the hard facts about software
Dudley Does Right can make a big splash making sense of the ever-expanding and hard-to-follow world of tech. We can also dig behind the secret trillions-of-dollars life of invisible software.
Canadians spend billions on apps and software, but mostly not while they notice it. Yes, the apps we download into our phones and computers, or pay for in our smart TVs, are a gold mine for a handful of giant foreign corporations. But that gold is peanuts compared to profits from the software that runs our parking garages, tracks our movie points, books our travel, dispatches our taxis, delivers our pizzas, handles our bank deposits, runs our social media, manages our hydro transmission, lands our planes, organizes our health-care system, manages government spending. And so much more.
All that costs lots of money and employs lots of people around the world. Dudley Does Right will look for tech choices you can make to help more of that money stay in Canada, and create more jobs here for Canadians who are doing so many laudable things in the world of tech.
Can there be a Canadian alternative to PayPal? Are any reliable messager or dialer apps Canadian? Does Amazon create more than parcel-delivery jobs in Canada? Who are the best Canadian web-server hosts?
We’ll hear from Canadians in these fields about how more of our tech can be Canadian tech, and how we might benefit from tech advances in countries other than the U.S.A. We'll find out how to make sure our governments, schools, and other public and private institutions shop Canadian and local for software and tech talent.
Recently a number of Canadian cities made pitches to Amazon to become the location for its new mega-campus. If only they put money where their mouths are to make such efforts to help their local tech firms!
There is another secret side to the life of invisible software. The internet and all this data burns up a lot of energy — running and cooling mega servers especially. Who's working to minimize that?
|
