that focuses on digital printing. The paintings are 3D-printed repro- ductions of works owned by the National Gallery of Canada, whose direc- tor, Marc Mayer, en - thusi astically joined forces with Verus in late 2015. The precision of the scanning and printing technology could cause a "para- digm shift" in the way art masterpieces are shared, preserved a nd appre ciated, he says. The origi- na l m a ster pieces DOUBLE TAKE A 3D print of a painting by Claude Monet features raised brushstrokes 1999: BC Tel and Telus, based in Edmonton, merge–creating a national telecom player, to be called Telus Communica- tions Inc. and headquartered in Vancouver. Darren Entwistle joins as president and CEO a year later, and he's been there ever since–except for that weird spell, 2014-15, where he kinda left but didn't (Joe who?). Dur- ing Entwistle's 17 years, the shareholder return on Telus stock has been almost 400 per cent.