Research and Innovation : Innovation + Job News

2010 was a banner year for Toronto startup Pushlife -- enough to get it named to IDC's list of 10 Toronto Digital Media Companies to watch. And that momentum continues into 2011 as the company seeks to add two team members, a mobile developer and a software developer, to its staff.

Founded in 2008 by former RIM executive Ray Reddy, Pushlife's mandate is to take on iTunes and the iPod pretty much straight on. Pushlife's software allows any phone or mobile device -- Blackberrys, Androids and plain old cell phones -- to play music, to synch with iTunes or Windows Media Player, and to share playlists and music information on social media. The only catch? You can't get it for the iPhone.

In May 2010, Pushlife pushed its software live, and by the end of the year it had launched a partnership with Virgin Mobile internationally to distribute the app for free. In addition to breaking up the iTunes monopoly, Reddy has said that the application eliminates the need to buy a dedicated music player, since it can turn virtually any phone into one. This holds particular promise for market share in developing countries, where mobile phones are ubiquitous but consumer spending dollars are scarce.

For information about the companies current hiring, click here.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Ray Reddy, Pushlife; IDC; PaidContent; RedCanary

In May last year, Mobilicity launched as one of a couple new wireless carriers in Toronto, aiming to squeeze traditional juggernauts Telus, Bell and Rogers in the mobile market. Mobilicity's pitch was simple: unlimited plans on a 3G network, all pre-paid, with no contracts.

Just over half a year later, the Vaughan-based company is showing significant growth: they are currently hiring seven staff in the GTA on the heels of announcing a new Facebook app that promises to give smartphone capability to regular phones.

After launching in Toronto in May, the company expanded to Vancouver, Edmonton and Ottawa in November. By December of last year, the company claimed that it expected to add more than 50,000 subscribers in one quarter, a roughly 10 per cent share of new business in Canada.

In 2011, Mobilicity is scheduled to expand its service to Calgary. As it builds up to its Alberta launch, the company is hiring in Calgary and continues to hire in Vancouver, in addition to the seven new positions being added at the Vaughan, Ontario headquarters.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Sheryl Steinberg, Mobilicity

The provincial government's Health Technology Exchange -- known as HTX, it was created to fund and encourage healthcare technology innovation in Ontario -- announced last week that it had helped secure Toronto as the location of the first global GE Pathology Imaging Centre of Excellence.

The facility run by GE Healthcare will conduct research and promote best practices. As GE Healthcare VP Peter Robinson says, pathology is largely an area that has "escaped the impact of technology," and the new imaging centre will change that. Robinson expects the centre to fundamentally transform global medical practice. "We have the potential to drive much higher levels of quality ... and really change the way cancer is diagnosed and treated."

Robinson says the project wound up settling in Toronto due to a number of factors, from "a pressing need on the public policy front, a willing partner in the provincial government, especially the Ministry of Reasearch and Innovation, a depth of clinical expertise," that he notes is among top 10 in the world in the field, combined with, "a research community that extends across the entire region that is rich with capacity ... with tremendous imaging expertise. So a number of things came together to convince [GE's startup digital pathology venture] Omnyx that this was the right environment.

The announcement was officially welcomed by representatives of the provincial government, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the University Health Network, whose members will participate in and benefit from the centre's research. According to Robinson, the centre will employ 15 engineers directly.

HTX provided a $2.25 million grant to the project, which will join a $7.75 million investment from GE Healthcare. According to HTX, an additional $7.2 million in investment has been promised by R&D partners in the project.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Peter Robinson, VP and General Manager, GE Healthcare Canada

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

Just over six months ago, in June 2010, Toronto's InGamer Sports launched its fantasy sports application that allows real-time gaming during professional sporting events. At the time CEO Nic Sulsky predicted that the pilot event during the NHL hockey Stanley Cup final was the start of a revolution in sports gaming that would take fantasy players from being "general managers and make them head coaches."

Last week, market analysts IDC added credence to his confidence when it named InGamer one of the 10 Canadian Digital Media Companies to Watch in 2011. The recognition capped a period of intense growth in the final months of 2010 that saw the company launch a weekly partnership with CBC's Hockey Night in Canada and a separate deal with Rogers. The platform now offers gaming for hockey, football and basketball games. Most importantly, Sulsky says, InGamer has signed a global distribution deal with international sports marketing giant IMG that he says will "open up the international market to InGamer in ways we only dreamed possible when we began working on the platform."

In the immediate future, the Canadian sports spectatorship innovators plan to extend their range of sports alongside their extended distribution, to allow gaming during soccer and rugby in 2011, as well as baseball, golf and motor racing.

"It's been pretty exciting," Sulsky says. " with IMG as a partner we will begin growing very quickly internationally."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Nic Sulsky, InGamer Sports

If you are a Facebook member, and you almost certainly are, then you likely saw a lot of Social Graph Studios in your news feed earlier this month -- though you may not have noticed. They're the Thornhill-based application developers behind the "My Year in Status" and "My Year in Photos" apps that, for the second year in a row since their development, attracted millions of seasonal users as the calendar turned from 2010 to 2011.

Founded in 2009 by Oz Solomon, under the motto "The shortest distance between friends is laughter" with the mission of creating applications that bring people together to have fun, the local company has exploded into one of the more successful application developers. They boast the evergreen products "Status Shuffle" and "Status Statistics," as well as "xo Hearts xo" alongside their grand-slam holiday season favourites in their suite of products. They have earned the top satisfaction rating for Status Shuffle of any application on Facebook, which the company claims makes them a trusted venue for advertisers.

In all, the company claims 8 million users ("and we've only just begun," they say), and is growing rapidly. Right now, the company is looking to add two developers to their staff to accommodate that growth.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Oz Solomon, Social Graph Studios

Companies who want to have some influence on the federal government's research and development policy should act fast to submit a survey circulated by the Toronto Region Research Alliance (TRRA), as the deadline for submissions is January 28. The findings will help the TRRA form a submission to an expert panel reviewing government R&D programs.

According to Pat Draper, President and CEO of the TRRA, "In October 2010, the federal government established an independent expert panel to review the government's programs in support of research and development. The panel has requested input from interested parties and the Toronto Region Research Alliance plans to respond. As part of our process, we are seeking feedback from companies in the Toronto Region about their engagement in R&D activities, their awareness and use of federal government programs to support R&D, and barriers to greater innovation."

Currently, the federal government claims to spend over $7 billion per year in support of R&D through companies and educational institutions. Minister of State for Science and technology Gary Goodyear said, in announcing the panel, that the process would help focus the effectiveness of the spending to create jobs and grow businesses.

The TRRA will make its submission to the panel in February. The questionnaire, which takes approximately 10 minutes to complete, is available here.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Pat Draper, TRRA

 

Armed with a paper bag full of cash and a love for design, urban planning, art and science, the newly formed Awesome Foundation Toronto is looking to encourage people to improve the city, make it more fun and encourage serious social projects with a decidedly unserious-sounding grants program. They're offering $1,000 to the person who submits the best idea to "do something awesome."

The Toronto project is spearheaded by Mozilla Foundation consultant and "pitch designer" Geoffrey MacDougall, and joins the growing international Awesome Foundation network. As outlined in the Boston founder's founding post, the project is a sort of "micro-MacArthur Foundation for your flashes of micro-genius": "The idea is simple: create a monthly $1,000 grant awarded to a person doing things to forward the interest of Awesome. The money will be spent on a project, activity, or research, and it will be (intentionally) broadly defined. We don't even really care if it's for fun or for profit. We will never claim your intellectual property or anything like that, and anyone in the world is eligible. So long as you need the money and the idea is awesome, you will receive it with no strings attached. Period. End of story."

The Toronto chapter's first call for submissions asks for videotaped entries explaining the awesome idea, and why it needs $1,000 to be realized. The deadline for submissions is February 15th.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Geoffrey MacDougall, Awesome Foundation Toronto

Wallace Wireless, a software developer who makes applications for mobile phones that serve businesses in their communications needs, was established in 2001 and has since developed several significant products for Blackberrys and other devices that specifically serve the medical industry.

The WIC Pager, for example, allows Blackberry phones to replace the pagers so beloved by hospitals; it's database, forms and continuity products are also niche targeted at healthcare-industry clients. So the news that US-based healthcare communications giant Vocera has acquired Wallace Wireless makes intuitive sense. "Ineffective, incomplete and inaccurate communication is a daunting challenge for care givers striving to provide the highest possible care," says Vocera CEO Bob Zollars, noting that the acquisition of Wallace Wireless "strengthens our portfolio of products and services that analyze, eliminate or mitigate these communication failure points."

Rob Moffat, president of Wallace Wireless, meanwhile says that "Bringing our companies together creates enormous potential for improving the seamless delivery of alarms, alerts and pages." Moffat says, "We could not have selected a partner with a strategic vision that is better aligned with ours."

For the local Toronto business community, it is reassuring to hear via Mike Middleton of Q1 Capital Partners, who brokered the deal, that Vocera intends to keep the Wallace management team in place here in Toronto, and to establish its office as the Canadian sales division of Vocera, suggesting that increased growth could be on the way for the office near Jarvis and Front.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Victoria Holl, Vocera Communications; Mile Middleton, Q1 Capital Partners

In multicultural Toronto, there's a growing awareness that an ethnically and culturally diverse workforce is a key asset to doing business in the global economy, but as the frequently cited high number of skilled immigrants whose talents are underutilized demonstrates, not every business yet understands how to fully exploit the human resource riches found in Toronto's pool of skilled immigrants.

A study of 168 skilled immigrants and 20 Toronto employers released last week by the Progress Career Planning Institute indicated some keys: for internationally educated professionals, the study concludes, becoming "more Canadian" by focussing on language and communication skills is pivotal; for employers, mentoring new hires on the workplace and Canadian culture is important.

A day-long conference to be held this week (January 20) at the Toronto Board of Trade will explore the subject for the benefit of human resource leaders from corporate Canada. Entitled "Building Workplace 3.0" and presented by CIBC and Skills for Change, the conference features a keynote speech by John Tory and speeches and breakout sessions on subjects such as "Competency based hiring" and " Canadian experience vs. Technical experience."

Registration for the event is $195. See the Diverstiy@Work website for more information.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Amanda Galbraith, on behalf of Progress Career Planning Institute; Judy Csillag, Skills for Change

At the the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which could be considered the world series of the tech world (it's where Apple's iPod, iPhone and iPad were unveiled in past years), last week Markham's Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) launched a world-leading technology of its own. The Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) are chips that AMD claims will revolutionize computing.

The Fusion APUs allow home computers, laptops and processing devices to perform tasks that were previously only available to industrial computers, including displaying high-definition graphics, supercomputing through access to GPUs and extending the battery life of laptops up to 10 hours. AMD senior VP Rick Bergman says the company believes this is "quite simply, the greatest advancement in processing since the introduction of the x86 architecture more than 40 years ago."

The development of the Fusion APU chips took place at AMD's GTA plant, helped along by an investment last year of $56.4 million from the provincial government. In addition to the previous AMD staff of 637, the development of this processor created an additional 122 jobs. Ontario Minister of Economic Development Sandra Pupatello congratulated AMD on their "game-changing" technological leap, noting that this APU will "help put made-in-Ontario technology inside millions of computers, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets and other mobile devices," and said that AMD is continuing to help establish the Greater Toronto Area's reputation as a global hub for innovation in graphics and media processing.

Outside reviews were equally effusive. Matthew Murray of PC Magazine writes that the Fusion APU was one of two technologies at CES that are already "reshaping the industry as a whole," and notes that the APUs will put a surprising amount of power into very cheap laptops. Jeremy Laird of TechRadar writes that AMD has developed the "the most revolutionary CPU architecture in living memory," and that, "Its design fundamentally challenges the very concept of a CPU core."

AMD says it expects to announce soon that major laptop manufacturers will be shipping laptops containing the APU processors in the coming year.

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

A new iPhone application called Rocket Radar shows TTC riders when the next streetcar will arrive at their stop. The application was developed and designed independently by Toronto interactive designer Adam Schwabe and is on sale at the iPhone App Store for $1.99.

Schwabe says that he'd been wanting for some time to create an application that would answer the question "Where's my streetcar?" (He notes wryly that sometimes the phrase would contain crude expletives.) But he says, "It wasn't until the City of Toronto and TTC released the Next Vehicle Arrival feed late last year at http://www.toronto.ca/open that the app became feasible." The feed provides real-time GPS data from streetcars in a format that allows independent developers to then use it in various other formats.

Schwabe works days as a designer for Teehan+Lax and developed the app in his spare time. For this project assembled a team including Jason S�o Bento, who executed the visual design, and Mohammad Kurabi and Jeremy Koch at nFuse Inc. to develop the application. Schwabe says the total time from rough sketches to finished product was about two months.

Schwabe says the data made available from the city was "absolutely critical" to delivering a project like this. "This is one of the best things the City of Toronto and TTC have done in years." He says he hopes this will be one of many apps that capitalize on the data initiative. "City officials need to recognize that Toronto is full of extremely talented designers and developers who are eager to build really cool applications, and just need the data to do so."

Schwabe says sales in the first week since the project launched have been "outstanding," topping the Navigation category in Canada on iTunes. He says that in many ways the project was a test for him to see how viable creating such an app with no up-front capital would be. Up next? "There's been a surprising amount of demand for an Android application, but for now, my plan is continue improving Rocket Radar, then I'll have some time to breathe and think about other platforms and future app ideas."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Adam Schwabe, Rocket Radar

When Yonge Street introduced the local startup Guardly back in October, the company's founders were just getting ready to unveil the concept and begin work on developing the product, a personal security application for mobile phones that will allow the devices to act as "panic buttons" that will notify loved ones through multiple communications networks.

Two months later, the company has hired two staffers, bringing the total number of employees to four (plus one intern), and is nearing completion of a market-ready product. Company president Josh Sookman says his "OnStar for mobile phones" should be ready to launch this month.

"The team is really meshing and we're probably going to get the first product out by the end of January," Sookman says, "but since we're dealing with personal safety, we want to make sure it absolutely works before launch -- we can't afford to release it and debug later."

Sookman says the current team is exactly what the company needs to take it through the launch phase, at which time he'll be looking to secure a round of funding to commercialize and monetize Guardly. "We've had some great conversations with investors," he says, "we speak to investors and they go home and talk to their wife and kids, and the family helps us do our sales job for us." Sookman notes that he's also been negotiating some partnerships with large social service organizations and companies who seem eager to offer the product to their clients.

The company is currently working out of the Yonge Street offices of Extreme Venture Partners, a breeding ground for apps in Toronto that has produced some of the world's most successful application development startups. "It's a really exciting time," says Sookman.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Josh Sookman, President, Guardly.

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.