higher education : Innovation + Job News

It was $250,000 in student fundraising that got Trinity College's solar panel development started, and soon they will been giving money back to students as an innovative--and sustainable--source of student aid funding.

The 252 solar panels installed on the roof of the school by a team led by consultant Oxtoby of CarbonFree Technology, which were unveiled last week, are a direct result of a student fundraising drive in 2007 that generated $250,000. An additional $262,000 for the project was provided as an interest-free loan from the City of Toronto. Now that the panels are plugged into the grid, generating revenue for the school through the province's feed-in-tarrif program, the school estimates it will repay those loans in approximately 12 years.

After that, the revenue generated by the panels will be used to fund student aid at the school. They will generate approximately 67,000 kiloWatt hours per year of sustainable energy.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: David Oxtoby, CarbonFree Technoloy

In a report released last week called Toronto: Canada's High Tech Hub (PDF), the city's Economic Development and Culture staff reported that Toronto remains Canada's digital innovation capital, home to 30% of the country's ICT sector. The report singled out one small startup headquartered at Ryerson University's Digital Media Zone incubator as an example of the exciting activity taking place: HitSend Inc, makers of Soapbox.

Soapbox, the first application developed by HitSend, aims to give people in specific communities or networks (companies, for example) a platform to put forward ideas, debate them and vote on them. Founded by Ryerson students Brennan McEachran, Graham McCarthy and recent graduate Ayu Er, the company launched Soapbox in October of last year. Already it has added a fourth staff member, a sales and marketing representative.

Brennan says the products soft launch has been very successful. "In Vancouver, a company site we set up had 900 users within three days, and their page had 14,000 interactions. Within a week their largest competitor called us to set up a page of their own."

HitSend is preparing for a more widespread launch of SoabBox in July of this year.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Brennan McEachran, HitSend; Heather Kearney, Ryerson Digital Media Zone; Shane Gerard, City of Toronto



 

Yanina Chevtchouk is a full-time Ryerson business student. She's also the owner and CEO of the fashion design label Paria Lambina Inc, headquartered here in Toronto. That combination of traits has earned her an award from the organization Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship as the 2011 Ontario Student Entrepreneur Champion.

She says that being a full-time student and running a business at the same time gives her the opportunity to put her learning into practice immediately. "It has its ups and downs, but I think the benefits outweight the drawbacks."

The recognition comes with a cheque for $1,000 and the chance to move on to the national-level competition, where the prize is $10,000 cash. But Chevtchouk, says the opportunity to network and "receive feedback from top executives" that could improve her business as the real benefits of the citation.

Founded last year, Paria Lambina debuted a collection at Montreal Fashion Week in the Fall, earning writeups from sweetspot.ca, Canoe.ca and Flare magazine. She's preparing for bigger stages yet--next up is Toronto Alternative Fashion Week.

Chevtchouk says that it's an interesting time to be in the fashion industry in Toronto. "It's definitely an interesting place given the number of US retailers that are coming here. It's an exciting time."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Yanina Chevtchouk, Paria Lambina; Jaime Szegvary, ACE

Toronto helped lead the world in its embrace of diversity when the first same-sex couple to be legally married in North America was wed here in 2003. That local tradition of re-examining legal attitudes to gender issues will carry on as York University professor Nancy Nicol has received $1 million in funding to study the criminalization of sexual orientation and gender issues across the globe.

The funding, to be delivered over five years, comes courtesy of the federal government's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. According to the announcement of the award, Nicol will lead a 22-member team to "explore how LGBT and human rights groups resist criminalization of sexual orientation and gender identity," especially in the developing world of the global south.

"Our work will combine documentary and participatory video with qualitative interviewing, focus groups, legal data research and analysis, and a limited use of surveys," Nicol says in a release. "We plan to make a unique contribution to documenting and analyzing criminalization, asylum and resistance to criminalization within and beyond regions."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Trevor Lynn, SSHRC; York University

Oakville's Pipeline Studios has grown quickly since its launch in 2007, taking on computer animation projects for such entertainment powerhouses as Nelvana, Nick Jr., Hasbro and the Disney Channel, including working on the kids' show blockbuster The Backyardigans. In that time they've also grown from 24 to 90 employees, and continue to hire now, according to company co-founder Juan Lopez.

"It's a constant process of growing and hiring," Lopez says. "it's a key advantage, having made a large investment in technology, but also being close to a pool of very highly skilled labour." He notes that Canada�and the GTA and Sheridan College in particular�have a global reputation for excellence in animation. "That reputation means that major worldwide productions come here, even though there's competition from lower-cost areas such as China. We control the standard of quality." He notes that the company's reputation for quality and for employing the best has also attacted some of the best animators in the world to relocate here. "People like the quality of life here. They mention it."

Mac Holyoke was a Sheridan College graduate and an employee of Nelvana when he hooked up with fellow Sheridan Grad Lopez to found the company in January 2007. They formed a partnership with Sheridan College's business incubator Spark, and have since recruited more than 60 per cent of their staff from the school, which is known around the world for its animation program. Pipeline's success at Spark was recently held up as a model by the Ministry of Research and Innovation when it announced the creation of an Ontario Centre of Excellence research hub called HalTech at Sheridan.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Juan Lopez, Pipeline Studios; Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation

A group called Toronto Homecoming (see Yonge Street's feature from January 2010) is accepting applications from talented Torontonians who've moved away in an attempt to lure them back home. Those who qualify will attend a conference held June 9-12 that will showcase what Toronto has to offer and put them in touch with large firms firms and headhunters looking to hire executive talent.

This is the second annual Toronto Homecoming conference -- last year's attracted 40 Torontonians back to the city, according to organizers.

Toronto Homecoming co-chair Eva Wong Scanlon said that the genesis was a desire to help build on Toronto's recent economic growth. "Many organizations are trying to improve the economy by attracting corporations here, but we also realized that high-level talent is important to driving growth, so we came down on the personal side, to attract professionals." The organization's research shows that a significant number of Toronto's most talented and promising professionals leave the city to seek employment opportunities elsewhere.

The event is sponsored by the Toronto CivicAction Alliance (formerly the Toronto City Summit Alliance), a group devoted to fostering growth and innovation in the city, headed by prominent politician, business executive and radio host John Tory. In a statement, Tory said that he had met some of the participants at last year's conference. "This event meets a real need in the city by connecting talented individuals with great jobs in the region."

Wong Scanlon says that in the past decade, Toronto has developed a more global outlook that would value the foreign experience of its expatriates, and the conference will help dispell uncertainties by introducing professionals directly to potential employers.

Applications to attend the conference can be filed by early to mid-career "thought leaders" and executives at the organization's website.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Eva Wong Scanlon, Toronto Homecoming

The power of social media has made it ever easier for students to connect with one another (Facebook, remember, was launched as a Harvard University social tool). The internet is a powerful driver of social interaction. But when it comes to serving students' academic needs, according to Ryan McDougall, the range of services and how they interact has been pretty poor.

McDougall is the Communications Director of uBuddy.org, a brand-new academic-oriented social networking site created by and for University of Toronto students. After launching in mid-February for beta testing, McDougall says the site has already attracted 1,200 users. "It is designed to be an efficient and powerful tool for--among other things--note sharing, meeting classmates and starting course discussions," McDougall says.

The site was the brainchild of U of T grad Charles Qu, who recognized a hole in the market when he himself was a university student, and developed the platform and startup company with help from MaRS.

McDougall says that during the pilot phase, the service is available exclusively to U of T students. But he says there are plans for expansion to other universities in the fall of this year.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Ryan McDougall, Communications Director, uBuddy.org

When Ontario Minister of Innovation Glen Murray announced a new data initiative at MaRS last month, he was long on hype with the announcement (he said he expected it to be "one of the most important things I'll ever be involved in in my life") and short on details (though he said the initiative would be fully-funded, he also explained it would be "rolled out" over the next several months).

But he did name check a specific inspiration: Toronto's 1DegreeBio, which has already launched a world-leading data sharing initiative for the biological sciences sector. The company was founded in July 2009 and launched online in June 2010 as the world's first online independent resource listing all academic and commercially available antibodies.

"I used to work in a large research lab in Toronto," says founder Alex Hodgson, "and what I noticed is that researchers were buying multiple versions of antibdies because they were never sure which ones were crap. There was no central resource, no quality control�you can't do great research with crap antibodies."

After finishing her MBA, she created 1DegreeBio with an open source spirit and social media techniques inspired by online retailers such as TripAdvisor and Amazon.com. 1DegreeBio offers a method of sharing information to eliminate costly overlapping in the research community, it connects various companies and scientists with the results of their peers and through user reviews. Less than a year after launching, the site now offers "just under 500,000 antibody products," and has grown from two employees working from Hodgson's home office to six employees in a new office.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Alex Hodgson, Managing Director, 1DegreeBio

Late last month, TVO -- Ontario's public broadcasting network -- launched a digital public archive of its four decades of popular news and educational programming. The online portal offers searchable access to such popular favourites as Polka Dot Door, Today's Special, Imprint, Studio 2 and Saturday Night at the Movies.

According to archive producer Craig Desson, the new initiative offers more than simply a nostalgia trip for people to smile at favourite programming from their childhood. "The nostalgia is fun -- people get a big kick out of it -- but to me so much of the value is the educational material within it. It's a kind of 'ideas archive' where you can access the smartest thinking from people who were involved in Ontario's history through the decades."

Desson points out that this "cultural history archive" includes news interviews that allow people to take the long view on particular issues, tracing an outline of how our public discussion and thinking has evolved. To that end, he'll be curating a podcast series called Think Again, which will compile thematic material from the archive to shed light on current debates -- a fitting task, since Desson says so much of the material feels surprisingly contemporary.

According to Desson -- the only full-time employee working on the project, although many others were involved in stages to set it up -- the project took just under six months to complete. The real labour behind it, he says, was converting all of the archival material into a digital format. That conversion work has been underway for years, as part of a larger mandate, which allowed the online access portion to be brought to market quickly.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Craig Desson, Producer, TVO Public Archive

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

Current university and college students and recent grads from across the GTA are being challenged to find innovative ways for people to interact with the city of Toronto in mobile applications. The Battle of the Apps, sponsored by both the City of Toronto and Ryerson University's Digital Media Zone, asks students to form teams to design applications that enhance the city or showcase it to users. The winners of the contest will get more than $5,000 in prizes.

The contest is being run by mobile development company D1 Mobile. Company President Daniel Ezer says he was tired of constantly hearing about how rich with talent Silicone Valley is. "Toronto is an amazing and diverse city. Battle of the Apps is our way of bringing out students' innovative minds and encouraging them to develop something which benefits our city," he says.

Registration for the contest is open until this weekend. Finalists will be announced on March 21, and the winners will be chosen and announced April 7. More details are available at www.battleoftheapps.com.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Daniel Ezer, President, D1 Mobile

At an event in downtown Toronto last week, Ontario Minister of Research and Innovation Glen Murray suggested that investing in knowledge should be the provincial government's re-election issue -- a position he compared favourably to the Conservative party's plan to offer cheaper beer prices. He said there's a reason such an investment is important.

"The economy is changing at a pace unheard of in human history. This is bigger than the industrial revolution, which took 200 years. This is bigger than the agricultural revolution which took 2,000 years. These revolutions are happening in months. It took less than two years for Facebook to get 58 million participants, it took television 20 years to get that many people. The pace of change is monthly for what used to take place in decades. The pace of change in society has become a social challenge in itself."

In what he said he thought was one of the "most important things I'll ever be involved in in my life," Murray announced the launch of a "multi-year, fully funded project" to share data. While details were not made available, Murray said the "core strategic research centre" would be set up at MaRS and rolled out over the next four months. The plan, he said, is to "try to create a collaborative open-source platform where companies, government and not-for-profits will provide data" and knowledge that would be available to other researchers of all stripes across the province. "My goal is, in the next decade, to drive this collaborative centre to make us the first true wiki-mobile-digital economy."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Glen Murray, Ontario Minister of Research and Innovation

It's been a big month for news out of the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD).

First, on January 13, the school announced that famed architect Will Alsop, who designed the university's iconic Sharp Centre for Design, has joined the faculty as an adjunct professor. OCAD's Martha Ladly, chair of the Art, Media and Design masters program, said that Alsop has "proven to the world his commitment to standards of excellence, and to the necessity of design for humanity through sustainable practices, creativity and imagination." Ladly noted that both graduate students and upper-level undergraduates will benefit from Alsop's advice and instruction.

The internationally renowned designer is scheduled to begin teaching an undergraduate course at the school in September. His appointment runs through 2013.

Shortly after that, the school was the recipient of $359,800 in funding from the federal government through the Applied Research and Commercialization Initiative. The funding will see OCAD partner with small- and medium-sized businesses for research, design, development and commercialization projects. MP Paul Calandra, speaking on behalf of the government, said the initiative will both create jobs locally and drive innovation among local businesses.

Sara Diamond, president of OCAD, said that projects under this initiative are "game changers" in their industries, and that the school's history as an incubator of applied research and market-ready innovation means it is well-suited to fulfill the program's hopes. Diamond said that the program will focus on innovations in the mobile, health, environmental and digital sectors.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Sarah Mullholland, OCAD University; Gary Toft, Ministry of State for Economic Development for Southern Ontario

Savvica, founded and headquartered in Liberty Village in Toronto, is India's largest educational marketing and recruitment services company. Unpacking that sentence and the story behind teaches some lessons in how to succeed in the global technology market.

According to a history told on StartupNorth, the company was originally founded by Malgosia Green in Toronto in 2004, but was shelved when she took a job in San Francisco in 2006. However, she and her husband and co-founder John "kept burning a little midnight oil, still looking for a deal or an opportunity, and most of all, they kept their dream alive." In 2007, an India-based e-learning company provided investment to expand the company, and Green located the Savvica office right back here in Toronto.

Just over three years later, Green is the CEO of what has become a giant in the Indian educational marketing and recruiting industry, operating the student web hubs learnhub.com, studyplaces.com and jumbotest.com. In the words of the company, they offer marketers and recruiters "unique access to students in India and other countries." As their web list of clients shows, their dominance in India is not a limit to their reach -- since their core service is study abroad information, they provide services to hundreds of colleges in Canada, the US, the UK and in other countries.

What's more, Savvica is expanding now, hiring two developers in Toronto. (If you're reading this from afar, they are hiring a VP to work in their India office, too).

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Malgosia Green, Savvica; startupnorth.com

Human Resources and Skills Development Canada announced a $10 million investment in its Canada Summer Jobs program last week, a move that is expected to create summer employment for 3,500 students this year. The Honourable Jean-Pierre Blackburn, announcing the program on behalf of the government, said the program will give students skills and experience, prop up the economy and "strengthen the local economies of communities across the country."

The program will offer funding for student jobs to non-profits, small businesses and public sector employers, all of whom can apply for funding through the program at the Service Canada website beginning February 1, 2011. (Submissions for this year must be received by the end of February.)

A spokesperson for the federal government said that it was impossible to estimate right now how many of the jobs the program creates would be in Toronto, but noted that "The Ministry is committed to creating jobs and stimulating the economy in the Greater Toronto Area."

Noting that this was the first increase in the Canada Summer Jobs program budget since that program's funding was cut in 2006, David Molenhuis of the Canadian Federation of Students welcomed the announcement. "The Canada Summer Jobs program creates jobs for students that would not otherwise exist," he said. "After record levels of unemployment and the vast majority of students facing tuition increases, it is high time that the federal government do something about it."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Michelle Bakos, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development; David Molenhuis, National Chairperson, Canadian Federation of Students