Coffee Briefings are timely deliveries of the latest ITWC headlines, interviews, and podcasts. These briefings drop on Tuesday mornings. Today’s Coffee Briefing is delivered by IT World Canada reporter Pragya Sehgal, with files from the rest of the editorial team!
Missed last week’s Coffee Briefing? We’ve got you covered.
ITWC Podcasts
Listen to the latest episode of Hashtag Trending
A new study debunks a longstanding electric vehicle myth, AI speech recreation tools have some experts worried, and Tesla’s automated cars hit a snag.
Listen to the latest episode of Cyber Security Today
Today’s episode reports on phony Windows 11 downloads, how an insurance giant was hacked, Mac malware, a ransomware gang attacked and more.
Listen to the latest episode of Hashtag Tendances (Hosted by Direction Informatique)
If you live in Quebec or prefer to consume the latest technology news in French, our sister publication Direction Informatique has you covered. Follow them on Twitter as well.
In case you missed it
Recent tech news that we maybe didn’t get to yet, or it’s news we’ve reported on and feel is worth resurfacing.
U.K. technology company Test Driven Solutions expands to Canada
Global software technology company Test Driven Solutions has selected Calgary to house its Canadian headquarters, the company announced in a July 26 press release.
Established in 2020 as a remote and on-site support provider, U.K.-based Test Driven Solutions offers individual software consultants or full team support for short and long-term projects, with various services including full stack software developers, technical architects, automated and manual quality assurance engineers, agile and waterfall business analysts, scrum masters, and devOps engineers. [Full press release here]
Zoho makes its cloud-based invoicing solution free of charge for SMBs
Zoho is making its online invoicing solution, Zoho Invoice, free of cost for freelancers, and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the global technology company announced in a July 26 press release.
Zoho Invoice offers capabilities such as time tracking, auto-recording of expenses, project billing, and over 30 real-time reports to help freelancers and small businesses easily navigate the billing and payment collection process. The solution enables businesses to create and send fully-customized, professional invoices in less than a minute, follow up for payments automatically, and get paid online to achieve efficiency in their invoice process.
Hootsuite onboards new chief marketing officer
Hootsuite has appointed Maggie Lower as chief marketing officer (CMO) who will oversee the company’s overall global strategy for brand, demand generation, communications, and events.
Prior to joining Hootsuite, Lower was CMO at the Chicago-based software company Cision. She has previously also held the top marketing roles at workforce solutions firm TrueBlue, financial risk-mitigation products provider Aon Hewitt, and spent thirteen years in senior leadership roles at the Bank of America.
Shopify launches a centralized chat and analytics tool
Shopify has launched Inbox, a centralized chat and analytics tool that unifies all of the company’s existing chat tools to centralize customer conversations for merchants. Shopify says the tool will also give merchants access to all-new data-driven insights (like classifying chats and mapping those to conversions) that they can leverage to better understand their business and close more sales.
Inbox has two components: brand management settings in the Shopify admin, and mobile and desktop chat apps. “Brand management settings in the Shopify admin solve what can be a disparate experience of managing tone and brand across multiple products/platforms by centralizing pre-drafted messaging (like quick replies, FAQs, away messages) in the same place merchants already manage the rest of their business: the Shopify admin,” the company explains. Similarly, mobile and desktop chat apps allow merchants to focus on engaging with customers by centralizing all conversations, including messages from new channels like Instagram, in one place.
Nokia Canada partners with EDC to strengthen supply chain [Full story]
Export Development Canada (EDC) will provide financing and insurance solutions to Nokia Canada to boost the export of its technologies and products.
Cloud, containerization and the digital bank of the future [Full story]
Banks are continuing their cloud transformation as they modernize legacy systems and provide more self-serve experiences to customers through mobile channels. This has become even more important over the past year as we deal with the pandemic.
This is Akamai’s second major failure in just over a month. In June, a misconfiguration in its Prolexic service took down Australian banks.
RBC to launch innovation hub in Calgary, bring 300 new tech jobs [Full story]
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) will be welcoming 300 technology employees to a new Calgary innovation hub scheduled to launch in September 2021, the financial institution announced in a July 21 press release.
Tech companies team up to create a digital banking app for Indigenous communities [Full story]
Tech companies BlocPal International and OneFeather have come together to create a digital banking app for Indigenous communities in Canada called the OneFeather APP.
Accenture acquires Toronto-based Cloudworks to expand Oracle footprint in Canada [Full story]
Accenture has acquired Toronto-based Oracle Cloud implementation service provider Cloudworks to deliver Oracle solutions to clients across Canada.
OpenText announces Cloud Editions 21.3 for better information management in the cloud [Full story]
OpenText has released Cloud Editions (CE) 21.3 which includes new features to support information management in the cloud at scale.
Ahead of its annual partner conference, Inspire, Microsoft announced its 2021 Partner of the Year Awards finalists and winners in a variety of categories.
Microsoft issues workaround for new Win10 privilege escalation problem [Full story]
Microsoft has quickly issued a workaround for Windows 10 systems after the discovery of a serious vulnerability that could allow a successful attacker to increase their access to a compromised computer.
