Tech hubs are communities that are geared toward educating and encouraging new talent, and also providing space for the growth and acceleration of high-tech businesses. We had the chance to talk to local tech leaders about Miami as a tech hub at the Miami AI and Machine Learning Meetup Week, and discuss the advantages of being located in a tech ecosystem as well as what the future will bring for Miami. Tech hubs exist as an ecosystem to facilitate collaboration between startups and large technology-based companies. Tech hubs make interaction, networking, innovation and co-innovation easily accessible for community members. Companies located within a tech ecosystem will benefit from the free flow of talent, ideas, resources, workspace, and networking for accelerated growth.

The U.K. is gaining in popularity as a great place to start a tech firm. The country is quickly catching up to China on the tech investment front, with VC investments reaching a record of $15 billion in 2020, according to TechNation. A global health crisis notwithstanding, London remained a favorite for investors. U.K. cities made up a fifth of the top 20 European cities, with names such as Oxford, Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge rising to the fore in 2020. Bristol proved especially popular among tech investors last year -- local businesses raked in an impressive $414 million in 2020, making it the third-largest U.K. city for tech investment.

Earlier this year, Talent Garden hired Spain's Lorena Pérez as its new chief people officer. With more than two decades of experience in HR, Pérez plans to use her expertise to scale Talent Garden in Europe while coming up with ways to retain and motivate the company's talent. She discussed the importance of conserving company culture while a company scales, and some of the ways she uses technology to improve her work and efficiency in HR. I come from the HR world, of course! I've been working for multinational companies, mainly creating and developing HR and people departments. I have more than 20 years of experience now, with my first relevant experience being in a communications company in the tech sector.

Despite Canada's rising reputation as a global leader in the artificial intelligence community, it appears Canadian companies are not making as much of an impact on the international AI scene. CB Insights has released its third annual list of promising AI startups to watch around the world, and only one Canadian company, Montreal-based Element AI, made the cut. In addition to Element AI, a German startup with Canadian roots, Twenty Billion Neurons (TwentyBN) was also named to CB Insights' AI 100. Canadian companies leveraging this technology may still only have a minor presence on the global stage. CB Insights selected the 100 startups from a pool of over 3,000 companies from startups to unicorns, based on: patent activity, investor profile, news sentiment analysis, proprietary Mosaic scores, market potential, partnerships, competitive landscape, team strength, and tech novelty.