Financial District : Innovation + Job News

Attention digital media innovators: there's a new award that might have your name on it. The first annual Moonshot Awards, organized by the Canadian Digital Media Network, are now open for nominations.

"There are companies out there with great potential and great skill sets," Kevin Tuer, managing director of CDMN, told us this week, "and sometimes we don't celebrate them as much as we should."

The awards were launched in an effort to help rectify that reticence and shine a light on homegrown innovations in digital media. Awards will be distributed in four categories: dynamic company (for demonstrating "the greatest increase in productivity through the adoption of digital media"), globalizer (for increasing international interest in and support for Canadian digital media), innovator, and overall company of the year (chosen from nominees for the first three categories).

Tuer says CDMN hopes to see applications from companies of all kinds. The goal is to acknowledge companies that are making the most of the opportunities digital media offers, or creating new opportunities entirely. "Small companies can make a great impact as well," he points out.

Nominations close on April 12, 2013.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Kevin Tuer, Managing Director, Canadian Digital Media Network

Recently the federal government announced that it will be supporting two dozen innovation projects in and around Toronto, via the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario.

"This investment will boost business innovation, skills and product development in the Toronto area," said Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear when announcing the investment, "creating new full-time jobs and greater economic diversity within the region."

FedDev's contribution to the projects comes via a variety of the agency's funds, and will total approximately $18 million, roughly $13 million of the total investment is in the form of repayable contributions. The recipient projects have leveraged this government money to generate up to $55 million more from private sector investors. According to FedDev estimates, the projects are expected to lead to the creation of more than 800 local jobs.

A sampling of investment recipients: 

• Education software company Top Hat Monocle, which also closed an $8 million round of funding in the summer, and anticipates creating 30 jobs over the next two years.


• Medical diagnostic start-up Xagenic, which is working on a lab-free platform that will enable rapid testing for infectious diseases.


• The Canadian Coalition for Tomorrow's ICT (Information Communication Technology) Skills, which will use the funds to reach out to youth and encourage interest in science and technology careers. This investment will enable them to reach nearly 30,000 more students.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Office of Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology

Welcome to Yonge Street's first ever job round-up, where we highlight a few of the most interesting job opportunities available in Toronto right now.

Community-oriented food organization Not Far From the Tree helps homeowners collect fruit from the trees in their yards, and sends much of the harvest to local agencies like food banks and shelters. NFFTT is looking for a project director to start this spring. It is the organization's primary leadership position.

Also for those with a green thumb, the Toronto Botanical Garden is looking for a new executive director to oversee all programs and fundraising. Candidates should have a background in horticulture as well as organizational leadership.

FreshBooks makes easy invoicing and accounting tools for small businesses and freelancers. The company is seeking an Android developer who will "make FreshBooks a world-class Android development centre."

Another organization on the hunt for a mobile developer: the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. The company needs someone to develop an Android and potentially also an iOS educational app. The app(s) will explain the benefits of citizenship to youth ages 16-24.

MaRS Discovery District, Toronto's best-known innovation centre, is hiring an investment manager for the Investment Accelerator Fund, which puts funds into early-stage technology companies. This business development opportunity is a mid-level position.

Major design firm DIALOG (550+ staff) does work in urban design, interior design, architecture, and engineering. They are seeking a graphic designer to work in their Communications and Creative Services departments.

The Ontario Power Authority is looking for specialist to help support their Conservation Fund, which is OPA's "vehicle for the incubation of innovative approaches to energy conservation and demand side technologies."

Finally, ebook and ereader company Kobo is looking for a front-end web developer to work on merchandising and marketing materials.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan

Last year, after concluding that "Canada is weak at business innovation," the Conference Board of Canada announced that it was establishing a Centre for Business Innovation (CBI). The new centre's goal: "To learn why Canada is not a leader in business innovation…and to formulate public policies that will successfully stimulate business innovation." The CBI is hosting an innovation summit in Toronto later this month, at which they'll unveil the results of their first major study examining how Canada fares when it comes to financing innovation.

That report's key message: Canada has a large and strong public equity market, but unfortunately also "has a serious issue with innovation commercialization." As a nation we aren't particularly strong when it comes to riskier investments, in particular when it comes to financing research and development in a business context: "Canadian-based businesses would need to more than double their annual spending on R&D…to equal the business R&D intensity of the United States," the report finds.

In order to make progress, the report goes on, Canadian innovators "need practice tools to help them explain to investors both their innovative activity (e.g. innovation metrics) and the way it makes money (e.g. the business model and financial projections)." In short, we need to smooth the path to commercialization, and in order to do that we need to both provide new financial tools for innovation and develop a more sophisticated marketing culture around innovation. It's not that we lack the capacity for this--as the report points out, "Canada successfully funds risky ventures in mining and oil and gas development."--But we need a broader culture of business innovation, and Canadian innovators need to improve their capacity to sell innovation to potential investors. The CBI will turn to the practicalities of accomplishing that in future reports.

"Financing Innovation by Established Businesses in Canada" is available online [PDF] (free, but registration required).

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Conference Board of Canada

The municipal government unveiled a new economic development plan at City Hall last week. It hopes the plan will improve conditions for businesses that are thinking of setting up shop in Toronto as well as businesses that are already here, but face bureaucratic hurdles to success. Titled Collaborating for Competitiveness: A Strategic Plan for Accelerating Growth and Job Creation in Toronto, the plan is very much interested in sweating the small stuff: its focus is on streamlining zoning processes, maintaining infrastructure, and raising our city's profile--the nitty-gritty, daily details.

Among the report's key recommendations: 

- Reduce the time it takes to review development applications for employment uses.
- Maintain the current commitment to reducing the ratio of residential to non-residential property tax rates.
- Request the Province to conduct property tax assessments based on current (employment) use rather than highest market value use. Effectively, this would stop the assessment process from penalizing developers who want to retain property for employment uses rather than building lucrative condos.
- Conduct outreach "to identify and assist Toronto-based manufacturers seeking global product mandates."
- Establish a wider network of incubators and accelerators.

The ideas contained in this report are smaller-scale than ones found in some other recent economic development strategies. In 2010, the Toronto Board of Trade issued a sweeping report that was much broader in scope, for instance, including recommendations on everything from environmental policy to attracting immigrants. The emphasis on employment land use in the City report is well-timed, as Toronto is also in the middle of an Official Plan review, and a consideration of how to preserve employment lands in the face of increasing development.

Collaborating for Competitiveness will be debated at the next city council meeting, on February 20 and 21. The full text of the report is available online [PDF].

Writer: Hamutal Dotan

The Business Development Bank of Canada wants to give you money--one of you, at least. The BDC has just opened applications for its 2013 Young Entrepreneur Award.

Canadian entrepreneurs between the ages of 18 and 35 are eligible to enter. Eleven finalists will be selected, one from each province plus one from the territories, by a panel of judges in each jurisdiction. Those finalists will move on to compete for the grand prize of $100,000, and a second prize of $25,000 in consulting services, with the winners chosen by the public, who will vote on BDC's website.

The BDC Young Entrepreneur Awards are meant specifically for businesses at a critical juncture; judges are looking for "turning point projects that will propel small- and medium-sized businesses to new growth," BDC explains in a video guide to the awards.

To apply, you must create a short original video (just one to two minutes, no fancy camera work expected) explaining your turning point, and your approach to tackling it effectively. There's no specific constraint on what counts: it could be a new marketing strategy, an equipment purchase, or some advice that will help set up export operations. The key is that it's something that you haven't been able to do yet, but that the judges are convinced could mark a fundamental moment of growth for your company.

All applications must be received by noon on April 2.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Business Development Bank of Canada

Innovation requires, first of all, innovators: people with the creativity and talent to come up with plans and projects, products and services, that hadn't quite occured to anyone else before. And innovation in the globalizing world requires increased flexibility, knowledge of foreign markets, and the capacity to adapt to changing technologies and circumstances.

Enter a new immigration initiative from the federal government. Announced last week, the Start-Up Visa Program is a pilot project that will run for five years, with 2,750 visas available each year for immigrant entrepreneurs and their family members.  The goal is to attract entrepreneurs and entice them to start new businesses -- and by extension creating new jobs -- here in Canada. To be eligible, applicants must have some funding from Canadian backers lined up: a minimum of $75,000 from an angel investor or $200,000 from a venture capital firm. If accepted, applicants will become permanent residents. The Start-Up Visa Program is the successor to the defunct Federal Entrepreneur Program, a previous immigration stream that the government halted in 2011.

"Recruiting dynamic entrepreneurs from around the world will help Canada remain competitive in the global economy," said Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney when announcing the program. In order to help support the program, the government will be working with Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA) and the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO), who will help line up potential investors.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ministry of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism

The Conference Board of Canada has announced it will host an innovation summit in Toronto in February. The summit is part of the board's plan to support businesses in their efforts to become more innovative. The Innovation for the Corporation summit is a two-day event that will seek to better understand why Canada isn't as strong a leader in innovation as many think we could and should be.

"We've seen the report cards that put us in a declining space...our innovation performance is ranked 21st," explained Bruce Good, executive director of CBC's Centre for Business Innovation, in a video announcing the summit. As several indices all show that same slip in our comparative success in innovation, Good goes on, "the time for change is now."

He believes infrastructure, stable government, sound fiscal management capabilities, and a lot of latent energy and enthusiasm are raw resources ready to be tapped. The summit will focus on four key areas to help the business community make the most of those strengths, and understand specific areas where we're falling behind: funding mechanisms, people and skills, business strategies, and what has to change for us to do better. Speakers range from the presidents of several major corporations -- IBM, Cisco, and GE, for instance --to researchers and the leads at young startups who are finding success in their own innovative smaller businesses.

The Innovation for the Corporation summit takes place on February 19-20 at the Fairmont Royal York. Online registration is now open and early bird fees available until January 18.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Conference Board of Canada

It's a distinctly modern annoyance when cellphones run out of juice. Today we rely so heavily on our mobiles that a dead battery can scupper meetings, disrupt dinner plans, and overturn after-school carpool arrangements.

Toronto startup DanTeb Enterprises aims to help the battery-drained by installing mobile charging stations at select locations across Toronto in the coming months.

The idea came about, co-founder Laura Miller explains, in the most ordinary of ways. She was on the phone with her father, who was telling her a story about a friend of his who had come across a mobile charging station while travelling in Mexico -- and as he was telling her that story, her own phone ran out of power.

DanTeb officially launched with a pilot this past summer with stations at the CNE. Things ran smooth enough between visitors to the Ex and convention attendees, Miller says, that they've quickly moved on to their next phase: installing five or six stations in the PATH underground mall downtown, and a total of 20-25 stations across Toronto this quarter.

The stations use MicroPulse charging technology, which allows for fast charging. The point isn't to charge a phone back to full battery, explains Miller, but to give it enough power in a short time to allow users to make a few calls and survive on standby until they're back at home or work. Users can access the phone while it charges or check out the station's touchscreen, which will come with some apps and advertisements. Those ads will provide revenue for the startup.

DanTeb is currently supported by the Ryerson Digital Media Zone and the university's new urban energy business incubator, i-CUE. Miller says the two-person operation will hopefully ramp up to about a dozen staff within the next six months. In addition to a strong sales team, she'll be looking to bring on engineers and technical experts. She hopes that soon the charging stations, which right now are imported from Spain, will soon be built locally.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Laura Miller, Co-founder, DanTeb Enterprises

In a bid to ease some of the growing pains media companies face as they adapt to a rapidly changing digital world, earlier this month Polar Mobile launch MediaEverywhere, a development platform for mobile sites (in the future it will also include mobile apps). Among the Canadian publishers signed up: Toronto Star, Canadian Living, Hockey News and Elle Canada.

The plaform "enables media companies to build better custom mobile sites and apps faster and easier than tradi­tional custom devel­opment," wrote Polar CEO Kunal Gupta in a blog post introducing MediaEverywhere. Essentially, it's a tool that aims to streamline the process of making publications mobile friendly, which reduce costs for publishers in the process.

"Media companies are going through a second revolution,"  Rob Begg, VP of marketing for MediaEverywhere, told us over the phone. The first was the move from print to digital, and this second one is the shift specifically to mobile. Media companies of all types report that mobile is by far their fastest growing type of traffic, but developing sites and apps in the mobile market is tough, says Begg, due to the proliferation of platforms.

MediaEverywhere saves companies from having to put money into iOS, Android and other platforms separately—or worse, only having the money to develop in one at a time. Begg describes the approach as "mobile-centric rather than device-specific."

The total investment in Polar Mobile to date is $9 million; $6 million of that went towards building this platform. Currently they have 40 staff and are hiring enthusiastically, says Begg.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Rob Begg, VP of Marketing, MediaEverywhere

It was only a few weeks ago that we told you about BufferBox, a new network of parcel pick-up stations had just launched in the Toronto area. With a growing list of stations—they're up to about 14 in Toronto and Mississauga and have more going in by the end of the year—and a contract with Metrolinx to help target commuters, things seemed promising for the new startup.

And now, they are looking even more exciting. BufferBox has just announced it has been acquired by Google. Neither BufferBox nor Google would confirm the financial details, but TechCrunch is reporting the purchase price was in the neighbourhood of $17 million.

BufferBox services are free until year's end. When paid service begins they expect they'll be charging $3 or $4 per delivery. The goal is to have approximately 100 stations in the GTA by the end of 2013. Google, meanwhile, is likely looking for a challenger the Amazon Locker parcel delivery program (which is not available in Canada), and is hoping that BufferBox can expand and scale quickly.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Brad Moggach, Sales & Marketing Director, BufferBox; TechCrunch

"While nearly all high growth technology startups have historically emerged from no more than 3-4 startup ecosystems, namely Silicon Valley and Boston, this trend appears to have reached its end. Simultaneous with a global explosion of entrepreneurship has been an explosion in the rise of new startup ecosystems around the world, and a newfound maturity in others."

So begins a new report from the Startup Genome called the Startup Ecosystem Report (available for free online, though registration is required). And among those ecosystems that are currently flourishing: Toronto, which ranks the highest in Canada on the report's index, and eighth in the world. (Vancouver is right behind us in ninth; more surprisingly Waterloo is further behind, at sixteenth.)

All cities in the index are compared to Silicon Valley (which predictably is the benchmark first-place ecoysystem) across a variety of metrics. While we are similar to Silicon Valley in terms of our level of ambition, our technology adoption rates, our sector mix and mentorship support, one key area of difference, according to the report, is that "startups in Toronto receive 71% less funding than SV startups. The capital deficiency exists both before and after product market fit."

While that may sound like grim news, it actually provides a very useful roadmap for future growth. The report goes on to conclude that the current under-investment in Toronto-area startups "presents a large opportunity for investors. Moreover, "policy makers can help closing the funding gap by attracting late-stage venture funds through tax breaks and incentives, and investor-friendly policies."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Startup Ecosystem Report

Every year leaders from the venture capital, communications and media industries gather for the Canadian Innovation Exchange, a one-day forum dedicated to the country's innovation economy. (This year's CIX takes place in a couple of weeks—at the MaRS Discovery District on November 27.) And every year, a panel of experts selects the CIX Top 20—leading technology-based companies who are showcased at the forum. This year's list has just come out, and there's good news for local entrepreneurs: about half the finalists are Toronto-based companies.

Finalists are divided into two categories: information and communication technology, and digital media. Among the Toronto finalists in the first category are B2B marketers Influitive, audience engagement platform Viafoura and consumer goods software makers Nulogy.

Among the rising stars in the digital media category are liveblogging company ScribbleLive and e-commerce platform Shopcastr. We profiled Shopcastr just a few months ago, when they closed $1 million in new funding.

The other Toronto CIX Top 20 are:
·         Sitescout, which helps small businesses manage their digital advertising;
·         Language learning tool PenyoPal;
·         Employee engagement platform Employtouch;
·         Jibestream Interactive Media, which develops digital wayfinding systems (including 3-D directors for Pearson airport).

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Canadian Innovation Exchange

The Hospital for Sick Children and MaRS Innovation have partnered to create a new vehicle for commercializing new medical technologies.

Bedside Clinical Systems was formed in March of 2011, with a focus on developing tools that help with clinical care for children. After some pilot studies they are now launching their first tool: Bedside Paediatric Early Warning System (BedsidePEWS).

BedsidePEWS is based on research conducted by a Sick Kids scientist, Dr. Christopher Parshuram, who has a particular interest in patient safety. For several years, says Bedside Clinical Systems CEO Rajesh Sharma, he had been "developing a tool to be an early indicator for kids who might be in danger of cadiac arrest."

That tool is deceptively simple: provide a way for nurses and clinicians to input a patient's vital signs and key health indicators into a monitoring system whenever they are checked, and use those inputs to create a single numerical score to assess the severity of the patient's condition. The advantage, however is that  "it takes the subjectivity out of it," Sharma says. Clinicians no longer need to make tricky judgement calls about, say, whether to wake up an attending physician at 3am if they're not sure whether a patient needs urgent attention. They have an objective measure to rely on.

BCS currently has two full-time staff, and plans to grow to a team of between four to six next year, as they hire for both technical and marketing positions to help find and support customers for this new tool. MaRS Innovation works with member institutions to commercialize "market-disruptive intellectual property."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Rajesh Sharma, CEO, Bedside Clinical Systems