Entertainment District : Innovation + Job News

Normative Design is a interactive company that provides a full suite of web and mobile consulting services to clients -- as company COO Jon Tirmandi says, that's "how we pay our bills." But as a sideline that is of growing interest and importance to the company's bottom future, Tirmandi says, they have been conducting research into location-based mobile services.

This began last year when the company partnered with OCAD University's Mobile Innovation Experience Centre on the Red Rover project, which used a developmental location-based gamin platform to facilitate city-wide games such as Red Rover, tag and capture the flag. Users are able to map their interactions and movements within the game using their mobile phones.

In a new project announced last month [PDF], also in conjunction with OCAD's MEIC and with support from a grant from FedDev Ontario, Normative Design is working on the Sousveiller Project, which will use crowd sourcing techniques to map the presence of security surveillance cameras throughout the city. Tirmandi says that at some point the map, which will show both the locations of cameras and the areas they are able to see, it would be possible to plot games in which participants move through the city without appearing on camera, for instance.

In the long-run, Tirmandi says, these experiments have a variety of practical, marketable applications, ranging from enabling physical gaming to innovative hyper-local news media delivery options.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Jon Tirmandi, COO, Normative Design

We reported last year after the inaugural Green Innovation Awards, co-sponsored by the City of Toronto and the Toronto Community Foundation, that Robert Kori Golding was the big winner -- his My Green City concept took home $25,000. His plan was to create a social game (similar to FaceBook giant Farmville) that encouraged people to take real-world steps to help the environment in order to earn points in the game.

A little less than a year later, his idea seems absolutely prescient, as "gamification" -- using games and game-design theories to encourage better behaviour and performance in the real world -- has become a hot subject, as demonstrated most emphatically last month with the publication of Jane McGonical's book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

During a recent check-in, Golding reports that he is progressing well towards creating the game -- he and his company Albedo Informatics have now partnered with OCAD University's Mobile Experience Innovation Centre to begin the serious development of the game for multiple platforms and devices.

In fact, last month the federal government announced a commercialization grant to OCAD to fund several projects, including My Green City. This is planned as the first of several projects for Albedo Interactive, which Golding says will be focused on creating games that are not designed simply to addict people and generate revenue, but to inform and connect people.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Robert Kori Golding, Albedo Informatics

Shiny Ads President Roy Pereira got the idea to change the advertising industry in May 2009. "Some really small advertisers were coming into a friend's website, and unfortunately it was very different than the traditional media buy with a large brand advertiser and a large budget and a lot of understanding. These guys were coming in, they had $50 in their budget, they knew nothing about online advertising, they didn't have any ads designed and ready to go. And taking their ads was a losing proposition because it would cost you more to service them than the revenue they'd bring in. So I looked for a solution, and didn't find one. So I thought, well, we can build one."

He says that when he built his business plan that year, it dawned on him what a large opportunity he'd stumbled on in small advertisers. "Really every niche and news site has a good chance of converting their readers into advertisers -- everyone at a niche website is interested in that one topic, and so you have this great targeted audience. News is interesting because its mostly local or topical."  Custom-made for small, "long-tail" advertisers, in other words.

Pereira launched his service, a fully automated self-serve ad platform that connects web publishers with smaller-scale advertisers, in January 2010. Since then they've attracted a lot of large websites, according to Pereira. The success led the company to move into a new, larger office space and to double the size of the team from two to four staff last month.

VP of Business Development and Sales Zunaid Khan, brought onboard to professionalize the sales end now that the technology has been demonstrated, chips in that even while the company continues to add to its offerings, the existing product is already serving up ads on smartphones and other platforms. "Essentially, whatever the customer is willing to sell, they can do it through our system."

He notes that the technology is turning heads in the industry: they were invited to present at the recent Toronto DEMO event; they'll be presenting at Innovation Alley at the upcoming ad:tech conference in San Francisco; and they were recently named by IDC as one of the 10 hot tech companies in Toronto to watch.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Roy Pereira and Zunaid Khan, Shiny Ads

You've likely heard of Amazon's eReader, The Kindle. You may also have heard of it's upstart competitor, Kobo, which was launched in December 2009. What you may not know is that Kobo, which was called a "global powerhouse" by TechVibes, is headquartered right here in Toronto -- the company's ownership is led by Canadian book retailing giant Chapters Indigo Books & Music.

According to company Marketing VP Liz Ridout, the company's strategy of open formats has led to explosive growth. Offering digital books and reading software and support for pretty much every device -- eReaders, smartphones, tablets -- on the market, including its own reader, the Kobo, the company has grown from 35 employees to 185 at its Toronto office in the past year. "We've definitely outgrown a few spaces," Ridout says.

Ridout says that for all this rapid growth, more is on the horizon, as the service will be pre-loaded on over 20 million devices sold in the coming year. "I don't see the pace of growth slowing down," she says, "we're really focused right now on developing global markets." While Ridout says the future may soon seen more offices established around the globe, the growth here in Toronto continues: the company is currently hiring 17 new staff.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Liz Ridout, VP Marketing, Kobo, Inc.

Toronto-based startup Peraso Technologies Inc recently announced the closing of a round of follow-on financing in which it secured $8 million. Peraso has developed the world's first 60 GHz multimedia transceiver to -- initially at least -- serve the consumer wireless mobile market.  The financing, according to Peraso CEO Ron Glibbery, will be used to bring the innovative technology to market.

"Bringing the world's lowest cost, lowest power 60 GHz transceiver to market within a year of receiving initial venture funding is a significant accomplishment" says Brian Antonen of Celtic House Venture Partners, who invested during the initial funding round in fall 2009, which generated $10 million, and led the equity financing group this time. In addition to Celtic House, this round of financing included iNovia Capital, VentureLink Funds and the Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund.

"The 60 GHz wireless market opportunity is growing rapidly," says Glibbery, adding that this financing and the participation of the province's Emerging Technologies Fund will allow Peraso to "compete with tier 1 competitors on a global scale."

As it gears up, the company is hiring four staff.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Ron Gibbery, Peraso Technologies Inc., Jim Whitaker, VL Advisors Inc.

Syncapse says its business is "sizzling HOT" and "growing fast and furiously" less than a month after it announced it had secured $2 million in financing through the Business Development Bank of Canada. Earlier in the year, the company had raised $3.3 million in capital through another round of financing, and it says it has invested $10 million this year in product development. As a result of the rapid expansion, the company is hiring 10 new staff in its Toronto office now.

Founded in 2007, Entertainment District-based Syncapse is a social media provider that builds software that allows marketers to set up their own social media environments to establish relationships with customers. In three years, the company claims 700 per cent revenue growth and contacts with 60 million consumers. They have also established offices in New York, London and Portland, and been named on multiple "companies to watch" and "fastest growing" lists as it was named to Facebook's preferred developer program.

Earlier this month, in announcing the BDBC financing, Syncapse President and CEO Michael Scissons said that the funding would accelerate research and development for their suite of products, and sure enough many of the current positions available are in development. BDBC executive Robert Duffy said in a statement that the financing indicates that Syncapse is "setting the agenda for growth" in a rapidly developing sector. "Syncapse's early successes demonstrate the strength of its business plan and the vision of its management team. We look forward to its continued global expansion."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Michael Scissons, President and CEO, Syncapse

As this year began, we covered the launch of online innovative lending institution CommunityLend, Canada's first (and still our only) peer-to-peer lending institution, which connects qualified borrowers and lenders through its website. Mere weeks later, we wrote that the company was adding to its team.

As of August 31, the company had facilitated overt $600,000 in loans (at an average loan size of $7,500), and had attracted over 2,000 registered members to the site.

As the company continues to grow, it announced late last month that it had appointed John Philip Green to the role of Chief Technology Officer. In announcing the hiring, CommunityLend CEO Michael Garrity notes that Green helped lay the company's foundation as a consultant when the architecture of the lending operation was being built in 2007. "Shortly after his consulting engagement with us, [Green] was lured away from Toronto to Silicon Valley to head up engineering for Internet start-up RapLeaf and then Affinity Labs, before founding his own start-up, Savvica. As John's experience and success grew, we had always wanted to find a way to bring him back to CommunityLend," Garrity writes.

Days later, the company announced a major expansion of its service into British Columbia.

Green started work at CommunityLend August 24. The former CommunityLend CTO, company co-founder Colin Henderson, will move into the role of Chief Operations Officer and retain his seat on the board of directors.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Michael Garrity, CommunityLend; StartupNorth

If you've seen the big windmill on the CNE grounds near the Gardiner Expressway, you're familiar with the work of the Toronto Renewable Energy Cooperative (TREC). The not-for-profit cooperative set up Windshare, the for-profit company that now owns and manages North America's first urban wind turbine.

Now TREC has announced a new initiative, SolarShare, one of six projects it currently has in development. SolarShare follows the same business model as Windshare did -- as TREC Executive Director Judy Lipp puts it, her organization's mandate is to "enable Ontarians to become not just consumers of green energy, but to invest in it." It does so by acting as an incubator for renewable energy cooperative companies that finance the building of a project and then derive revenue from it.

TREC has seen business grow since its launch in 1998, but has especially felt a boost since the announcement of the provincial government's Feed-In Tariff program two years ago. As a measure that growth, Lipp points out that the cooperative has gone from 1.5 staff members to 10 employees in the past two years.

Lipp expects the first of SolarShare's projects to be up and running by the end of 2010. Currently, TREC is scouting a suitable location for a Toronto solar farm (a hoped-for site at the CNE recently fell through due to details of provincial regulations). Once a suitable location is identified, she says, raising capital and beginning building should take less than a few months.

Author: Edward Keenan
Source: Judy Lipp, Executive Director, Toronto Renewable Energy Cooperative

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

A couple weeks ago, local carbon-offset sales organization Carbonzero announced the purchase of 10,000 ERUs from a British Columbia reforestation project from Carbon Friendly. It is the first forestry project in the growing company's portfolio, and a diversification that demonstrates the growing success of the enterprise.

Founded five years ago by company President Howie Chong "out of the basement of his parents house," according to Carbonzero COO Dan Fraleigh, the company has grown steadily as awareness of global warming has led to an increase in interest in carbon offsetting. Fraleigh says the company has doubled its staff to 8-10 employees in the past year and seen business grow by "a couple hundred per cent" during the same period -- a year in which a Suzuki Foundation study ranked Carbonzero the number one offsetting firm in Canada.

Fraleigh says it is the careful standards that helped the company achieve that recognition that have previously kept it out of the forestry project market. "The standards just weren't there [previously] for us to ensure the carbon reductions were there year after year," he says.

Among the company's most high-profile clients recently is TD North America, who purchased enough credits from carbonzero and other vendors to declare their global operations carbon neutral. Fraleigh says that in the immediate future, the company plans a relaunch of its website and branding.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Dan Fraleigh, Chief Operations Officer, Carbonzero

In January, Zipcar became the first car-sharing service to be approved by the City of Toronto for on-street parking. Now their competitor, the locally-based AutoShare, is getting in on the action too, with 22 vehicles parked in six different locations in downtown Toronto and North York. AutoShare President Kevin McLaughlin says the move reflects an important shift for the city. "Symbolically, it means the city is taking another step to thinking about the transportation infrastructure we need for the future," he says. More practically, for the company, it will serve to increase awareness through visibility in addition to the obvious benefit delivered by new locations.

McLaughlin says the industry in Toronto has been experiencing explosive growth. "Four years ago we had 2,000 members," he says. "Today we and our competitor combined have 20,000 people participating in car sharing service. That's a tenfold increase." AutoShare itself has about half of that market, with over 10,000 members on its roster.

The company has gone from five to 16 employees in that same four-year span, and is looking to hire two new employees right now. McLaughlin sees only more growth as the city approves more and more flexible spots for his service and others like it, and as people become more aware of the environmental and economic costs of individual car ownership.

Author: Edward Keenan
Source: Kevin McLaughlin, President, AutoShare

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

Last year was a tough one for much of the Information Technology industry, but when Entertainment-District-based server management firm uptime software closed its 2009 books on January 31, it looked back on a solid year. They launched up.time 5, an update on their server dashboard product, and saw their global client list grow from 580 to 700 companies. Already this year, they've added three new employees to bring their team to roughly 40 members, and a company spokesperson says he expects this year to be even better as they launch another update.

"We're in a good position, and so far we've been growing [revenue] at a clip of about 45 per cent per year" says Nick Johnson, uptime's director of marketing. This year, he says, the company has targeted matching their expansion levels from 2008, when they saw 67 per cent growth. If things go as anticipated, Johnson says the company will add "conservatively, eight-10" more new positions in 2010.

The company was founded by three former Sun Microsystems employees in 2001. At the time, Johnson says, most of the server management products on the market were from multinational corporations, "they were multi-million-dollar solutions." With no venture capital or outside investment, the founders built their company and financed growth through sales.

"These guys have done a good job hiring a team made up of really good talent," Johnson says, noting that all the company's development, marketing and sales is handled in-house from their Richmond Street offices. "When you bring in these types of people, they love to succeed ... and they work their butts off."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Nick Johnson, Director of Marketing, uptime software

Just a month ago, on January 20, we covered the launch of CommunityLend, a new peer-to-peer lending system in Toronto. The service connects borrowers with good credit to those who would like to lend money, cutting out the middle-men traditionally involved in borrowing to offer better rates on loans through competition and community-building.

Now, co-founder Colin Henderson says, the company has registered users "well into the hundreds," which he notes is encouraging given that rather than looking for as many members as possible, the company is seeking a niche of qualified borrowers and lenders. And that growth has led to the company's need to add a new staff member to bring its full-time contingent to six.

Henderson says CommunityLend is looking for a junior developer to work with their professional outsource developers on the Ruby on Rails platform. Developers interested in working with best-of-breed Ruby on Rails developers and joining the growing team of finance innovators at CommunityLend should contact Henderson directly at [email protected].

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: CommunityLend

Established in 2001, Context Creative serves clients both near and far, delivering integrated design and communications campaigns on the Web, in email, TV, print, direct mail and outdoor.

The firm's clientele range from Ontario Government ministries to the private sector and not-for-profit organizations. Context Creative provides graphic design, copywriting, illustration and photography, project management and production services for corporate communications, advertising, brand design, and integrated campaigns.

Despite a shaky economy, Context Creative is growing: the last 12 months it added three full-time positions for a total of 12 employees. The firms says it is cautiously optimistic that Toronto's economy will continue to improve across many sectors and that demand for innovation, creative-thinking, and graphic design services will continue to rise.

To that end, Lionel Gadoury, the principal and director of creative services at Context Creative, says Toronto is a hotbed for graphic design talent and a city that's always open to new businesses and service offerings.

"Toronto is Canada's design hub," he said. "Most of the (graphic design) industry is based in Toronto and it's a huge advantage to other businesses located here."

In 1996, he said the Ontario Government passed recognition for Toronto-based RGDO to confer professional status on its members once they meet required qualifications and pass an examination. That's unique, as it puts the province and Toronto in particular at the forefront of continuing to develop a truly professional graphic design community, he remarked.

"More often these days we're called in to answer business challenges," Gadoury said. "Companies are either looking to break into new markets, lower their costs of communicating with their customers, and/or to gain market share.

"In many sectors of the economy where products and service have become highly commoditized, brand is the key differentiator."

Meanwhile, the company is breaking new ground by incorporating a not-for-profit foundation, New World Now Cultural Promotions Inc.

"Our first project underway is Trails of 1812, a program which promotes tourism, the arts, culture and healthy lifestyle activities in Ontario," he added. "It is an example of innovative thinking that goes beyond the typical client-service provider model. It builds on our expertise working with the Ontario Trails Council and various government ministries and brings together the private sector, NGOs and government."

Writer: Liam Lahey

For ecobee opportunity runs both hot and cold. The young, Toronto-based startup established itself as a company that delivers intelligent energy conservation solutions for real people and its green-minded approach is proving to be a winner with customers Stateside.

"We help consumers save money, conserve energy and reduce their environmental footprint; we build technologies to help consumers do that," explains Stuart Lombard, president and CEO of ecobee. "Our first product build is a more intelligent, programmable thermostat. Fifty to seventy per cent of your home energy use is due to heating and cooling."

Established in July 2007, ecobee's product platform is built around the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system, an internationally recognized set of standards for environmentally sustainable construction. Fast-forward to February 2009, Lombard and his staff of 25 are selling the ecobee Smart Thermostat at a healthy clip south of the 49th parallel.

"We've been selling products since February 2009 with 95 per cent of our sales taking place in the U.S.," he said. "We sell in every single state and we have over 350 installation partners that install and service our product."

ecobee also works closely with about 20 electrical utilities across North America including Toronto Hydro via its Peak Saver Program. "We work with utilities on those types of applications and our product ties into the smart meters that are rolling out across the continent. Our product allows you to see your real-time electricity use."

Headquartered at 333 Adelaide Street West, the company is enjoying another growth spurt. Though energy conservation solutions like the Smart Thermostat appeal to green-minded homeowners in general, the average consumer's increasing appreciation for reducing his/her own carbon footprint combined with the Smart Thermostat's use of the Web is proving to be a resounding success.

"We're expecting 300 to 400 per cent growth year-over-year and we're growing on that trajectory right now," he added. "In the future, as we move toward new technologies, there will be a platform to manage the consumption and generation of electricity in your home and we'd like to tie into all of those things."

Writer: Liam Lahey

Standing taller than just another product or technology, EnviroTower provides a means for companies to switch to a clean cooling tower water treatment system versus going "bareback" and dumping chemically-treated water back into the municipal wastewater system. That's so 1980s. And yet, each year, tens of thousands of litres of chemically-treated water enters wastewater systems after being used to keep most large buildings and factories cool. What better way for any earth-respecting corporate citizen to walk the green talk than to invest in this firm's solution?

In a nutshell, EnviroTower's innovative system cuts both the amount of chemicals used as well as water and energy requirements during treatment, while ensuring that scale and corrosion in a water tower is kept to a minimum via an intricate monitoring system.

Founded in 2004 and calling its 380 Adelaide Street West digs in Toronto home, the comprehensive and financially rewarding EnviroTower solution includes the patented water treatment system and web-based remote system monitoring capabilities, all supported by a customer service program designed to ensure its' large enterprise clientele receive the maximum return on their clean cooling tower water treatment system investments.

Led by CEO Paul Wickberg, the company has gained the endorsement of some of North America's largest and most demanding commercial real estate organizations. EnviroTower officials credit its continued growth on the ability to deliver consistent, reliable results. EnviroTower's customers include the likes of IBM, Hilton Hotels, Marriott Hotels, and Wal-Mart; each reportedly realizing an average savings of 15 per cent on their cooling system's energy draw and 20 per cent on water consumption annually.

EnviroTower's North American service is provided by its own service representatives, supported by in-house leading water industry engineers who perform on-site system analysis, design, training, testing, reporting, performance validation and ongoing consultation and support.

Writer: Liam Lahey