Komal Minhas, who was invited to screen her new documentary Dream, Girl at a White House event and later invited to speak at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in France - is returning to Waterloo for an exclusive screening of her documentary about female entrepreneurs.
Startup companies are cropping up all over Waterloo Region, but to grow they often need support.
That’s where University of Waterloo mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor Zhongchao Tan steps in, helping to sow the seeds for success.
The University of Waterloo celebrated the official opening of the expanded Velocity Garage, making UWaterloo home to the largest free startup incubator in the world.
Occupying space in the Lang Tannery building, Velocity has grown by more than 29,000 square feet to provide space for up to 120 startups to work and collaborate, and to benefit from co-location with Communitech’s network of industry partners and supports.
The expanded facilities will allow Velocity’s software, hardware, life-sciences and social entrepreneurship startups, currently housed in separate buildings, to grow as a community under one roof, and share insights through peer mentorship.
Date: Friday, October 28, 2016
I’ve had the privilege of being surrounded by talented and hard-working individuals during my undergrad at Waterloo. Every single friend, mentor and influencer catalyzed my growth and should take partial credit for everything I accomplished in my undergrad: I’m graduating this fall as a result of their impact on my life.
Pixel Tours has big ambitions for the creation of what it calls “mind-blowing digital experiences,” although you wouldn’t know it standing outside the company’s headquarters: an unremarkable three-storey building in an industrial park in north Toronto.
Descend into its basement digs, however, and you’ll discover an Aladdin’s cave of technology, including a $10,000 gaming machine, a virtual reality rig and massive 4K screens, not to mention a collection of high-end Lego.
There were many days Jeffrey Azzolin felt like giving up and moving on to something else.
Two years into his effort to build a better blade for hockey skates, the University of Waterloo graduate was right back to square one, wracking his brain for an entirely new design that would both work and be financially viable.
Jim Wei (BASc 2000, Mechanical) doesn’t mind admitting that he barely scraped through while earning his mechanical engineering degree 16 years ago.
Learning to persevere, to do what he had to do just to graduate from the challenging Waterloo Engineering program, has been invaluable to him in the business world ever since.
“It’s a very competitive school and you’ve got to compete to survive,” says Wei, who now runs a thriving manufacturing company in Buffalo. “Books are books, they don’t teach you everything, but the environment at UW taught me a lot.”
Bjorn Dawson (BASc '16, Mechanical) was just 20 years old when he bought his first home in 2012 – and got a great business idea in the bargain.
The previous owners were avid gardeners, so he experimented by planting a few seeds himself and discovered how much better homegrown produce tastes.
Do you want to help facilitate the upcoming global transition to electric cars, but remain in Waterloo? If so, Matt Stevens (BASc 2004, Chemical; PhD 2009, Chemical) is someone to talk to.
After obtaining a bachelor’s degree and his PhD from Waterloo Engineering, Stevens is currently the CEO of FleetCarma, a Waterloo-based firm that builds “the number one connected car platform for electric vehicles.”