Well, September’s ending (someone wake up Green Day) and, for many B2B companies, September marks the beginning of the end-of-year sprint.

As prospects and customers enter their planning cycles, vendors and solution providers engage in roadmap presentations and pitches to get on next year’s budget.

Meanwhile, internal planning cycles are also underway, which usually means the age-old battle between “Next year we want to have different (better) results!” and “…but we’re not going to do anything differently.”

But enough about that; what’s going on in KW tech?

Need to catch up? Here are the June, July, and August Round-Ups

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DarwinAI Pulls Back the Curtain on What They’ve Been Up To

Waterloo’s DarwinAI is a leader in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), which is a combination of both Ron Burgundy and Hansel (in that it’s kind of a big deal and also so hot right now).

The company already boasts an impressive array of references including Audi, BMW, Honeywell, Intel, Nvidia, Arm, and Lockheed Martin—let’s pause for a moment to recognize just how enviable that list is—and for the past few months has also made significant contributions in the fight against COVID-19.

If you’ve followed DarwinAI, you might have seen some medium posts on explaining explainability (here are Part I and Part II of a good primer) and the ongoing development of COVID-Net (a convolutional neural network for COVID-19 detection via chest radiography).

Several of those posts touch on, mention, or otherwise slightly reference DarwinAI’s GenSynth platform. Pandemics don’t wait: How we built COVID-Net in under 7 days goes into some detail, but still focuses more on how GenSynth was used than on what GenSynth is, leaving eager audiences wanting more (it’s still a great success story / proof point, though).

Well the wait is over! DarwinAI recently posted a comprehensive page dedicated to the GenSynth Platform. Targeted primarily at the developers and data scientists who are the actual end users, this page pulls back the covers on GenSynth to showcase this powerful solution. From a product marketing standpoint, I like the page for a couple of reasons, but mainly because it is –>useful<–.

In fact, I liked the GenSynth page so much that I wrote about it in Deep Divin’ into a Product Page

Bits and Bytes

Here are a few other September notables:

• eSentire continued their strong run, with Getting Started with Incident Response and 2020 Threat Intelligence Spotlight: Legal Industry; both of these resources use education as the engagement strategy, helping general audiences understand a particular subject (i.e., incident response) and by helping a particular vertical (i.e., the legal services industry) learn about the cyberthreats they face
• Preseem posted a short video that outlines how their platform helps Wireless ISPs (WISPs) manage access point congestion and quality issues that can result new traffic demands resulting from the changes imposed by COVID-19
• And hey, speaking of videos, KA Imaging has just uploaded a bunch that showcase how their Portable Dual-Energy X-ray device finds what traditional X-rays miss—while I hope never to personally need to benefit from KA Imaging’s revolutionary product, recent approvals mean that it’ll be coming to hospitals and diagnostics labs soon!
• Waterloo EDC has taken their comparison series across the pond in, Three key findings: Waterloo vs. Europe’s tech hubs; on a related note, here’s a joke that a colleague in Zurich told me some years back, “What’s the difference between North America and yogurt? If you leave yogurt alone for a while, it will develop some culture.” BURN! Oh hey, then they squeezed in this comparison against Salt Lake City just before the month-end cut-off.
• We turned two, so yay—thanks everyone who’s been a part of these fun early years!

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Aaaand that’s a wrap.

If you want to nominate something for inclusion in the October round-up, then hit me up.