Douglas Soltys

Toronto

Founder and Editor-in-Chief at BetaKit

Co-Host at The BetaKit Podcast Channel

word czar. two-guard. currently: @BetaKit previously: @MobileSyrup @BlackBerry and a bunch of dead sites you might remember fondly. "Wildly out of control."

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Articles

Amii CEO Cam Linke says Canada’s AI strategy requires customers

5 days ago | betakit.com | Douglas Soltys

I have been all over Canada for the last few weeks attending the nation’s tech events. One of those events was the Upper Bound AI conference, hosted in sunny Edmonton to a record-breaking 6,000 people. The Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) organized the event, and this week on the podcast, we have Amii CEO Cam Linke.
Web Summit Vancouver was worth “every penny”

5 days ago | betakit.com | Douglas Soltys

After two weeks of living out of a suitcase, I’m back in Toronto. But I still have the West Coast on my mind.
“The energy is here”: local leaders call Web Summit Vancouver’s scaled-back debut a success

6 days ago | betakit.com | Josh Scott |Douglas Soltys

As Web Summit Vancouver wrapped up the first of three tech conferences planned for the city between now and 2027, three things were clear: the weather was perfect, traffic was nowhere close to as bad as Toronto’s, and the vibes were positive. A scaled-down version of its predecessor Collision, Web Summit Vancouver featured nearly 16,000 attendees in its inaugural year—less than half of the 38,000 attendee tally that descended on Toronto last year.
Canada’s next innovation capital

1 week ago | betakit.com | Douglas Soltys

Last week, I wrote that Alberta tech has energy. Writing you now from the Edmonton airport (with one eye on the Oilers game) after a busy week at Inventures and Upper Bound, I can confirm that I don’t. Thankfully, reporter Madison McLauchlan was with me and supercharged BetaKit’s coverage. Hours after landing she broke news that Alberta Innovates had promoted interim leader Mike Mahon to permanent CEO.
The Canadian engineer trying to fix the internet’s original sin

1 week ago | betakit.com | Douglas Soltys

This week on The BetaKit Podcast, we’re talking protocols. As our guest, Erik Reppel, notes, the internet we use every day is secretly just 15 protocols in a trench coat. Through his work as the head of engineering at Coinbase’s Developer Platform, he’s built a new one, x402 (you can read Coinbase’s white paper on the standard here). It’s designed to fix what Marc Andreessen calls the original sin of the internet: failing to figure out an easy way to send money.
Alberta tech has energy

2 weeks ago | betakit.com | Douglas Soltys

Canada’s VCs were abuzz online this week following the release of the CVCA’s Q1 2025 venture report. You should read Madison McLauchlan’s story below, which notes that deal count has plummeted sharply back to pandemic lows, particularly in the early stage. Depending on which VC you ask, the data reflects either the death of domestic venture capital or a mirror image of recent US performance.
Why Faire’s co-founder wants to bring Silicon Valley’s DNA to Canada

2 weeks ago | betakit.com | Douglas Soltys

Did you know there’s another Canadian-made alternative to Amazon? Founded in 2017, Faire works to help retailers with physical stores find great products to sell—the types of things you won’t find on Amazon. “Building Faire, for me, was an opportunity to bring more of this DNA from Silicon Valley to Canada.”It’s not just the anti-Amazon agenda that connects Shopify and Faire. Shopify invested in Faire in 2023, making the company its preferred wholesale marketplace for Shopify merchants.
Will AI agents replace SaaS before SaaS replaces employees with AI?

3 weeks ago | betakit.com | Douglas Soltys

It’s May, which means we’re at the start of wildfire season in Canada. Actually, that’s not quite true. Traditionally, wildfire season spans from late April to August, but recent years have shown that wildfires are no longer seasonal. That change has been devastating across Canada. 2023 was both an outlier and a sign of what’s to come: 16.5 million hectares of forest burned and 640 million metric tons of carbon released into the atmosphere.
Half of the internet is bots and they’re feeding you lies

3 weeks ago | betakit.com | Douglas Soltys

A recent report from cybersecurity company Imperva claims that more than half of all internet traffic now comes from non-human sources, or bots. That stat is worthy of discussion on its own, but I want you to focus on another one: over a third of all internet traffic is now bad bots—malicious automated actors. What are these bad actors doing online? Disinformation and defamation campaigns, targeting businesses and governments with ‘irregular warfare’ to manipulate markets and elections.
CEO Don Murray says Safe Software’s new features will help replace enterprise SaaS with AI agents

1 month ago | betakit.com | Alex Riehl |Douglas Soltys

Safe Software’s Don Murray is one of the many tech executives betting that artificial intelligence (AI) will eat the world. But the CEO of the Surrey-based data integration company says Safe makes an important distinction: AI is an assistant, not an authority. Founded by Murray and Dale Lutz in 1993, Safe Software offers a software platform to help enterprises share different types of information, including spatial data.