Innovation + Job News

"It's the biggest project we have done to date, and the second biggest in Africa," a slightly rushed-sounding Daniel McCormick tells me over the phone—understandably, since he's having a rather busy day.

McCormick is a managing partner of Siginik Energy, which just announced that it has signed a deal to provide solar energy to Ghana, one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, and a nation seeking not just new energy sources but renewable ones. The deal will see Siginik build a 50-megawatt ground solar installation, from which the Electricity Company of Ghana will purchase power for a 25-year term.

Siginik, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Toronto-based Episolar Inc., is "a full turnkey solar energy provider," says McCormick, and also one of the beneficiaries of Ontario's Green Energy Act. That act was passed in 2009, and McCormick says that "it created a labour force that is highly skilled."

Ghana is hoping to draw on those skills to help meet its own energy needs, which are substantial and growing. To help the country expand its power sources, Siginik will be hiring both abroad and here at home—about 50 full-time, part-time and contract positions in the Toronto area, says McCormick, ranging from engineering consultants to components providers. Some of those hired here will also work in Ghana to train local workers.

Recently Ghana's Parliament passed a Renewable Energy Act; the country has set a target of obtaining 10 per cent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Daniel McCormick, Managing Partner, Siginik Energy

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

"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

At the intersection of increasing health care costs and growing public comfort with medical information lies Mihealth Global Systems Inc., a company founded on the idea that if patients had quicker, easier ways to communicate with their physicians everyone would benefit. Mihealth provides a secure web portal through which patients can access their medical records, and a smartphone app which lets patients take that information with them wherever they go.

Last week Mihealth announced a new partnership with American company Preventice to expand those digital services. The technology the companies will be implementing falls into the category of body telemetry, a growing category of medical service which allows physicians to keep watch on patients from a distance.

Typically, body telemetry mechanisms have tended to be cumbersome (keeping users from bathing, for instance), but this new one will make the process vastly less burdensome, says Mihealth founder Dr. Wendy Graham.

Graham says it will consist of a "disposable patch the size of a Band-Aid, and a tiny sensor," which will transit information via Bluetooth. Physicians will be able to monitor blood pressure, heart rate and respiration; a later iteration of the device will provide for motion sensors as well, to check sleep patterns and ensure patients are appropriately active.

Like any new medical device, this one will need to make its way through the standard regulatory and approvals processes; Graham hopes that Ontario residents will have access to it within a year. It's a way of saving the health care system money, she points out, by allowing faster, easier patient monitoring, in addition to providing patients with greater freedom.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Wendy Graham, Founder and CEO, Mihealth

Sunnybrook Research Institute, along with Western University and 19 private sector partners, is the beneficiary of nearly $7 million in funding awarded recently by the federal government's Economic Development Agency (known as FedDev). The money will go to developing four imaging technologies Sunnybrook has been working on, and will help accelerate plans to bring those technologies to market.

The medical imaging tools in question have a range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications in the treatment of cancer, strokes and heart disease, and specifically will help facilitate the use of non-invasive treatment methods. These include ultrasound surgery to target and destroy tumours, early monitoring of the effectiveness of chemotherapy, and using magnetic resonance imaging to guide surgeons as they unblock arteries.

In awarding the grant, local MP John Carmichael says the government hopes to help "develop new technologies that will increase the competitiveness of the medical imaging industry in Canada, help diversify our economy, and create high-value jobs."

These tools will also help provide more efficient and in many cases more comfortable health care, increasing the number of procedures that can be done on an out-patient basis and speeding up recovery times. The funding will provide both research and business support as the partners work towards the commercialization of these technologies.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: John Carmichael, MP, Don Valley West

Way back in 1995, the company that would become Destiny Solutions was founded as Destiny Web Designs, putting the best practices of the then emerging World Wide Web to work for Toronto business clients.

"One of our clients was the University of Toronto's continuing education department. We built out their site in the late 1990s and realized there was a huge opportunity in creating applications for this new market in higher education," says senior vice president Jonathan Tice. The needs of continuing education departments are different than those of traditional "tuition cohort" models, and new administrative tools were needed to help grow the potential of those departments. 

He says that U of T was the first university in North America to put its systems fully online in 2001, and the reputation the school's then-president, Mary Cone Berry, had as an innovator gave the newly born Destiny Solutions a great advantage. "That relationship made it easy to make Stanford our second client."

Eleven years later, the Yonge and Eglinton-based company is the leader in providing specific administrative solutions for non-traditional learning departments at some of North America's biggest and most prestigious schools, including Georgetown, Duke, Penn State, Stanford and University of Toronto. It's a market that has begun to rapidly transform education itself. Tice cites US education department executive Richard Culatta's impression that "this is education's Internet moment."

"We're growing quite quickly," says Tice. Currently at 40 employees, the company is hiring for nine positions now. Tice says they've been growing their staff at a rate of about 25 per cent per year—revenue growth has significantly outpaced that. "We really can't hire fast enough, but we're very specific about who we hire. We serve clients who are the best in the world, and we're really looking for A-players."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Jonathan Tice, Senior Vice President, Destiny Solutions

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

Two years ago, Yonge Street reported on a $27.9-million expansion planned by Therapure Biopharma of its biomanufacturing facility in Mississauga. Late last month, that facility officially opened to pursue research and manufacturing of protein-based bioproducts to meet global demand to treat infectious diseases.

The facility was completed with the help of a $4.2-million grant from the provincial ministry of Economic Development and Innovation. "Ontario's support for Therapure has built upon our strengths in research and manufacturing to help its global clients bring new, innovative medical treatments to patients," said Minister Brad Duguid in a statement.

The company expects the new capacity will double its staff over the next two years to about 200. The company has long been on a growth trajectory: from 13 employees in 2007 to 100 today. "Therapure is thrilled to officially celebrate the opening of its additional Custom Biologics Manufacturing Wing, which will enhance the company's ability to be an international leader in biomanufacturing and meet the needs of a growing market," said company president and CEO Nick Green in the announcement.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Office of the Minister of Economic Development and Innovation Brad Duguid; Thomas Wellner, former president and CEO, Therapure Biopharma Inc.

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

One of the most promising startups to emerge out of Ryerson's Digital Media Zone incubator over the past year was Scanly, an app that gave students discounts from various retailers through their mobile phones. Business prospects appeared so encouraging after the company's launch in September 2011, the founders applied to and were accepted for a session at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator that may be the most renowned in the world.

Interestingly, the company has returned reimagined, reinvented and renamed.

"As we prepared to go to California and scale up Scanly, we realized that expanding it beyond Ryerson would be very costly and risky, and that the business could never become truly big," founder Martin Drashkov writes about the experience. "Abandoning a product and starting anew is always tough, but thankfully we had the support of the Y Combinator partners and the awesome YC Alumni community."

The reinvented company recently launched in its new incarnation, Kyte, an app that allows any Android phone to be turned into a children's phone. "After doing some research, we realized we could write an app that runs on Android phones and completely locks down the phone into a limited, kid-mode, while letting parents control the phone from the web," writes Drashkov. "We had stumbled on a very interesting idea—we would be the ones to make sure every child in the world can get a smartphone!"

The app allows parents to control their kids' web experience and track their location by GPS. Work on the new product began in January. The Y Combinator process of mentorship helped with the development process. Finally, Kyte launched at the accelerator's Demo day last month.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Lauren Schnieder, Ryerson DMZ; Martin Drashkov, Kyte

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

One of the primary problems facing the world of sustainable energy is storage: since solar and wind power are "intermittent"—that is, they generate electricity at the whims of the sunshine and wind, rather than constantly or on demand—energy needs to be stored until there is demand for it. Batteries capable of doing so have so far been too large and expensive to be a solution.

Ryerson electrical engineering researcher Kamran Masteri Farahani has been conducting research for Toronto-based startup Temporal Power for the past 18 months. And he says the results show a breakthrough.

"This solves the problem of storage for wind power," he says. "This will change energy storage completely."

Temporal Power has developed a storage technique that involves flywheels spinning to store the energy kinetically. The company, in collaboration with Hydro One and Toronto Hydro, has created flywheels that are cheaper and easier to maintain than batteries. Masteri says his research, conducted at Ryerson's Centre for Urban Energy, shows that it works.

"After 10 hours, the flywheels still maintain 95 per cent efficiency," he says. "They also hold up to twice as much energy as competitor techniques, and 50 times as much energy as most commercially available materials." He says that the technology also regulates voltage and can feed or draw from the grid as needed, making much of the existing (and expensive) regulation technology redundant.

If Hydro One's own tests confirm the Ryerson result, the company will begin implementing the technology in its own system by the end of the summer.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Kamran Masteri Farahani, Electrical Engineering Researcher, Centre for Urban Energy, Ryerson University

Three-year-old classroom education innovators Top Hat Monocle are hiring now in Toronto as they move their headquarters from Waterloo to the big city.

"We're currently in a co-working space in Toronto as we await our official office space later this quarter," says CEO Mike Silagadze by email.

The company was founded by University of Waterloo students Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini when, for a class project, they decided to try to put the mobile devices students carry with them to use as learning aids. The reaction to the project was so good that they launched the concept as a business with $300,000 from Waterloo-area angel investors (they have since raised a total of $1.5 million in investment).

Three years later, their products are used on more than 85 university campuses around the world—including Harvard—and the company has seen more than $5 million in sales, according to a recent report.

Today, they continue to grow. Top Hat Monocle has opened a San Francisco office. The HQ relocation to TO, Silagadze says, is motivated primarily by recruiting purposes, "It was very hard to convince top candidates to move to Waterloo, and we in fact lost a few people that way. So long term, the right decision was for the company to be in Toronto."

The company currently has 24 full-time employees. Perks include weeks available to work on personal projects, catered staff meals and video game tournaments. The company is hiring developers, designers and sales reps right now—lots of them. "We'll likely need to hire another 20 to 30 sales reps and another 10 developers in the next six months," Silagadze says. "It's going to be a busy time."

Sources: Mike Silagasze, CEO, Top Hat Monocle; Yahoo! Small Business advisor

The Toronto-based gourmet café chain SPoT Coffee recently announced it had secured $250,000 in financing to fund its rapid expansion in Toronto and across Ontario and Western New York. The money will help with the opening of two new locations this summer, one in North York and one in Buffalo, according to the news release.

Director Alex Gress says the company, founded in 2004, currently has 10 locations either open or under construction, and expects to be announcing further locations soon. Gress estimates they employ more than 400 people.

The chain prides itself on building "community cafés that reflect the local surroundings and communities," Gress says. Each location has distinct artwork and seating to suit its particular environment and serve the area residents. The aim is to have each café be unique, Gress says, while also having a formula of sorts to ensure that the successful elements are replicable in new locations.

"Yes, there's a formula to replicate the uniqueness," Gress jokes.

In Toronto, where the company's world headquarters are located, Gress points to the Bremner Boulevard location near the CityPlace condo development and the soon-to-be-opened "Park Place" location in North York as examples of a successful partnership with developer Concord Adex.

"We essentially have a right of first refusal to lease prime locations in their developments," Gress says. And those are large developments. Gress says their North York location will be in an area expected to house 290,000 residents. Future possible locations with Concord Adex include the Concord Parade development near Bathurst and Lakeshore.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Alex Gress, Director, SPoT Coffee

"Years ago, I was a hired general contractor," says Gary LaRose, "and I got a commission to do a wine cellar."

The experience of the building project sparked a love affair with wine, he says, leading him to take "about 10 wine courses and become an avid collector." His passion and his business merged when 17 years ago he decided to specialize in building wine cellars, founding Rosehill Wine Cellars.

That collected experience led him finally to the recent opening of a dedicated wine-rack manufacturing facility in Mississauga, the first of its kind in Canada, unveiled publicly through press announcements this month after two years of preparations and testing.

"It takes a while to set it all up," LaRose says, noting the gradual collection of robotics and computer design equipment. Now the facility is operating at full speed, serving custom orders from across Canada and around the world. Rosehill may soon start seeking dealer arrangements with agents to compliment its online sales and Toronto retail store. "I didn't want to do this until the factory was ready," LaRose says.

At the factory and in Rosehill's Etobicoke retail location, LaRose now employs 17 staff in what is a growing, highly specialized area of industrial home design. "It's actually a very specialized subfield," he says. "You have to think like a wine collector—what types of wines will it house, the size of the bottles, displays.... Some people buy only by the case, some have lots of magnums of champagne, some will have no magnums. And then you need to know how to refrigerate the room, and build your racking all around it."

He says Rosehill has grown with the growing interest in food and drink appreciation over the past decade.

"At one time the people who would hire us were avid collectors looking to make a perfect home for their collections," he says. "Now it's quite a lot of people who just have a big home and are interested in starting a collection—they want to build the home first and add the wine collection later."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Gary LaRose, Owner, Rosehill Wine Cellars