Fuelling this boom, in part, are tech accelerators: startup bootcamps, where fledgling ideas have the respectability of a business plan stamped on them, are packaged with upward-trending graphs aplenty, and then sold to the baying crowd of investors. However, as much praise as seed accelerators often accrue, they’re very much focused on selling a product to investors, rather than nurturing the people behind the plan. A Canadian not-for-profit, called The Next 36 (N36) and based in Toronto, is trying to change that, with a different model for what it thinks a seed accelerator should be.

At heart, a seed accelerator is an incubator for technology startups. Companies exchange equity — normally around 5 to 10 per cent of their total worth — in exchange for a bit of startup capital, and an intensive programme of mentoring and networking from an all-star cast of mentors, often including the CEOs of companies like Twitter. It all culminates with a make-or-break pitch to investors, where they’ll try and sell off a little bit more of their company in return for a much greater wad of cash. Firms’ success or failure is very much judged on their ability to attract venture capital (VC) backing; either they get funding, and develop their idea, or they’re back to the drawing board, no further along than they were when they started the process.

The Next 36 takes a different approach. For starters, unlike the biggest seed accelerators in the U.S. such as Y Combinator and Techstars, it’s a not-for-profit, funded by donations and any operating profits it makes. That’s because the main aim of N36, according to Jon French, the programme’s Director of Marketing and Events, is “to accelerate the growth of individuals, rather than necessarily their ventures.” N36’s aim is to encourage the next generation of entrepreneurship in Canada, using the seed accelerator model as “a hands-on approach to teach a select cohort of entrepreneurs the skills they’ll need.”

As such, the model of this accelerator, and its philosophy, is dramatically different from others’. Applicants apply as individuals, and on the basis of their own background, rather than pitching an actual venture. Applicants are also all final-year undergraduates, or recent graduates.

More interestingly, only around a third of the applicants have a technical background — a marked difference from Silicon Valley accelerators, where the overwhelming majority of candidates are “geeks with computer science degrees and an over-inflated sense of self-worth,” according to one venture capitalist who wished to remain anonymous. At N36, around a third of any particular cohort are from a business background, a third technical, and a third from “all other walks of life,” according to French.

The program’s structure is also radically different from other seed accelerators. Each N36 cohort is in the program for nine months, starting in November each year. The 36 budding entrepreneurs are partnered into teams of three, with a rough division of skills. It’s an immediate start: according to Brian Luong, a McGill alumnus who was part of the most recent N36 cohort, the first night is an intense experience. “You’re thrown into a team with people you’ve never met before, and you work through the night to get a business idea to pitch the next morning.”

But the most telling difference between N36 and other accelerators is the lack of emphasis on getting VC funding. Because the accelerators themselves only get income if the value of the startup grows — and their share of the startup grows in value along with it — the atmosphere can often be so pressured as to appear hostile, with the accelerators’ mentors putting immense pressure on the founders to sell themselves to potential investors.

One founder who went through a well-known tech accelerator in New York City in 2011 told The Daily: “I’d say it verges on bullying… [the atmosphere] was so pressured, and everything so high profile, that if you didn’t get funding, [the mentors] would probably stop you ever succeeding again.”

On the other hand, the N36 atmosphere is more welcoming to mistakes. According to Sepand Norouzi, another McGill alumnus who was in the most recent N36 cohort, “it’s all about growing you as an individual. They give you a safe space to either succeed or fail, but either way, you end the programme much better equipped to be an entrepreneur than before.”

French echoes this sentiment: “For us [N36], it’s much more about the long-term: we’re not looking at the next few years, we want to create entrepreneurs who will be active for the next 10, 20 years.”

There’s another issue that has often dogged big-name accelerators: discrimination. By now it’s almost a universally accepted fact that women are woefully under-represented in the technology sector, and sadly, N36 is more or less average when it comes to the gender breakdown: in the most recent cohort, 6 of 36 entrepeneurs were women. That’s barely better than high-profile Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, which languishes at 10 per cent.

When challenged on the issue, N36’s French used the traditional excuses: “applicants mostly come from STEM-based programs, where women are under-represented,” “there’s only so much we can do,” or “we’re neutral to the gender of our applicants.” While those things are undoubtedly true — and while it’s clear that N36 doesn’t actively bar women from its ranks — it’s still disappointing to see. Furthermore, only 7 of N36’s 28 mentors are female, which doesn’t encourage the kind of female-friendly environment that needs to exist as part of a longer-term shift to increase women’s representation in technology.

N36 claims that they’re addressing “Canada’s deficit of high impact entrepreneurs and nation-building business leaders.” While that’s an excellent goal to start with — and N36 is clearly succeeding in teaching valuable skills to an impressive cohort of budding entrepreneurs — no plan focused on fostering a generation of leaders should be so willfully negligent to one of the most glaring problems, namely women’s under-representation, in technology. That N36, a not-for-profit in a perhaps unique position to do something about it, simply sits back and blames a lack of female applicants is a disappointing perpetuation of the status quo.

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The Special GA reached quorum, and was able to approve both the nominations to the Board, as well as the choice of auditing firm. These were the only two motions on the agenda – afterwards, Josh Redel, the manager of the new Student-Run Café (SRC) slated to open in January, presented and took questions on the SRC. Redel explained the business model of the SRC, and took questions on things such as menu choices, financial sustainability, and environmental sustainability.

During the Question Period for the SSMU Executive, VP Internal Brian Farnan was asked how SSMU lost $21,000 on this year’s Frosh. Farnan explained that it was mainly budgeting mistakes, new initiatives, and mistakes with sponsorship. He added that next year, the $200,000 for SSMU Frosh will not be handled just by students anymore, but will be put into the hands of SSMU’s accounting department.

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Technology, in general, has a fairly terrible lifespan. The components are not built to last – the lithium-ion batteries that power most electronics have a shelf life of around two years. Additionally, the rapid improvements in computing power render modern software too resource-needy for old machines (just think of trying to install the latest version of Windows on a PC from a few years ago).

As such, consumers often find themselves upgrading laptops and phones every few years. The average owner hangs onto their smartphone for two years, and a laptop for only a year longer. It’s a practice essentially enforced by manufacturers: official software updates, like Apple’s latest iOS 7, tend to only roll out to the latest generations of a device. Bought a cutting-edge iPhone 3GS in 2010? Sorry, but according to Apple, it’s too old to bother supporting nowadays.

The problem is only getting worse. In the past, the critical components of a computer – RAM, hard drive, and the like – were easily upgraded by folks at home, adding a few years of life onto a machine that was slowing down a little. Yet, with laptops getting increasingly thinner, less accessible and more self-contained, the years of being able to mod PCs (of which laptops are now the overwhelming majority) are quickly coming to an end: consumers are in thrall to the manufacturer. Mobile phone batteries, by far the most common point of failure, are often non-replaceable at home, meaning that when the battery of an otherwise perfectly good phone dies after two or three years, several hundred dollars’ worth of components go to the landfill.

That last comment about landfills is particularly pertinent. Not only are shrinking lifespans hurting consumer’s wallets, but it’s also a blight on the environment and the economy.

Electronic waste (‘e-waste’) is a big problem. An estimated 50 million tonnes is produced worldwide every year. Electronic products are often difficult to recycle, owing to the wide mix of materials used in their manufacture, some of which are inherently toxic. Old-school cathode ray tube televisions, for example, contain bromide and lead, and the aforementioned lithium-ion batteries can cause serious contamination if not disposed of properly.

As a result, recycling levels as a percentage of electronic waste are pitiful. Worldwide, only around 20 per cent goes to recycling, leaving vast tracts to landfills. For cellphones – a rapidly increasing area of waste – the number falls to a pathetic 8 per cent.

Due to the cost of recycling in an environmentally friendly manner, governments are loath to take on the extra cost of recycling e-waste for free. Some efforts have been made in Canada. Product stewardship programmes, administered on a provincial level, obligate manufacturers to bear the cost of recycling their used products by utilizing a series of free drop-off points throughout the province.

Although these measures are a step in the right direction, they’re not necessarily a remedy. Much of the ‘recycling’ is shipped overseas, to third-world countries where regulations are looser and the disposal far from green. Waste is often melted down to recover valuable materials, releasing toxic emissions and damaging both the environment and the workers during the recycling process.

Thankfully, old electronics aren’t all doom and gloom. With recycling so difficult and landfill objectionable on a number of levels, some individuals and organizations simply encourage increasing the functional lifespan of devices.

Some of this happens naturally through the marketplace. Sales of secondhand smartphones have exploded in recent years, and will likely double in the coming decade. According to Toni Sacconaghi, a industry analyst at Bernstein, a financial research firm, “analysis suggests that the used smartphone market is poised to explode – we estimate that the market will grow from 53 million to 257 million units over the next five years.” While that might not be great news for manufacturers hoping to push sales ever higher, polishing up devices and selling them refurbished is good news for consumers and groaning landfills alike.

Admittedly, there’s also a huge proportion of e-waste that no one in their right mind would buy. Still, a laptop that’s broken for you might provide some use to others, even if they’re not exactly willing to pay for it. That’s the principle behind the Freecycle network, a website that seeks to hook up people who are trying to dump unneeded stuff with folks who could use it.

The principle is absurdly simple – like Craigslist, but where everything is free – but the reality is more dramatic than most expect. A quick search of the Montreal area throws up the expected menagerie of mouldy armchairs and questionable curtains, but also a surprising number of perfectly serviceable items, from year-old IKEA wardrobes to printers, calculators, and even a 32-inch TV.

Speaking to various Montreal Freecyclers, it’s clear that the motivation is a mixture of altruism and laziness. Sarah, who was offloading the aforementioned TV, said,  “I’m moving out, and rather than trying to sell it to a shop or my neighbour, I wanted to give back to the community I’ve lived in for the last 15 years.” The story for others was slightly different: according to Guillame, who was offloading an old printer and a desk, “I looked into eBay, but it would’ve taken far too long for a few dollars. With Freecycle, I put them on the internet, no picture, and they were gone the next day.”

McGill is making an impressive effort in this area. Battery recycling programs exist, with dozens of pick-up points across campus; the sustainability policy also encourages donating old cellphones to a Canada-wide programme that donates them to women’s shelters across the country. Additionally, an organization called McGill Reboot redistributes used electronics across campus to promote reusing.

Despite these encouraging efforts to combat electronic waste at both grassroots and governmental levels, the problem at large is still largely unattended. As the volume of e-waste grows, manufacturers continue hastening the product cycle, with scant attention to making their devices easier to recycle – Apple last year removed its products from the Green Electronics Council’s leading eco-friendliness certification programme. After all, when you’ve got $94 billion sitting in offshore accounts, who has time for the environment?

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Data centres worldwide – the backbone of every internet site, from Google to Netflix, or even McGill’s own websites – consume around 1.9 per cent of the world’s electricity. At their most basic, data centres are nothing more than vast collections of servers, doing everything from hosting websites to fulfilling web searches and re-encoding YouTube videos.

As a result of all the computing power they need to function, data centres struggle with cooling. As anyone who’s ever had an overheating computer on their lap will know, computers run hot – a computer’s central processing unit routinely runs at around 85 degrees Celsius. Take into account the hundreds of thousands of individual servers in any given data centre, and cooling becomes a serious – and energy-intensive – problem.

To combat the problem, data centres rely on industrial-level air conditioning, using thousands of fans to pump cool air into the server rooms, and then even more computer fans to stop the individual components from melting. All that takes a lot of juice. Add that to the electricity that powers servers in the first place, and you have the bulk of the internet’s electricity usage.

Of course, there are ways to try and offset the environmental impact of using so much power. Google has proudly maintained a ‘carbon-neutral’ footprint since 2007 both by using 34 per cent renewable energy and developing a series of carbon-offset programmes.

Other companies are far worse custodians of the environment, though; Salesforce, one of the world’s largest providers of cloud computing services, gets just 4 per cent of its energy from renewable sources, according to an energy report by Greenpeace in April 2012.

The same report identifies Apple as one of the worst offenders in terms of carbon emissions, which gets over 55 per cent of its electricity from coal, arguably the dirtiest way of producing electricity. That said, an industry trend toward renewable energy is evident – the same Apple that relies so heavily on fossil fuels has more than doubled its use of renewable energy in the space of a single year.

Despite the fact that the bulk of the internet’s environmental impact is the result of a handful of gargantuan companies, consumers have an impact as well. Individual actions on the internet have an effect; according to Google’s own estimates, a single search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity – equivalent to turning on a 60W lightbulb for 17 seconds – a fact that the vast majority of people don’t consider before hitting search.

Google searches are just the tip of the iceberg. More data-heavy applications, like streaming a movie off of Netflix, consume more energy than you’d expect. A study by researchers from the University of Massachusetts found that streaming a movie over the internet is twice as bad for the environment as just shipping a DVD in the mail or, even better, walking around the corner to your local Blockbuster (R.I.P.).

That somewhat surprising fact is mostly due to the aforementioned costs of running a data centre. Storing just one movie takes hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, since one film has to be kept in dozens of different file formats, and each format in several different resolutions.

Then, once you’ve decided to stream a movie, the data has to travel from a Netflix server in, say, California, through dozens of switches, possibly an underseas pipe or two, pass by your very own internet router, and then be processed by whatever computer you’re watching your flick on. Although it’s a process that’s completed in milliseconds, it requires dozens of machines to be switched on, talk to each other, and crucially, use power.

Yet electricity’s just one of the environmental costs of the internet. Nearly 40 per cent of internet browsing is now done using mobile devices – devices which have batteries, almost always lithium-ion batteries. Lithium mining is a extremely damaging activity for the environment, generally using open-pit mines that leave permanent scars in the landscape and take decades to clean up.

That’s a particularly pressing problem for Canadians and Quebec residents: the Canada Lithium Corporation recently reopened an open-pit mine in Northern Quebec, producing 20,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium per year. With lithium prices steadily rising, and the smartphone craze showing no sign of slowing down, lithium mining is a problem that’ll only get worse.

By this point, you’re probably wondering just how the internet gets away with being such a dirty industry. The fact is, though, that the internet’s environmental impact, one way or another, is paltry compared to the negative side-effects of manufacturing industries or the greenhouse gases produced by farming. The online industry only contributed around 2 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions last year – the same as the aviation industry, but still just a proverbial drop in the bucket.

The benefits of the internet to the environment, though, are almost limitless. Although streaming movies over Netflix might not be quite as eco-friendly as you may think, the internet has drastically reduced the need for far more polluting activities. As Google likes to point out, one web search can take the place of driving to the library to research a fact, an act that’s orders of magnitude more polluting than the couple of watts it takes to power a Google search.

So, although the internet as a whole might be beneficial for the environment, the manner in which it’s executed could still be better. Yes, the internet is only a minor player on the world’s environmental footprint, but when the stakes are so high and the numbers so huge, every little bit helps.

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