
Sask. couple spends winter months farming chocolate ingredients in South America
WATCH: A Saskatchewan couple spend the winter months in South America farming chocolate ingredients. Mick Favel has the story.
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CTV News
37 minutes ago
- CTV News
Ottawa to spend $500,000 to enhance façades of historic Bank Street buildings
The City of Ottawa is looking to make aesthetic improvements to the façade of commercial heritage buildings to strengthen the historic character of buildings in the Bank Street area of Centretown. A report for the Built Heritage Committee proposes establishing a $500,000 Centretown Heritage Façade Improvement Pilot Program to encourage the restoration and conservation of heritage buildings. Under the proposed plan, eligible owners could receive 75 per cent of costs up to a maximum of $75,000 to support heritage façade improvements and restoration. 'The objective is to encourage private investment in the revitalization of the Bank Street corridor as part of the broader revitalization plan for Centretown,' says the report for the June 10 committee meeting. 'Through aesthetic façade improvements such as signage, lighting, commercial storefront improvements and heritage conservation projects such as masonry conservation, private property owners can help contribute to a vibrant Bank Street. These efforts will help reinforce a special sense of place along Bank Street as a historic main street in the downtown core.' Staff say eligible work includes improvements and restoration of storefront windows, entrances, brickwork, cornices and architectural detailing, and heritage compliant awnings, signage, painting, and lighting. The report says while a Heritage Property Grant Program already exists, the need for additional investment on Bank and Somerset streets 'has been identified through the city's ongoing work on downtown revitalization.' 'With additional funding and tailored support, the City would empower property owners to meaningfully conserve heritage features while contributing to the vibrancy of this historic main street,' staff say. Buildings eligible for the funding must be designated under the Ontario Heritage Act and be located on Bank Street, between Catherine and Albert Street, and a section of Somerset Street east of Bank Street. The proposed Centretown Heritage Façade Improvement Pilot Program would run between this summer and the end of December 2026.

National Post
37 minutes ago
- National Post
Canva Accelerates Global Growth and Product Velocity With Snowflake AI Data Cloud
Article content AI-powered insights in Snowflake are fueling personalized design experiences, accelerating B2B growth, and driving data-led innovation for the world's leading visual communication platform Article content Article content SAN FRANCISCO — Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, today announced at its annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2025, that Canva, the world's leading visual communication platform, is leveraging Snowflake to enhance both the user experience for its global community and drive significant growth in its B2B segment as it expands its relevance and impact across the enterprise. By harnessing the power of Snowflake's platform, Canva is accelerating the delivery of new features, optimizing its marketing and sales operations, and personalizing the design journey as it continues to scale globally, reaching new audiences and entering new markets. Article content From its transformation from a startup to a global visual communications powerhouse with over 230 million monthly active users, Canva exemplifies how data-driven decision making can fuel extraordinary growth. The company has seen exponential growth in recent years, now generating over $3 billion USD in annualized revenue, with an expanding enterprise customer base that includes some of the world's largest organizations. Throughout Canva's remarkable journey, it has relied on Snowflake's scalable data platform to transform user insights into innovative products — accelerating development and enabling more people around the world to design with ease. Article content 'As our user base expanded, so did the complexity and volume of data,' said Moe Kiss, Director of Data Science at Canva. 'Snowflake has scaled with us throughout our hypergrowth, helping us make sense of increasing data volumes while keeping our systems efficient. Having a reliable data foundation has been crucial for us to understand the needs of our users and to make informed product decisions as we continue to innovate across our visual communication platform.' Article content 'Canva exemplifies how data can drive extraordinary business growth,' said Erin Foxworthy, Industry Principal, Marketing and Advertising at Snowflake. 'By putting user insights at the center of their decision-making process, they've created a platform that delights hundreds of millions while building a thriving enterprise business. We're proud that Snowflake has been the data foundation supporting their remarkable data and AI journey.' Article content With Snowflake, Canva is: Article content Powering Enterprise Expansion: Canva is leveraging Snowflake to optimize its B2B sales and marketing efforts, including lead routing, scoring, and enrichment. This data foundation has been critical as Canva has expanded from primarily serving individual creators to becoming a significant enterprise solution with its Canva Enterprise offering. Major corporations like Salesforce, HP Inc, and Expedia are among their growing customer base. Accelerating Roadmap Delivery: Snowflake enables Canva to efficiently validate development at scale, speeding up the release of new features and enhancements to its millions of users. This data-driven approach supports Canva's ambitious product roadmap, including their recently launched Canva Sheets, a visual-first spreadsheet. The rich data flowing through Snowflake from sources like Google Analytics provides crucial insights into user behavior and preferences, directly informing Canva's product development process. Driving Personalized Experiences: By providing a unified view of user data, Snowflake empowers Canva to better understand individual preferences. This deep user understanding has helped inform the development of personalization capabilities across Canva's platform, including AI-powered design style recommendations that suggest colors, fonts, and layouts based on a user's previous behavior and design preferences. Optimizing Marketing ROI: Snowflake empowers Canva to predict customer lifetime value and optimize its marketing spend across various channels. These analytics capabilities provide the insights needed to effectively reach, engage and adjust for local markets. Canva's marketing team has seen particularly significant impact from Snowflake implementation, with enhanced ability to measure campaign effectiveness and allocate resources more efficiently across global markets. Enhancing Customer Segmentation with AI: Snowflake enables Canva to enrich user data, including through the use of AI and integrations with services like OpenAI, for more granular customer segmentation. This enhanced understanding helps Canva deliver more relevant and personalized experiences for its business customers. Article content Exploring Future Innovations Article content Canva is currently testing Snowflake's Cortex Analyst among other new capabilities to further enhance their data infrastructure. These advanced Snowflake technologies are expected to give Canva even greater ability to derive insights from their vast data troves and apply them to accelerate product development and enhance customer experience. Article content Looking ahead, the companies are exploring opportunities to further deepen their technical integration, enabling users to more seamlessly transform Snowflake data into compelling visual stories within Canva. Article content Snowflake is the platform for the AI era, making it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. More than 11,000 companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world's largest, use Snowflake's AI Data Cloud to build, use and share data, applications and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI are transformative for everyone. Learn more at (NYSE: SNOW). Article content Article content Article content Article content Article content Article content


CBC
42 minutes ago
- CBC
Wildfire evacuees scramble to find somewhere to stay
With thousands of people forced to evacuate their communities because of wildfires, the next challenge is finding somewhere to stay, with some being sent as far away as Niagara Falls, Ont. Meanwhile, the 150 fires across the Prairies show few signs of slowing down.