This happens hundreds of times a week, according to Al Lindsay, Amazon’s VP of Alexa Engine Software.

With 80,000 skills and growing, marriage is maybe the one thing Alexa can’t do.

This year, the smart speaker industry will grow to be worth an estimated $7 billion, and demand could potentially surpass that of smartphones.

A Canadian voice tech pioneer, Lindsay joined us at RBC Disruptors, our monthly conversation on innovation and technology, to share his insights into a voice-first world.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast

Here are 5 takeaways about the future of voice:

1. Voice Tech Is Making Smartphones Look Dumb

A lot of people ask, “Why do I need voice tech? I can do everything I want on my smartphone.” For Lindsay, his ah-ha moment was listening to music: “I’d say, play songs from Sting and two seconds later music would be streaming from the speaker.” No more taping on glass, navigating through apps and waiting. We used to see smartphones as the ultimate convenience. Now, voice tech has usurped them, eliminating the need to pull out your phone — and possibly get even more distracted. Voice could allow us to get back to being humans again.

2. Personality is Everything

In the beginning, Lindsay and his team were focused on making a voice tech assistant that was smart and helpful — those seemed like the obvious selling points. But customers leaned into Alexa as a persona. “It turns out fun and a sense of humour are appreciated as well,” Lindsay said. The company started adding quirks and funny responses, realizing the more natural interacting with voice tech feels, the easier people will adopt using it.

3. Voice Tech Is Disrupting Every Industry

When asked about what industries voice tech is disrupting, Lindsay was definitive: “All of them.” He predicted major changes from health care to hospitality. For hospital patients, smart speakers could handle simple requests like turning on the television or adjusting the bed, saving time and labour. When people go out to dinner, they’ll use voice to order a drink, and to charge the bill to their Visa — “or to the table over there,” he joked.

4. Every Business Needs a Voice Strategy

As we move to a more ambient world, small and large businesses alike will need a voice strategy. Similar to deciding on brand colours and slogans, companies will need to ask: Is our voice soothing? Young and fun? More serious? Sound adds a powerful new dimension to brand identity. It also opens up new opportunities. You don’t need to have speech team to have speech as an interface. Anything that has a computer interface, you can replace or augment with voice.

5.Voice is the Great Equalizer

Every interface before voice had a learning curve — it takes time to learn to type, or navigate an app. Lindsay said the distinction for voice-tech is that if we can truly achieve a natural conversation experience, technology will be immediately accessible to everyone in the world with language skills.

A lifelong entrepreneur, he’s also seen what it takes to succeed in business — and how failing is vital to learning how to get things right.

Today, the company pulls in $370 million annually in revenue and boasts 250 franchises around the world.

“We wouldn’t have gotten there if we didn’t fail,” Scudamore said. “We would never have gotten to where we are today if we didn’t continue to have the courage to make mistakes, and then learn from every one of those.”

One early mistake? “I realized that I was a terrible leader.”

At RBCDisruptors, our monthly conversation on innovation and technology, Scudamore talked about being willing to fail and the leadership lessons he’s learned along the way.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast

Here are some of his insights:

1. Ask Questions

When Scudamore set his sights on franchising, he went out and talked to 12 people. All 12 of them told him not to do it, that the junk removal business wasn’t franchise-able. He took the opportunity to ask questions, make changes, and tweak the model to make sense as a national business. Entrepreneurs need to have the boldness and the brashness to stand up and ask.

2. Paint a Clear Picture

Focus on what the future looks like, write it down, and share it with everyone. When Scudamore decided to scale 1-800-GOT-JUNK, he told his team the goal was to be in the top 30 metros. The naysayers left. Those who stuck with the company understood the goal, believed in it – and helped him to pull it off.

3. Make Tough Calls

Scudamore says the toughest thing he ever had to do was fire best friend, the company’s Chief Operating Officer. Together, they made rash decisions and almost bankrupted the business. “The right decision is usually a hard one.”

4. Be Out Front

Scudamore didn’t always know how to mentor. “I was hiding in my private office, not spending time with my team,” he said. “I didn’t want to. I was afraid of them, afraid of conflict.” He learned to put himself out there, and realized that leadership isn’t just about growing a business – it’s about helping people to grow.

5. Hire People You’d Want to Have a Beer With

“I learned how to build a team and culture through failure,” he said. Five years into the business, he had 11 employees — and 9 of them were “bad apples.” The workplace became toxic. He called a meeting, apologized – and let everyone go. He rebuilt by finding the right employees, hiring people who wanted to be friends with – who shared his passion for growth, and would represent the company well.

6. Get Out of the Way

Scudamore committed to a bucket list goal on the company’s vision board: be featured on the Oprah Winfrey show. It was clearly there for all to see, and an eager young employee took up the challenge, reaching out to the show and developing relationships until the call came in: there was an opportunity for 1-800-GOT-JUNK to be featured. “I did nothing to make that happen,” Scudamore said. “Tyler got out there and did all the work to pull it together.” You know you’ve gotten leadership right when your team can handle the execution.

Every entrepreneur makes mistakes, but you can’t beat yourself up when things go sideways, Scudamore said. Take a breath, and ask yourself what’s the one positive thing that can happen from this seemingly challenging situation. He finds the list is often longer than you’d think.

“Failure should be your friend,” Scudamore said. “Every single mistake we made we had to make to get to the next level”.

“I like to fix things. I always liked to fix things,” Chen said at the latest RBCDisruptors, our monthly conversation on innovation and how technology is changing the way we work, live and play.

He’s had plenty to fix at BlackBerry, the iconic Canadian tech company he took over as executive chairman and CEO in 2013. One of his first tasks back then was to announce a record $4.4 billion quarterly loss. The company got back in the black after a pivot to software and services, which now drive 90% of its revenue. The numbers are far below the good old days — but they’re climbing.

BlackBerry’s CEO says he’s driven to do what others think isn’t possible. Pulling that off takes a clear head and a sharp understanding of the larger trends around you.

He spoke to our audience about trade tensions between the U.S. and China, the future of mobile devices and how artificial intelligence is changing cybersecurity.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast

Here are some of his insights:

1. Huawei Will Have to Open Up

In the emerging cold war of technology, 5G is the latest battleground. Chen says China’s Huawei will eventually have to surrender its code for examination if it wants to win access to Western markets. “I see no other way for Huawei to get back in the game, without doing that,” he said. The reality is, Huawei isn’t the only supplier of emerging technologies like 5G routers and modems, and Western governments can move on without them. They can turn to other firms like Ericsson.

2. We May Have Seen Peak Phone

Chen says Apple got the inflation curve wrong, and the $1,000 phone isn’t going to be the next big thing. There’s not enough innovation to justify the eye-popping prices we’ve seen on new models.

3. Cars Are the New Smartphones

Vehicles are increasingly technology devices — and they’re going to need secure software to protect them. Chen sees this as BlackBerry’s big opportunity. Its QNX technology is already being used in 120 million cars. Amid concerns about hackers driving cars into ditches and drones into plane engines, BlackBerry’s goal is to make QNX the standard automotive operating system — what Windows is to PCs.

4. The Cyber Battle is Going From Defense to Offence

If you’re focusing on your most recent hack, you will lose. Security is a cat-and-mouse game that’s top of mind from the armed forces to hospitals to major banks, and both the hackers and defendants are turning to artificial intelligence to get them ahead of the other side. BlackBerry made its offensive play last fall, spending $1.4 billion to acquire Cylance — a cybersecurity company that uses AI to predict future attacks.

5. BlackBerry Doesn’t Want Your Data

Going up against giants like Apple and Google means focusing on your strengths. For BlackBerry, that’s security and privacy. It’s the heritage of the company, and its bet for the future. Unlike its competitors, BlackBerry isn’t trying to manage and monetize data. “We don’t take a look at any of the data. We don’t use it, we don’t care about it. We actually have an algorithm to discard it.”

6. Relish Your Losing Hand

Chen’s approach to business borrows from his love for contract bridge. He likes the game because it’s not about having a lucky hand. You get points based on how well you play the hand you’re dealt. “It’s really about, could you do better with what you’ve got.” That’s the challenge that drew him to BlackBerry. It’s a tougher road, but play it well, and it’s a higher playoff.

Smarter technology doesn’t mean we can sit back and let Alexa take the wheel. It means making our own pivot, and ensuring our society is not only tech-dependent but tech-savvy.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/bGCnjw2_n30

Between Toys “R” Us shuttering all its U.S. stores and tech-savvy toddlers playing with mobile devices, he might not be feeling too jolly about the future of toys. How can an Etch-a-Sketch possibly compete with an iPhone?

Right here in Toronto, we have a monster truck of a toy company who says it can be done.

Spin Master was founded in 1994 by three friends fresh out of university. They had early hits with the Earth Buddy and Devil Sticks; but it’s when they started investing heavily in R&D that their toy company took off. Today it’s one of the top five toy companies in the world, with sales exceeding $1.5 billion last year.

The global toy market is growing at 3–4 percent a year, mainly in Asia. In the U.S., parents spend an average of $350 on toys per child per year. And with R&D investment, toys can be every bit as innovative as our digital devices. Look no further than Spin Master’s Hatchimals — toys that peck their way out of egg when cuddled and rubbed.

I recently sat down with Spin Master Co-Founder and Co-CEO Ronnen Harary for our December session of RBCDisruptors.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Simplecast

Here are 6 lessons for innovators everywhere:

1. Build Your Own Empire

Spin Master created the cartoon phenomenon Paw Patrol by working backwards. About one-in-four toys is a licensed product, associated with a hit movie or show, but the bigger brands were always beating Spin Master for the rights. So instead of competing for rights to a franchise they didn’t own, Spin Master created an empire.

2. Use Tech As a Value-driver

A few years ago, the interactive technology to create a Hatchimal would have put its price point at $250 — way too high for the toy aisle. Today, you can buy one for about $80. Use technology to do things that haven’t been done before, at a price the market likes.

3. Respect Your Talent

Toy inventors are hard to find — there are only a couple hundred worldwide. Those relationships need to be nurtured. The duo who developed Zoomer, a voice-activated dog that responds to its name, have continued to create new toys for the company. Unlike many toy companies, Spin Master encourages inventors to stay involved in the process, and to share in the glory — including onstage when Zoomer won the 2014 Innovative Toy of the Year.

From left to right: Spin Master’s Zoomer, Hatchimal and Bakugan toys.

4. Stand Out From Your Competition

In the 1990s, Spin Master created “Key Charm Cuties” to compete head-to-head with Mattel’s Polly Pocket; but they couldn’t lure customers away from a trusted favourite without a significant point of difference. The lesson? Kids won’t settle for anything less than new and awesome.

5. Always Have Something in the Pipeline

Spin Master had a blockbuster hit with Bakugan, growing from a $450 million company to an $800 million company in just 21 months. But when interest in Bakugan dipped, it led to a major downturn for the company. Kids grow up, fads fade, and you always need to have your next great idea in the pipeline.

6. Don’t Obsess Over Your Failures

Not every toy is going to fly off the shelves. When something fails, no one person should be blamed — just like no one person should take credit when something succeeds. “Don’t ruminate about it,” said Harary. Move on to the next thing.

The Canadian entrepreneur spent his early childhood without electricity, taught himself to code, and studied philosophy at Cambridge before falling into a tech career that’s now pitting him against Microsoft and Google.

Butterfield’s biggest business success, Slack, is a corporate communications tool that arouses the kind of devotion that brings to mind Blackberry’s early days—and is aimed at reducing some of the 269 billion emails sent around the world each day. In person, Butterfield is soft-spoken and thoughtful, as one would expect from a guy who once contemplated a career as a philosophy prof. He joined us at RBCDisruptors earlier this week, where we had a chance to talk to him about effective communications, the merits of Silicon Valley and why corporate values are important. Here’s some of what we learned.

An Accidental Success Story

Stewart Butterfield didn’t start out to create either of his startups, Flickr and Slack. They were by-products of his efforts to create web-based, multiplayer games. The gaming ventures went nowhere. But in trying to build shared fantasy worlds, he came up with the photo-sharing software that became Flickr, and later the chat tool that morphed into Slack.

While he knew he was onto something with Slack, Butterfield didn’t initially think the tool would work for large organizations. Slack has 9 million users and counts IBM and Oracle among its biggest customers. While the path may not have been planned, building Slack into the company it is now—a challenger to the mighty Microsoft—was no accident, Butterfield says. “It’s a lot of work.”

An Antidote for Email

Butterfield’s luck with startups shouldn’t obscure his big ambitions. He wants to fundamentally change the way people collaborate, whether they work at IBM or as wedding planners. His solution is Slack, an alternative to the ubiquitous office email that Butterfield says is a “terrible choice” for intra-company communications. To illustrate, Butterfield describes a new hire signing onto corporate email and staring at an empty inbox. If that employee joins an organization using Slack, she or he has access to all the work that’s been done on a given project, right on Day One.

With the average 1,000-person company sending out an estimated 40,000 emails each day, it isn’t surprising that Slack has a community of evangelists.

Slack’s greatest advantage, Butterfield says, is that it provides a high degree of transparency across an organization, and quickly. That gives individuals and teams the clarity and alignment they need to perform their jobs.

The Valley Still Wins

Butterfield said more than once during the event that he’s a “patriotic Canadian,” and he believes Canada has all the talent it needs in terms of engineers, designers and marketers to staff Canadian startups.

So if given the choice, why would he start his next company in Silicon Valley? Butterfield’s answer was one we’ve heard before from entrepreneurs: It’s still the place with the deepest bench strength for recruiting specialized executive tech talent.

Corporate Values Matter. Like Playfulness

Butterfield took a page from Netflix’s playbook in assigning Slack some core values. But he wanted to make sure those values set Slack apart, reminding employees both how they should act and how Slack views them. He suggested any company should think carefully about its corporate values and ensure they tell employees and customers what makes it unique.

In case you’re wondering, Slack’s values include courtesy, playfulness and craftsmanship. Courtesy, for Butterfield, means empathizing with the client and always being open to understanding his or her needs. By emphasizing playfulness, he wants his employees to “look at the world sideways” in order to find creative solutions to problems. Craftsmanship is more than a call to avoid shoddy work—it’s Slack’s way of telling employees their individual work has meaning and value.

China’s Off Limits. Everywhere Else is Fair Game

When it comes to the massive and lucrative Chinese market, many tech companies want in. Slack isn’t one of them: Butterfield said the company isn’t prepared to give Beijing access to the company’s messaging data. But he is targeting the 600 million or so knowledge workers around the world that aren’t in China. He’s doing that by making Slack available in other languages and ensuring it supports specific industries and regulatory environments.

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Materially improving gender, ethnic and cultural diversity, particularly within executive teams correlates with a wide range of successes – specifically being able to recruit top talent and improve employee satisfaction and decision making.

Diversity can also help drive technological innovation and disruption. Consider Montreal-based Lightspeed, one of Canada’s most successful tech start-ups.

The software firm launched in 2005 by Dax Dasilva and a group of LGBT+ colleagues, and has grown in size to now include 600 employees in eight offices around the world.

A culture of inclusion was essential. So, too, was a recognition that innovation through diversity is as much evolution as revolution.

“Company culture is just as important as code,” Lightspeed’s CEO and founder Dax Dasilva told RBCDisruptors, our monthly event looking at innovation and how technology is changing the world around us.

Dasilva stressed that companies need to iterate in order to innovate.

As part of Pride Month, RBCDisruptors profiled Dasilva, a leading voice for the LGBT+ community in business and technology.

After Dasilva founded Lightspeed, he developed a mantra to ensure that everyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, had a seat at the table.

“That gave everybody the freedom to help us to grow the way that we wanted,” he said. “It allowed anyone at the company to be themselves and who they wanted to be.”

Lightspeed’s growth has soared since its start in a converted Montreal home and has become one of Canada’s most successful tech start-ups in recent years after its latest financing round in October that values the company around $1 billion. The company makes a cloud-based point-of-sale system that runs on tablets and computers aimed at for independent retailers and restaurants who annually process $15 billion worth of sales in over 100 countries.

Several recent studies that examine the business impact of LGBT-positive workplaces conclude that inclusiveness results in a more innovative and productive workplace. A study published in the journal Management Science in 2016 found that companies in U.S. states that are considered to be more gay-friendly are actually significantly more innovative, specifically producing higher rates of patents.

On average, companies based in U.S. states that passed laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual preference or gender identity experienced an 8% increase in the number of patents and an 11% increase in the number of patent citations, compared to states that did not pass such a law.

And yet, LGBT+ people are among the most marginalized employees, according to a recent report by Diversio, a Toronto-based firm.

Diversio surveyed 2,100 people in 20 companies in Canada, the U.S. and Britain and found that LGBTQ2+ employees felt more at risk of workplace harassment, and were twice as likely to feel their opinions were not sought out or valued by their employers.

Dasilva shared an example in which he encouraged Lightspeed’s management to focus on diversifying the company’s data science team to gain additional perspectives.

“If we only build certain predictive models, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that creates a certain set of solutions. As great as the AI community is in Montreal, we have to have other viewpoints work on that data science and find new and different angles.”

Supporting LGBT+ inclusion also makes better business sense. A 2017 report by the Center for Talent Innovation concluded 71% of LGBT respondents and 82% of LGBT-supportive allies are more likely to purchase from LGBT-inclusive companies. Even more importantly, LGBT+ inclusiveness drives market innovation as teams with members whose sexual orientation matches the target consumer are much more likely to understand the market, the report found.

“We’re all looking for sources of innovation,” Dasilva said, stressing that one of his goals in technology is creativity. “All of the best of us is when we’re involved in something that’s creating good.”

After Dasilva launched Lightspeed, he discovered he had created a “monoculture” by hiring people from his own network of friends and acquaintances. It limited the company’s growth. “You have to own up to your mistakes and widen your circle,” he said. “You have to get out of your comfort zone of the people who are like you.”

In addition to managing Lightspeed ahead of a possible IPO next year, Dasilva also runs Never Apart, a Montreal-based non-profit organization that encourages social change through cultural programming. He understands that his role at both groups is to foster and build leadership, in the corporate world and within the LGBT+ community.

“The purpose of these two organizations is to build up leaders. You can’t make change in the world without having everyone see themselves as a leader.”