North York City Centre - Willowdale : Innovation + Job News

Electric vehicles (EVs) are as old as cars themselves—the first ones date back to the 1830s, and in the early 20th century they constituted a significant portion of the market. They eventually lost ground to their gasoline-powered counterparts, but as calls for sustainable transportation options grow louder, so are calls for modern, commercially viable electric cars.

Right now electric vehicles largely remain the purview of enthusiasts. The provincial government is hoping to change that; it wants five per cent of all new cars to be electric by 2020. If they're going to succeed, we're all going to need to get better acquainted with the technology.

That is one reason that the South Central Ontario chapter of the Canadian Automobile Association just opened its first electric-vehicle charging station outside its head office in Thornhill. Electric vehicle owners, CAA members or not, can use the station free of charge, and the rest of us can get a better glimpse of what the future of driving might look like.

Teresa Di Felice, director of government and community relations for South Central CAA, told us that currently there are about 400 electric vehicle owners in Ontario. CAA is hoping to help that number increase: they've made submissions to the government, seeking partnerships to facilitate future growth.

"There are a lot of people talking about [EVs], and a lot of interest, but like anything new, there are hurdles," she says, pointing out that the government's five per cent goal is "very aggressive."

The CAA charging station joins three others in the GTA; you can find them all via the map on ChargePoint.


Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Teresa Di Felice, Director of Government and Community Relations, South Central CAA

Last August we reported that 500px, the explosively popular Toronto-based photo-sharing platform, was ramping up, growing to eight staff members, up from just two. That, as it turns out, was just the beginning.

The company is now up to 22 staff members, and plans to grow to 30 or 40 by year's end. On top of that, 500px has just made its first acquisition, last week announcing it had entered into an agreement to purchase another Toronto company, Algo Anywhere.

Algo is a young company—founded just 10 months ago—that has been working on applying academic research in artificial intelligence to real-world online environments. The first major tool they developed is called Recommender, a platform for providing personalized recommendations for customers on e-commerce and other sites. It's this expertise in personalizing a website user's experience that caught 500px's eye, says Oleg Gutsol, the company's CEO.

"Algo's technology was very attractive to us because it will allow us to greatly enhance the experience of our users on the 500px platform. We will be able to deliver better image search and discovery results, display more relevant content, personalize photo recommendations for browsing and purchase."

The financial details of the acquisition haven't been disclosed, but the deal does include job offers for Algo's staff. Algo's principals, Zach Aysan and Adam Gravitis, will become chief data scientist and chief software architect, respectively. 500px is also currently looking to hire a user experience designer and several software developers.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Oleg Gutsol, CEO, 500px

It was just in September that Wattpad announced it had secured $3.5 million in Series A financing. Now, nine months later, they've closed another round of funding—a whopping $17.3 million.

"We still have a lot of money in the bank," says Allen Lau, Wattpad's co-founder. "The [original] plan was to raise Series B next year, but the traffic was growing so quickly that we thought it was a good time to raise a bigger round and secure the future."

Wattpad is a social media platform for sharing stories; it currently hosts five million user-generated pieces of writing in 25 languages. A key focus for the company and its users is fostering relationships between writers and readers: authors engage with their audience while developing story outlines, for instance, or seek feedback as they publish a novel in chapters. The growth was so strong, explains Lau, that "we ended up spending time and effort in sustaining activities—adding more servers, making sure our infrastructure was scaling up—rather than improving the product per se."

The Series B financing, spearheaded by San Francisco's Khosla Ventures (also including former Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang and current investors Union Square Ventures and Golden Venture Partners), will enable Wattpad to focus on enhancing its product, with a particular emphasis on the streamlining the user interface and boosting social functions on its mobile apps. They'll be doubling their current staff complement, going to 40 from 20, and are currently seeking a talent acquisition specialist manager to help them manage that growth. Lau says they will be primarily seeking developers, designers and community managers.

Citing an old business maxim, he adds: "The best time to raise money is when you don't desperately need the money."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Allen Lau, CEO and co-founder, Wattpad

"Trading technology is really complex stuff," says Lynn Suderman, director of communications for Questrade, Canada's largest independent provider of online trading services. Questrade is hoping to make it easier soon, with the launch of a new suite of software in early June that will help clients make their investments more easily, and with better information at hand.

Questrade's goal is to dramatically increase usability in a software sector that is isn't known for it. On the one hand, clients need to be able to actually understand the transactions they are contemplating, since most aren't professionally trained investors. On the other, the information required to make those transactions is detailed and often hard to parse. Building software that can process all the relevant data—from various markets and exchanges, from the client's account information, and from Questrade itself—and do so in a very secure environment compounds the design issues.

The upshot, says Suderman, is that "what most platforms provide is either a very basic view, where you just get to buy and sell, or it's a patchwork of all sorts of complex pull-down menus that are meant for professional trades."

Questrade's new platforms will be available for desktops, mobile phones and tablets, and they will follow web design trends in allowing clients to completely customize their screens: change displays, modify order and placement of information, select how detailed that information is, add and subtract widgets, and more.

In order to support this platform relaunch, Questrade has been and continues to be looking for new talent. In addition to a spate of recent hires, the company currently has 11 positions to fill in Toronto, and 11 more elsewhere.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Lynn Suderman Director of Communications, Questrade

Last week, the prestigious Branham300 listing of the top information technology companies in Canada named York Mills-based firm SecureKey among the top 25 "up-and-coming" ICT firms in Canada. While the company welcomed the news, SecureKey EVP Robert Blumenthal noted, "It's a recognition milestone, not a business milestone."

Of course, over the past year, as the online security ID tech startup has grown to 100 employees from 60, it has hit plenty of business milestones too. Most notably, SecureKey secured a major investment from chip-manufacturing powerhouse Intel and announced that the SecureKey configuration will be included in millions of Intel products being manufactured over the next year.

Blumenthal says the firm's technology solves the increasingly ubiquitous problem of secure online logins. For the sake of convenience, most username and password combinations are unsecure and often reused from website to website. More complicated (and secure) login procedures become too much trouble for users. The gold standard, he says, is a two-step process, "something you have and something you know," such as a bank card and PIN code combination. SecureKey's technology uses a small, portable "applet" contained in cards, USB keys or devices to create a similar authentification process.

Blumenthal says that next week SecureKey will launch the first phase of a collaboration with the Government of Canada that will enable citizens to use banking credentials to interact securely with the government.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Robert Blumenthal, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, SecureKey

North York-based health technology startup Infonaut's innovative disease surveillance system, Hospital Watch Live, has been generating buzz for a while now—it's been about 18 months since the product was featured in Popular Science magazine, as Yonge Street reported in November 2010. But the system will now be tested in real hospital conditions after Infonaut signed a contract with the University Health Network last month.

After two years of live tests at various hospitals and a full-time simulation at George Brown College, Infonaut CEO Niall Wallace says this 18-month trial will be the "final-stage commercialization test" for the company.

"Innovation is a tough game," he says. "There's invention and then there's innovation. Innovation is when people start paying you for your invention." The system will be tested at Toronto General Hospital in the multi-organ transplant unit. Wallace says Infonaut is very focussed on selling to the US market; hospitals south of the border will be watching results from Toronto General very closely. "It's a very well respected academic and teaching hospital," he says.

The technology is designed to prevent the spread of infectious organisms in hospitals by automating disease surveillance and infection control functions. "Infonaut is the only system that automates and applies these techniques inside the hospital to save money, save lives and create a new gold standard for safety and quality that is driven by evidence and analytics," Wallace said in an announcement. The system tracks the movements of and interactions between patients and staff, while preserving patient privacy, in order to identify chains of transmission and prevent the spread of infections.

In preparation for its final commercialization, the company has been staffing up. Wallace says they've hired five employees in the past 10 weeks, bringing their staff to 12; they continue to hire developers, as well as sales and marketing staff.


Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Niall Wallace, CEO, Infonaut

Founded in 2006 by Toronto entrepreneurs Alan Lau and Ivan Yuen, the mobile e-reading app company Wattpad, has a written an exciting story for itself this year.

"The easiest way to explain the concept is that it's like YouTube for books," says marketing coordinator Pamela Odina by phone. "People can share their own stories. We've got partnerships with some major publishers, there's a real mix of content."

That mix now extends to more than 1,000,000 free titles, and continues to grow. As does the company. This summer, Wattpad added their 1,000,000th registered user, and have added another 300,000 since then. But Odina says even those numbers don't tell the bigger story. "Many of our users are not registered, they're just reading. We get 7-million visitors a month."

On the heels of that success, the company announced $3.5 million in financing in September and moved into new office space near Yonge and Sheppard. Odina says the company is currently focused on building its team to develop more products and platforms. From the two founders five years ago, the company started the year with six staff and just hired number 11 this month. Odina says they plan to add another nine or so staff over the next year.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Pamela Odina, Marketing Coordinator, Wattpad

Earlier this year, the Toronto-based photo-sharing platform 500px was a two-person, home-based, self-financed operation. It had been that way since 2003, when it launched on the former blogging giant Livejournal, and remained that way as it slowly grew in popularity after it migrated to its current site on the web in 2009. The site allows users to share photos and to create galleries and portfolios. But when the number of the site's users suddenly grew by 60 per cent this spring to 85,000, 500px jumped into another league.

An announcement of $525,000 in venture capital financing in early June and a move to office space at Ryerson's Digital Media Zone drew notice, and soon 500px rose to the top of the TechVibes list of Toronto's hottest startups (seventh on the Canada-wide list). As reported recently in the Globe and Mail, the company's growth had been on the verge of sinking it. With the new funding, it instead seems to be rising fast.

This summer, the startup has grown from the original two founders to a staff off eight, and they are currently hiring two more developers now, as they look for new office space.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Evgeny Tchebotarev and Oleg Gutsol, fournders, 500px; The Globe and Mail, TechVibes, TechCrunch

The Toronto-based company VisualSonics has launched a new medical imaging product that it says could revolutionize the world of cancer diagnosis. The Vevo LAZR is an acoustic photoimaging technology that allows researchers to study tumour growth in real time. VisualSonics claims that this process allows doctors access to real-time information of tumour growth and mutation that they have never had before.

VisualSonics President and CEO Anil Amlani says his company's new technology will allow "acceleration in the study of cancer and its treatment enabling early detection, early diagnosis and rapid personalized treatment." In a statement provided by VisualSonics, David A. Jaffray of the Ontario Cancer Institute at the Princess Margaret Hospital says, "This imaging system has the potential to transform the way we diagnose and treat cancer."

VisualSonics specializes in medical imaging technology that allows real-time, in vivo, systems for research. Based in North York, it is a division of the Seattle-based company SonoSite.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Shailja Tewari, VisualSonics

Toronto tech company BlueCat Networks is on a hot streak that can now be measured in years: they've been among Deloitt's "Fast 50" list of Canadian growing companies four years running, made the list of Red Herring's top 100 private companies in North America and at the most recent CIX conference, they were named the hottest innovative company in Canada in the information and communications field.

And last year the company, which provides IP services, grew considerably, expanding its list of foreign offices into Europe and Asia. Recently it launched a first of its kind DDI software in the US with Cisco systems. And they continue to grow, hiring two in their Toronto office now.

Founder and CEO Michael Hyatt says that the company's growth is built on "world-leading DDI technology innovation." Anyone looking to join the team can rely on the endorsement of another award: last year I Love Rewards named BlueCat one of the 50 Most Engaged Workplaces in North America.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Michael Hyatt, CEO, BlueCat Networks

In 1984, the Edithvale Community Centre opened in a disused Willowdale Public School. Now, more than a quarter century later, it has finally grown up into a new, innovative $14.75 million building of its own. The new centre -- the first community centre opened in the city of Toronto since 2005 -- was officially opened this past weekend. The bill for its two-year construction was funded by levees on developers of condominiums in the area.

The new building features an innovative green design that includes low off-gassing building materials, an efficient ventilation system and motion sensitive light fixtures, in addition to a green roof. To serve the community, the facility includes a gymnasium, a banquet hall, lounges, a demonstration kitchen, fitness facilities and an elevated track. The U-shaped structure was constructed around a 50-year-old tree at the centre of the site.


Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation

Parc Downsview Park needed someone at the helm with a background in business, according to the park's board chair David Soknaki, and that's what the innovative experiment in sustainable development will get from new President and CEO William Bryck. Bryck comes immediately from a post at Queen's University, prior to which he was an executive with private-sector firms including Markborough Properties and CB Richard Ellis Management Services.

The park, on the site of a former military base in North Toronto, is Canada's only national urban park. Sprawling over 572 acres, it has a unique mandate from the federal government to be self-financing, and is being developed as an experimental and environmentally friendly "Tree City" design created by Bruce Mau and Rem Koolhaus. In addition to allowing a naturalized park to "grow," along the lines of New York's famed Freshkills Park, the site has taken on tenants in a recreational and museum hub and will incorporate residential and commercial development on the site.

In a statement about his appointment, Bryck said, "this is more than an alteration of the landscape, but promises to become a tangible representation of life and living in the imminent future -- an inspiring prototype to be reveled the world over."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Lisa Hastings-Beck, Director, Public Affairs and Communications, Park Downsview Park

Got an Innovation & Job News tip? Email [email protected].

Journeys, a Nashville-based teen fashion footwear and accessories retailer with 815 stores across the United States, has expanded into Canada, opening three stores in Toronto this spring.

"We are both excited and proud of our first few stores" in Canada, Robert Taylor, the company's senior VP, said by email. The first location, at Mapleview Shopping Centre in Burlington opened May 1, while locations at Square One in Mississauga and Fairview Mall in North York opened June 5. According to Taylor, the stores' staffing levels are still being adjusted, but he anticipates that "each store could employ up to 10 associates, more during peak seasons, including store managers, co-managers, full- and part-time positions, depending on each store's volume."

Taylor says the Journey's brand is "attitude you can wear." The retailer is part of Genesco Inc, owners of more than 2,270 retail stores across the continent.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Robert D. Taylor, Senior Vice President Operations, Journeys

Got an Innovation & Job News tip? Email [email protected].

An airplane hangar that was used to build mosquito bombers during World War II has been turned into a rock climbing gym at Downsview Park, one of four new businesses to set up shop at the park's burgeoning Sports Centre during the past year.

True North Climbing owner John Gross says the space was perfect for a climbing gym -- its high ceilings with windows at the top allow space for climbing equipment and lots of natural light. But even better, the steel construction of the hangar allowed the construction of a stalactite suspended from the 36-foot-high ceiling.

As of its opening day in mid-April, the gym has hired three full-time and 17 part-time staff, according to Gross. For the recreation industry, Downsview's Sports Centre has seen a mini-employment boom in the past year. "It's still kind of a secret," Gross says, "but I think we've hit critical mass now -- four new businesses have opened in the past year and people are becoming aware that we're all up here."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: John Gross, owner, True North Climbing

Got an Innovation & Job News tip? Email [email protected].

In the wake of the success of Avatar and Sherlock Holmes, virtually every media commentator agrees that the future of the film business is in 3-D. But as the industry attempts to explore the storytelling potential of what is essentially a new medium, the local film industry finds itself facing an adjustment to a new type of production.

A series of initiatives, including Sheridan College's research project at Pinewood studios, are set to ensure that the GTA becomes a hub for 3-D filmmaking. The latest of these launches with a presentation April 23 at the Cinespace Studios in Toronto: 3D FLIC, a $1.4 million research project out of York University.

"The really interesting things will start to happen when people figure out how to use this technology," says Nell Tenhaaf, York University's research lead on the project. She says that the 3D FLIC project brings together partners from academia and various corners of the industry to explore technology, techniques and content. "We're trying to take on the whole package."

Tenhaaf agrees that the GTA is well-positioned to become a global hub for this new dimension of filmmaking. She says that many of the project's partners, including Cinespace film studios, have driving business and jobs as a key goal. "Certainly... that's what they want, to keep the studios full. We've always been a centre for film production," she says, noting that traditionally Toronto's attractiveness as a production centre varies from time to time based on the strength of the currency and the status of certain tax advantages. "If you have a solid expertise base, that makes you very attractive." Setting up that expertise base in 3-D is what this initiative is all about.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Nell Tenthaaf, Associate Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University

Got an Innovation & Job News tip? Email [email protected].