Jeff Fraser

John is an old high school friend I mostly see at weddings, so I wasn’t expecting to see a message from him blinking on my desktop one night in December. He asked if I still had the Bitcoin he’d given me back in 2011. “I still have it I think,” I replied, dimly recalling the loonie-sized brass coin that he’d given me, around the time someone bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC. I remembered seeing some recent headlines about Bitcoin making a comeback. “How much is it worth now?” I asked, thinking that for him to be asking, it must be worth a couple of hundred bucks. “13,000 USD-ish,” he said.

Wings Gaming are The International 2016 champions, following a 3-1 victory over Digital Chaos in the Grand Finals. They head home from Seattle with just over $9.1 million. Though the road to the Grand Finals is a long one, Wings took the shortest path possible, cutting through the Upper Bracket with a 9-2 game record and barely breaking a sweat. They came into Day 1 one of the event bold and unpredictable as ever, pulling out crazy drafts that left the desk analysts scratching their heads. "There is no meta," Chan "WinteR" Litt Binn said ahead of Wings' draft in Game 3 of the Grand Finals.

Without Shopify, Manitobah Mukluks would never have gone from a specialty business working with a handful of high-end shoe retailers to a worldwide phenomenon competing with the likes of Ugg. Today, its premiere and one-of-a-kind “story boots” that are painstakingly crafted by aboriginal community elders, retail for upwards of $1,000 on Manitobah’s online store. But back in the mid-2000s, when it was founded by a Métis trader and a former Canada Goose distributor, there was no way Manitobah could afford to work with the big-name enterprise e-commerce businesses.

If you’ve been to an ad technology conference lately, then you’ve no doubt experienced it: the odd juxtaposition of future-forward cheerleading for innovative technology and grave real-talk about all the threats lurking out there on the exchanges. In one auditorium, sponsors are lining up with a litany of impressive spend projections for 2016, proof-positive that it’s time for your brand to get on the bandwagon. But just down the hall, industry watchdogs are warning that everyone along the digital supply chain is looking to gouge you, including your trusted agency partners.

Imagine you represent Boston Pizza, State Farm or Procter & Gamble, and while surfing the web you click a bad link and end up at BeachCreeps.com, an adult blog that posts photos of bikini-clad women. There at the top of the site is a shiny new banner ad from your latest media buy. Now imagine you’re not imagining it. Beach Creeps is a real site, where Marketing discovered ads for those and many other household name brands like Target, Harley Davidson, Scene Card and Equifax.

When the new Canadian census figures were released this week, there was a lot of talk about the rise in single-person households, as well as same-sex pairings and unmarried couples with children. But another variety of domestic arrangement continues to fly below the radar of demographics: those that involve more than two adult romantic partners. While statistics are hard to come by, the lifestyle – which many of its practitioners call polyamory – does not go totally unnoticed, for better or worse.