State Of The Race
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CBC polling average as of writing: CPC 33.5%, LPC 31.2%, NDP 20.3%, GPC 3.4%
- National: CPC 35%, LPC 32%, NDP 20%, GPC 2% [Angus Reid]
Driving The News
October 18, 2021
📈 Bullish
Good morning. A 66-million-year-old skeleton of a Triceratops, called Big John, will be auctioned off in October. How much would you bid for a dinosaur skeleton?
Markets
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TSX | 20806.63 | -0.07% |
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S&P 500 | 4520.03 | -0.34% |
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DOW | 35100.00 | -0.76% |
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NASDAQ | 15374.33 | 0.07% |
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Gold | 1798.50 | -1.92% |
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Oil | 68.35 | -1.36% |
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Dollar | 0.79 | -0.02% |
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Bitcoin | 58572.43 | -10.79% |
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Housing: Home sales fell 30% in August in Montreal compared to the year prior, but average home prices in the area are still increasing.
- COVID: As of writing, 84.8% of Canadians 12+ have received at least one vaccine dose and 77.5% of Canadians 12+ are fully vaccinated.
Ontario-based Facedrive may file for bankruptcy as early as this month.
What’s Facedrive? Facedrive was founded as a "greener" alternative to Uber. However, the company has also dabbled in other ventures like developing a COVID-19 contact tracing tool and food and grocery delivery services.
The company had a tumultuous rise and fall: Facedrive's early high valuation can be partially attributed to Facedrive’s strong marketing tactics that received a lot of attention from investors.
It was worth around $5 billion in February, which is a little less than Air Canada’s $6 billion market cap, to now being valued at just $200 million.
- But Facedrive’s revenue numbers told a different story: they only made around $4 million in all of 2020.
What happened: The filing comes a week after Facedrive's Sayan Navaratnam stepped down as CEO when the company's share prices dropped to record-lows.
Bottom line: It was just a matter of time, as Facedrive’s losses kept mounting with little to show for it, before it had to either deliver on its promises to shareholders or face the music of the market.
What’s Cohere? Founded in 2019, Cohere makes software to help companies build applications that include AI which can communicate with users in a conversational, non-robotic tone.
- Google implements this kind of software to write predictive text in Gmail, but that tech is usually too expensive for smaller companies to access.
- Cohere is trying to make that sort of tech cheaper for a wide range of use cases, like implementing chat features on a website.
What’s next: Cohere counts Geoffrey Hinton, aka the godfather of AI, Slack investor Index Ventures, and Raquel Urtasun among their investors. The company now wants to use the funding to grow their team and market their tech.
Build the next killer social media app? Become rich trading NFTs? The same stuff you do now, just with a much faster machine and nicer design? Whatever it is, we don’t judge.
But first you need to get that new MacBook and that’s where we come in: The Peak is giving away a brand new MacBook Pro to one lucky reader.
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President Nayib Bukele revealed that El Salvador was in talks to introduce bitcoin as legal tender at a bitcoin conference in June, and just four months later has made it reality. Bekele pitched bitcoin as a way to receive remittances from relatives abroad cheaply and without transaction fees.
- Remittances make up ~22% of El Salvador’s GDP.
What happened: To start, El Salvador residents received around US-$30 in bitcoin in their wallets to use and businesses will be required to accept it in transactions.
While cryptocurrency traders are excited about the move, most El Salvadorians are concerned about the adoption of bitcoin given how volatile its prices are. And they may have a point: bitcoin’s price fell 17% since El Salvador made it legal tender.
Zoom out: Other countries will be closely watching El Salvador’s adoption of bitcoin to see if they should follow suit.
And not the semiconductor kind of chips either: Boston-based biotech firm Emulate raised US-$82 million to develop their "organ-on-a-chip" technology.
Their what? It usually takes anywhere from 10-15 years to bring a drug from the lab to the market. That process is often so long because scientists must test drugs on animal models and cells. However, those models aren’t exact replicas of human cells, and therefore results from pre-clinical trials often don’t produce the same results in humans.
- When that happens, scientists have to start from scratch and return back to the drawing board.
This is where organ-on-a-chip technology comes in: the USB stick-sized chips are filled with human cells from certain organs, like the lung or liver, and replace the use of traditional animal models and cells.
- Because the chips are lined with human cells, it’s more like testing the drug on humans themselves.
Emulate, which was founded in 2013, will use the funds to work with pharmaceutical companies to develop tailor-made chips.
Zoom out: Organ-on-a-chip tech will speed up the time it takes and reduce the costs involved to develop a drug.
Tesla will release its full self-driving (FSD) software starting on Friday for American customers. Elon Musk first announced the news in August on, you guessed it, Twitter.
- The FSD software, which costs an extra US-$10,000, was released in beta mode to a handful of Tesla owners last October.
How’s FSD different from Autopilot? Pre-installed Tesla Autopilot can steer, accelerate and brake while the Tesla is in one lane. FSD goes a step further and switches lanes and navigates interchanges. But like Autopilot, it still requires the driver to pay attention to the road.
Why it matters: Experts are concerned about the wider rollout of FSD because 1) it still has some software kinks that need to be ironed out, and 2) it comes on the heels of American traffic regulators opening an investigation into Tesla Autopilot for causing car crashes.
- Some people are also concerned that the label “full self driving” will make people think the car is, well, fully self-driving when it’s really not. Now how would they get that idea…
- People in the U.K. and the U.S. spend more time watching TikTok than YouTube.
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Ford hired Doug Field, who headed Apple's efforts to create a self-driving electric car, to contribute to the carmaker's growing EV efforts.
- Alberta-based Enbridge bought North America's biggest crude export hub in a US-$3 billion deal.
- Not even a week after Steph Curry asked for crypto investing advice on Twitter, the NBA star struck a deal with crypto exchange FTX.
- Save the date: Apple's fall launch event is scheduled for September 14th.
- Motherboard: "The Mystery of the Burnt Tesla in the Middle of a Frozen Lake Has Been Solved"
- Vox: "Why are these octopuses hurling shells at each other?"
- Got a re-brand in the books? Need some fresh creative and campaign concepts? Taylor Day has got you covered. Trusted by some of the strongest brands in North America. See the work.*
- Does this newspaper clipping from 1803 contain the first use of an emoji?
- Lifehacker: "The One Question You Should Be Asking in Job Interviews Right Now"
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