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Waterloo, Ontario, is a boom town. An hour west of Toronto, the city rumbles with construction work. Even the Older Mennonites of St. Jacobs, one town over, are digging up their main street, forcing their horse-and-buggies to detour. The region’s growth stems largely from the University of Waterloo, whose intensive internship programs have made it a magnet for tech recruiting. In the ’90s the city birthed Research in Motion and its Blackberry platform, which briefly dominated the mobile industry. Today, Waterloo is also a bot town. It’s where Kik Interactive, a seven-year-old startup with a mobile messaging app that’s popular among teenagers, began working on a conversational platform for bots two years ago — long before the idea became the hot tech trend of 2016 and the latest leg of Facebook’s march to world domination. There’s a crowd of bot-platform contenders right now, including giants like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google and upstarts like Slack, Telegram, and Twilio. But Fa...

It all started with a casual meeting over a meal… The lunch One beautiful Tuesday afternoon, Dmitry and I went out for a late lunch. I asked my close friend of 20 years how he was doing. Dmitry answered, “Awesome! I love what we’re doing these days!” It was obvious that my most sarcastic friend genuinely meant every word. Little did we know then, that Dishero, the company we had co-founded a year and a half ago, would be shut down within the next 72 hours as a direct result of his answer. We laid off everyone that very Friday… Success -ish Let’s roll back. Dishero was founded by Ilya Ginzburg, Dmitry Fink and myself with the goal to replace the paper menus and give restaurants full control over their online presence. Our business was seemingly working and from 30K feet — it looked great: We had raised a total of $2.8M (2 rounds). Most of it was still in the bank, providing us with a comfortable 18 months runway. We had assembled great engineering and business teams, totaling 17 people ...

On Friday, NHL legend Gordie Howe (aka “Mr. Hockey”) died in his son’s home in Ohio. He was 88. His death came just one day before the classic, 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was set to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Many noticed the timing was strange, as Howe features prominently in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He’s not in the film, per se, but Cameron Frye, Ferris’s best friend in the movie, wears a No. 9 Howe Red Wings jersey for almost the entire film. The coincidence was unfortunate, but it piqued interest in one of the film’s lasting mysteries: Why the hell is Cameron a Red Wings fan, anyway? Cameron’s Red Wings sweater would seem a minor detail were the film not set in Chicago, a famously sports-obsessed city that doesn’t take kindly to opposing fans. Cameron is from the Chicago suburbs, so logic would dictate that he be a fan of the hometown Blackhawks. Instead he supports the Detroit Red Wings, the Blackhawks’ arch rival. It’s impossible that the filmmakers did this by mi...

For the last few years, Adam LaRoche has brought his son Drake to the ballpark with him pretty much every day. The teams he’s been on (the Nationals from 2011 to 2014 and the White Sox last year) accepted him as their own and have affectionately referred to Adam’s son Drake as their “26th man.” After the Nationals won the National League East in 2012 and the team celebrated with beer and champagne, Drake and 19-year-old phenom Bryce Harper drank sparkling grape juice in the corner and watched the adults celebrate. That’s just one of a number of stories that have come out in the wake of this story about how Drake was accepted by his father’s teams. So by all accounts, Drake was beloved by the majority of guys on the team, was well behaved, and helped out around the clubhouse with cleaning cleats, picking up baseballs, and doing laundry like the teenagers who worked in the clubhouse would. He had a locker next to his father complete with a uniform and everything. Players who have been on...

While everyone was out celebrating that the United States won Copa America’s Group A, Ecuador was showing Haiti what it’s like to play soccer at warp speed and Peru was ushering Brazil back onto their charter just in time to do a little pre-Olympics Zika prep. In the unluckiest of twists, the USMNT was “rewarded” with playing Group B runner-up Ecuador, a team that was undoubtedly the best side despite the final results in group play and might just be the second most dangerous squad after Argentina. So what does this mean for the United States? Most likely an early exit so they, too, can prepare for the 2016 Olympics in Brazi — Oh, right. They didn’t qualify. *AHEM* Well, then, let’s have a look at what they will need to do against an Ecuadorian side that plays like a kid that never took his finger off the turbo button in FIFA ’95 for Sega Genesis. 1. DeAndre Yedlin has to have a big game. Errrrrrmmm... 1. Edgar Castillo has to have a big game. With Yedlin collecting yellows on Saturday...

So the internet would have me believe that there are people in this world that are not excited about Independence Day: Resurgence. That sort of makes sense. If you want to spend your life watching only good movies, it’s not a bad rule of thumb to avoid the ones with exploding world capitals or opening weekend holidays right there in the title. The original Independence Day is a landmark movie for many reasons, but its ability to be understated is not one of them. Personally, though, I think those people are crazy. I might even go so far as to say that Independence Day: Resurgence is my most-anticipated big budget movie of the year. It all starts with director Roland Emmerich. While disaster movies may barter in audience cynicism, the films of Roland Emmerich have always aimed for a more sincere sensationalism. Sure, flying saucers destroy world landmarks, monsters rampage their way through metropolitan areas, and ecological disasters wipe out entire cities. Humanity endures. Think of t...

It’s been five years since the releases of No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, and it’s hard to believe so much time has passed. Sometimes it can be hard to believe it wasn’t yesterday. Other times, when it’s really late, and the stars have grown dim and the moon is just a stack of studio memos with the subject line “Making Ashton Kutcher Happen (FINAL VERSION),” it can be hard to believe anything at all. But it’s been five years — of this I’m certain. The friends: They fucked. And now we are left to pick up the pieces. The front lines of the No Strings vs. Friends With War were truly for the savage at heart: families upended; homes broken; relationships strained if not torn. Innocent tweets were drafted daily. Takes were heated just to feel something. People you thought you knew copped to That ’70s Show completism. Darren Aronofsky was relevant or worse. It was wartime, pure and simple, and lawlessness reigned. Two movies about platonic sex dropped in the span of six months...

Mad Max: Fury Road was the weirdest, wildest movie nominated for Best Picture in the past several years, as well as possibly the most-deserving. I wrote a piece a month ago highlighting some of my favorite films from the past year — some categories I agreed with the direction the Academy nominations pointed, and others I didn’t really know what was going on. I do not want to underscore the achievements of any of the winners or losers in the category, and I can’t say that any of the winners in the past few years didn’t “deserve” the win… except (probably) Argo. Many or most of these movies absolutely deserve to be recognized among the best of the year — but it has never made sense to me, especially in a category as wide as ten nominees, that nearly all of them end up being the same types of films over and over. They are dramas, many of them period pieces and “based on true events,” and they feature some of the most recognizable actors and actresses in the business, working for the most...

Sunday night is Oscar Sunday, or the Superbowl for people who hate sports and love complaining about golden statues that don’t mean anything. There, eight films (eight? don’t ask me, Oscar rules make no sense) will compete for the grand prize of Best Picture, dooming them to a lifetime of thinkpieces about how they were overrated and how they snubbed x-movie. So for the purpose of making sure you have at least some knowledge of what you’re talking about when you inevitably start ranting on Twitter Sunday night (and so I can shamelessly rip off the format of my last post), here’s some basic info on The Oscars’ nominees for Best Picture. The Big Short The one that you thought was really cool and important, but you still don’t understand it This was directed by the same guy who did Anchorman 2. Good conversation starter. Yeah, banks are so evil. They really screwed us over, huh. You know, with the trading, and the lending, and the lack of regulation, and the, uh… Ok, no matter how many Ma...

While Gene Kelly’s death is sad in itself, it is also fraught with controversy. Twenty years ago today, the world lost one of Hollywood’s greatest entertainers, dancers, choreographers, innovators, cinematographers, and genuine movie stars. What follows is a brief tribute to Gene Kelly including an explanation of his death and the industry’s response(s) thereafter. In July 1994, Gene Kelly suffered the first of two strokes. Although doctors at UCLA’s Medical Center labeled it “mild,” the stroke kept him in the hospital for nearly seven weeks. Kelly suffered another, much smaller stroke in Feburary 1995. “He was neurologically stable, aware, and conversational,” the Associated Press reported the following day. But sadly, Gene would never fully recover from this one. At age 84, he died in his sleep on Friday, February 2, 1996. No Friends, Food, Tears, or Embraces While Gene Kelly’s death is sad in itself — in that such an energetic man/body was overtaken by such a debilitating condition ...

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in...

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Contrary to popular belief Contrary to popular belief Contrary to popular belief Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literatu...

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard...