Financial District : Innovation + Job News

Every so often—and especially at this time of year, when many of us are ordering presents and holiday gear—you come home to one of those annoying notices flapping on your door. Missed delivery.

To help shoppers (and the businesses trying to send them their goods) avoid that frustration, a new network of parcel pick-up stations has just launched in the GTA called BufferBox. There will be eight stations in Toronto by the end of this week, with several more elsewhere in the region. Another 10 are expected by year's end, with the goal of expanding nationwide.

To use the service, someone signs up with BufferBox and selects a home location—one of the pick-up stations that have been installed—and then provides that address to a company when ordering items for delivery. When the parcel arrives, BufferBox puts the package in a locker within the station, and then sends you an email with single-use PIN, which you use to open the box and retrieve your item.

The initial set of locations is geared to commuters and transit users: in its first partnership, BufferBox is working with Metrolinx and has installed parcel boxes in five GO stations (Union, Clarkson, Burlington, Oakville, and Port Credit). Three other parcel stations are in 7-Eleven locations, and in the near future, BufferBox also hopes to announce a supermarket partner.

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

Though they're not saying much publicly yet (a spokesperson declined to comment in detail for this story), news came last week that Rogers Communications is pilot testing new digital payment solutions, which it hopes to introduce to Canadian customers this year.

That news came as part of a broader story about a deal the Toronto-based telecom has struck with Netherlands digital company Gemalto, which has been chosen to provide security technology for this new service.

The technology Rogers is currently testing relies on what's called near field communication (NFC), a radio-communication standard which provides a way for mobile devices to exchange data and conduct transactions—creating what is often referred to as a "paperless wallet." Essentially, Rogers is creating a system which will allow its customers to use the SIM cards in their phones to make credit and debit card purchases and payments. They are also anticipating the "future addition of tap-and-go services including coupon redemption, loyalty programs, transit and other digital identification," according to a recent press statement.

While Gemalto will be testing the security features on this service, the innovative new technology may take some getting used to. Losing your phone—or worse, getting it stolen—may be that much scarier when it holds not just your contacts' information and family photos, but is enabled to conduct financial transactions as well. It is undeniably the direction in which financial institutions are moving, however, and we'll be watching to see how quickly customers adapt.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Allison Fitton, Rogers Communications

Though it can take decades and be fraught with peril—witness any number of eHealth controversies in Ontario—Canadian jurisdictions are gradually making headway in their quest to modernize the delivery of healthcare in this country. The latest initiative: storing medical records via cloud-based tools, to allow both patients and healthcare providers to access them easily, quickly and from anywhere.

Last week the federal government announced what it is calling the Connected Health and Wellness Project, which will aim to drastically simplify our ability to access our own medical files. The project is spearheaded by a partnership between York University, North York-based NexJ Systems (which specializes in cloud software) and McMaster University. It will see the creation of a set of online tools which will allow patients, their health care providers and supporting parties (such as family members involved in medical care) the capacity to access and share information, and also to work collaboratively on ongoing health management issues. For example, a diabetic patient could automatically update her file with the latest information about her diet, exercise and insulin levels, while a nurse or physician could moniter that patient's status remotely by accessing that information in real time.

The Federal Economic Development Agency will be contributing $15.5 million to the project; private investment partners have contributed more than $23 million. In total, there are 16 public, private, not-for-profit and academic partners involved, also including George Brown and Seneca colleges, the University Health Network and Research in Motion.

One potential growth area opened up by projects like this is the relatively new field of health coaching, which governments are hoping will help lower healthcare costs through ongoing management of and support for patients between doctors' appointments.

The technologies being developed under the auspices of the Connected Health and Wellness Projected are expected to be commercialized and reach the market in about two years.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Office of Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario

Earlier this year we wrote about JOLT, a technology accelerator created by the folks at MaRS Discovery District. Back then, executive director Susan McGill explained that the goal was to facilitate the rapid and efficient development of startups by funding and mentoring them in groups, rather than one by one.

Last week McGill unveiled the first group of startups that have been selected to participate in JOLT. Each will receive $30,000 in seed funding, as well as work space, design and development support, and guidance from an advisor. The participanting start-ups are:
•  tout.it, a social media platform aimed at sports fans
•  SlingRide, a tool for connecting drivers and passengers who want to cut costs by ridesharing
•  eProf, which creates "interactive virtual classrooms"
•  Venngage, a user-friendly tool for creating infographics
•  ShelfLife, a socially-driven e-commerce platform for collectibles
•  Greengage, which wants to help employers help their employees become more environmentally friendly

"These startups beat out dozens of other applicants from all over Canada," wrote McGill in a note introducing the first JOLT group last week.

In a few months they'll try to build on that success, taking what they learn at MaRS in order to pitch venture capitalists on the services and products they've been refining.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Susan McGill, Executive Director, JOLT

Porter Airlines is known for its fresh approach to air travel: rather than paring down service and customer experience elements as other airlines have done in recent years, with cuts in everything from baggage allowances to free meals to the legroom between seats, Porter has gone in the other direction. With stylized staff uniforms, a user-friendly website and perks like free coffee and shortbread in their airport lounge, Porter has attracted customers by trying to make the experience of flying more fun and more friendly.

Based on Toronto's small island airport,  however, Porter is an airline with a fairly limited geographic range. Currently it offers flights to 19 cities in the eastern half of North America; running long-haul flights out of the island airport isn't a viable option. So last week Porter announced its first interline partnership, with Qatar Airways. The agreement will allow Qatar passengers who begin their journeys in Doha to fly to Porter destinations as part of a single itinerary, connecting in either Montreal or Washington, DC.

"We had a lot of airlines who had approached us over the years," says Brad Cicero, communications manager for Porter. But the airline had to do some work before it could enter into any such arrangements, upgrading its back-end systems to handle more complex itineraries and monitor bookings effectively. Once Porter was ready to look for partners, it focused on other airlines that shared its customer-friendly approach.

"Qatar was always high on the list," explains Cicero. "We like their approach to service." (Qatar Airways was ranked the world's best airline last month, for the second year in a row, by Business Insider.) It's the first of several partnerships the airline is planning; Cicero says "anywhere from three to five could be in place" by the end of 2012. 

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Brad Cicero,  Manager, Communications & Public Affairs, Porter Airlines

Both Toronto and Canada punch above their demographic weight when it comes to Internet activity. As evidenced by our eager involvement in everything from Facebook to Flickr (Toronto has some of the highest participation rates on both platforms), we are a city and a country that has embraced the digital world enthusiastically.

Hoping to make that online experience better is CloudFlare, a company that provides web optimization to its thousands of clients, and which opened its first Canadian data centre in Toronto this month.

CloudFlare provides a suite of tools and services that help its clients' websites run more effectively and efficiently: everything from improving page load times to providing detailed analytics to blocking malicious attacks, says Joshua Motta, who is in charge of special projects for CloudFlare. For instance, CloudFlare will take information from client servers (think larger files that can slow a website down, like images) and set it up at their distributed data centres; when you load that client's website, some of the information is coming from CloudFlare's local data centre, making the page load more quickly for you and reducing strain on the client's servers.

Canada, says the company, is their seventh largest source of traffic worldwide. Considering the size of our population, that's substantial. The downtown Toronto data centre will help CloudFlare better serve Canadian web users, which are concentrated, unsurprisingly, in the GTA.

"Where we locate our data centres is typically in the most critical data centre of any given region," says Motta, "because that is where there is the greatest connectivity."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Joshua Motta, Special Projects, CloudFlare

The GTA has always had investors ready to put their money behind local startups, but that community has never been more organized, more communicative, or more active, says Bryan J. Watson, executive director of the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO).

NACO recently released the results of a national survey it conducted to assess the level of activity among angel investors in Canada; they found that a whopping 80 per cent of all investments made in 2011 across the country were made in Ontario, with a large percentage of that activity taking place in the Toronto region. (NACO won't provide city-by-city breakdowns due to privacy concerns; the value of some specific deals might be identifiable if they did so.)

This is a marked increase over 2010, when 62 per cent of investments were made in Ontario.

"The biggest difference," Watson says, "is that the GTA [investment] community is much more organized say four years ago—even a year ago." It's only in the last year that angel investment "has gone from an activity that was one promoted... to one that started to occur naturally." (The full study results are available online [PDF].)

The most attractive area for investment, unsurprisingly, is in the information and communications technology sector, which Watson says continues to be "pretty hot." Following on Ontario's green energy push there is "still a lot of interest in clean tech—often with enabling technology, often with a little bit of web and control systems."

The technological theme emerged again in the third sector Watson cited as being attractive for those looking to invest GTA startups: medical technology: "Specficially the devices and diagnostics side of things." Toronto investors are also expressing "a lot of interest in web-enabled technology or big data tecnology—using online infrastructure and analytics" to develop new tools and platforms.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Bryan J. Watson, Executive Director, National Angel Capital Organization

For years, teachers and professors have struggled with suppressing the use of cellphones in classrooms. As the phones got smarter, students got more absorbed, and the fight against distracton grew only more challenging as laptops and tablets became ubiquitous, too.

Going with the flow instead of against it is software company Top Hat Monocle, which was started—fittingly—by two students as a graduate project. Described as a "classroom response system," Top Hat provides instructors with a suite of tools they can use both during class and after to make learning more interactive, and provide students with real-time feedback. A professor can use it, for instance, to administer a quiz at the end of a lecture, and both she and her students could see the results instantaneously, while still in class together.

Top Hat formally launched in 2010, and secured its first found of financing—$1.5 million—in November 2011. Last week it announced a major new round of funding: $8 million, drawn from several venture capital investors. The significant influx will help the company accomplish two key goals, says chief revenue officer Andrew D'Souza.

"One, we're really hoping to expand the functionality and increase the interactivity." (One such expansion: in the fall the company will be adding the capacity to "turn your in-class experience into a competetive type game," where students challenge each other to test their familiarity with course material.) Second, says D'Souza, the financing will "really drive the sales and marketing." More precisely, the aim is to grow from a current base of 200,000 users to one million users in the next two years.

Top Hat currently has 35 staff, and is now hiring at the rate of 2 to 3 positions a week; the target is to hit 80 staff in total by year's end. The majority of those positions will be at the company's home base here in Toronto, where they do product development and are hiring "aggressively," particularly on the engineering side. The company also has a distributed sales team, and a small office in San Francisco; staffing in those operations will be growing as well.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Andrew D'Souza, Chief Revenue Officer, Top Hat Monocle

The Hospital for Sick Children opened its new Centre for Genetic Medicine six months ago—quietly, and without much fanfare.

They had a good reason to wait: Sick Kids has just announced that it will be the first hospital in Canada to install cutting-edge genome sequencers, ones that will allow them to sequence a patient's full genome "in a couple of hours, for a thousand dollars."

It's the kind of advancement in medical technology we last saw when MRIs became common, and researchers hope it will usher in a new era in pediatric medicine.

One feature that's distinctive of pediatric patients: a much higher proportion of them are being treated for chronic illnesses compared to the adult hospital populations.

"70 per cent of the patients at Sick Kids come in with chronic disorders that have some kind of genetic component to them," says centre co-director Dr. Steve Scherer. Because such a high percentage of Sick Kids' patients are ill at least in part due to genetic factors, genomic sequencing has the potential to be especially beneficial in a pediatric setting—it is there that genetic research may have its greatest impact.

The long-term goal, Scherer says, is "to sequence the genomes of all of the children who come in the hospital."

That's up to 10,000 genomes a year, once things are fully up to speed. For the first year, the sequencers, supplied by Life Technologies Corporation, will be used in clinical research testing, covering maybe 1,000 patients. The hospital will then incrementally cover more and more of its patients. They are also hiring clinical geneticists, counsellors and other support staff (such as computer scientists with a background in biology or medicine) to manage the large influx of new information they will be processing.

"In a way it's a big experiment," Scherer says. The hospital will inevitably learn as it goes—as, hopefully, will the researchers who have a massive new influx of information to help them provide individualized medical care.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Dr. Steve Scherer, Co-Director, Centre for Genetic Medicine

The Ontario Brain Institute was founded in 2010 to foster collaboration among brain researchers, and develop relationships between those researchers and industry partners who can bring innovations to market.

Helping the institute make good on that goal is the federal government, which recently announced an $11-million investment in OBI. The money will aid the commercialization of 14 separate projects, devices and therapies, and is bolstered by an additional $11 million in private investments OBI has already raised.

A sampling of the projects that will supported by the funding:

- A study of the potential benefits of deep brain stimulation in the treatment of Alzheimer's, led by Dr. Andres Lozano of Toronto Western Hospital
-  A clinical trial of a "site-specific and sustained release-microparticle technology platform" that can deliver drugs directly to the brain, a collaboration between Dr. Robert and Edge Therapeutics Inc.
- Bringing Smarter Kids, a learning tool for pre-school children, online through a variety of virtual platforms, a project coordinated by Dr. Sylvain Moreno (Baycrest Centre for Brain Fitness) and Cookie Jar Entertainment

A total of 28 partners are involved in the projects supported by this funding, including both nonprofits, local private companies and five multi-national corporations.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Michele-Jamali Paquette, FedDev Ontario

Ontario has been making a concerted effort to develop its clean energy sector for a number of years. Now a new venture will help that sector take its innovations around the world. This month the provincial government, in partnership with MaRS Discovery District, announced the creation of the Clean Energy Institute.

"The overall goal," says Jonathan Dogterom, the practice lead for cleantech at MaRS, "is to be able to put a bit more of an economic development focus on energy technology."

Which is to say: the institute's key objective will be to help the community of clean energy innovators that has started to cluster here by creating new export opportunities that will allow them to expand their businesses in foreign markets.

"Energy represents a huge market around the world," Dogterom says, "and we have some of the best innovations in energy technology."

We don't, as of yet, have the international presence to match.

The project is still in the very early stages of development. MaRS and the Ontario government will be reaching out to industry stakeholders in coming months to get input into the project; they also expect to add some private partners as the Clean Energy Institute takes more concrete shape. Their immediate goal: develop a detailed plan for setting up the institute over the course of a year.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Jonathan Dogterom, Practice Lead (Cleantech), MaRS

While stem cell research garners a lot of buzz, the science of taking developing effective therapies from research is still very new.

Hoping to make contributions in this area is Bay Street-based biotech company Actium Research Inc., which has just entered into an agreement with McMaster University to take some of the research being conducted there and use to it bring new cancer drugs to market. While we're used to thinking of stem cells as they pertain to healthy cells in humans and other animals, it turns out the stem cells in this case are cancer stem cells.

A tumour is not made up of just one kind of cell, says Actium president Helen Findlay. In addition to the rapidly multiplying normal tumour cells are cancer stem cells, which "can escape from many forms of treatment and they are the ones that are responsible for cancer recurring or spreading."

Dr. Mick Bhatia, scientific director of McMaster's Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute, has found a way to grow cancer stem cells and also to do research with normal, adult human stem cells (rather than working, as many researchers do, with embryo or animal stem cell sources). Bhatia's work involves screening both kinds of stem cells against a library of drugs and therapies, to see which target the cancer stem cells, and which might help repair damaged tissue.

For its part, Actium will be working on the development process that will allow drugs—both newly developed ones and existing therapies which have not previously been used in cancer treatment but are found to be effective with this research—to pass through the regulatory process and come to market. Actium will be hiring in a number of areas. Findlay says they "need people with skill sets that do things like look at drug manufacturing, clinical research, designing studies" as it works to raise initial funding.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Helen Findlay, President and Chief Operating Officer, Actium

Toronto entrepreneur Katherine Hague has been involved with startups since she was a teenager. Last year, she designed a theme for the celebrated Ottawa online retail startup Shopify, and then wanted to sell some T-shirts of her own in a Shopify store.

"I realized it would look pretty silly in a storefront, with just one product," she says. The cost, hassle and time involved in setting up an online shop for a single product—in order to achieve the level of professionalism she wanted to project—convinced her she needed an alternative. Looking around at the options for ultra-small-scale vendors, mostly eBay and Craigslist, convinced her she'd need to create that alternative. Shoplocket was born.

"We wanted to make it as easy for people who had something they wanted to sell as it is to post a video or a photo," she says. "The challenge for us was knowing what to leave out, so it would be optimized for the majority of users who need the service." Those users include people who don't want to learn any code or to design and maintain a storefront. They just need a way to sell things that looks professional and is easy and quick.

Working out of the Extreme Startups accelerator at Yonge and King, Hague and her partner Andrew Louis officially launched Shoplocket in open beta late last month. Hague says they have attracted 4,000 users in those few weeks, and have hired a Canadian manager and brought on two co-op students. Hague expects Shoplocket will close a funding round sometime this summer.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Katherine Hague, CEO, Shoplocket

Bay Street-based management software firm Blueprint has announced that they've recently raised $15.9 million in venture capital to finance growth in the US, Europe and Asia.

The company, which makes requirements definition and management software to streamline IT operations for large institutional clients including banks, governments and insurance companies, already has offices in four US cities.

Founded in 2002 as Sofea Inc. the company set out to tackle the "requirements definition" problem facing companies. It was rebranded as Blueprint in 2007 as it entered the US market. The company has shown consistent growth since then, more than doubling its client base, to more than 200 clients, since spring 2010.

The new round of financing, led by Tandem Expansion Fund, comes as the industry prepares for rapid expansion.

"The requirements definition and management software market is at a tipping point for explosive growth over the next two to three years," said investor Roger Wilson of BDC's IT Venture Fund in a statement.

Blueprint expects to benefit from that growth. "We have demonstrated that we can dramatically improve the software development performance of our initial set of Global 2000 customers, leaving us well positioned as a leading requirements platform as global demand takes off," said Blueprint president and CEO David Nyland in the company announcement. "For this we need to grow our presence in the US, EMEA [Europe, the Middle East and Africa] and Asia.... We are now significantly strengthened by our financial partners who have validated our business plan and are supporting us with expansion capital to enhance our global penetration."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Robert Bartlett, Blueprint

The Toronto innovation incubator MaRS announced last week that it was launching Canada's first private dedicated cleantech venture fund. The MaRS Cleantech Venture Fund LP opens with a goal of $30 million in capital to invest—about half that amount has been closed so far—from a group of private investors including Greg Kiessling of Bullfrog Power. It will be managed by Tom Rand and Murray McCaig of MaRS.

"Great companies will go where they can find the capital, and we want those companies to stay right here in Ontario," Rand writes on the MaRS blog, a point he elaborates on in the fund's announcement. "We have great companies here at MaRS. They've got strong intellectual property, and many have a real chance at global leadership if they can get to market fast enough. Finding that first million or two has always been a challenge in Canada, and we intend to fill that gap."

Elaborating on the phone, Rand says that access to seed capital is more than just a perk for the sector. "Without healthy venture and seed funding, there is no cleantech sector," Rand says. "It's an absolutely fundamental part of the sector." He says that up until now, there hasn't been much appetite in the Toronto private sector for some of the risks in the cleantech sector, risks New York and Silicon Valley are fine with.

Moving quickly, the fund has already announced its first two investments: in GreenMantra, a company whose technology promises to recycle plastics into usable waxes and greases; and in Smart Energy Instruments, whose technology may help build the smart electricity grid.

MaRS points to estimates showing the global cleantech sector will be worth $3 trillion by the end of the decade. It aims to see Canada capture two per cent of that market—equivalent to a $60-billion industry nationally.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Tom Rand, Managing Partner, MaRS Cleantech Fund