Research and Innovation : Innovation + Job News

VitalHub, a company started by the IT department at Mount Sinai hospital, has developed a technology that allows doctors and nurses in a hospital to easily track patient information using iPads and iPhones, a solution to longstanding and often-noted paperwork problems. As a company, they've had a busy couple of months.

In December 2010, VitalHub launched at Mount Sinai hospital, allowing clinicians to access patient's charts on mobile devices from anywhere in the hospital. This replaces a patchwork of different types of computer terminals and software programs that stored different types of information and often required multiple passwords. While the hospital plans for ever-wider deployment of the technology, they also established VitaHub to allow its commercialization and use at hospitals elsewhere.

Last month, the plan attracted a $300,000 investment from MaRS that VitalHub CEO Neil Closner says will enable the company to continue its deployment at Mount Sinai, further develop the product and market it to other hospitals. And befitting that expansion plan, the company is also in the process of hiring three full-time and two part-time staff to enable that expansion.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Neil Closner, CEO, VitalHub

At an event at MaRS last week, the provincial Minister of Research and Innovation, Glen Murray, announced that MaRS would become part of the Ontario Network of Excellence. At an event that showcased the innovative power of the GTA displaying companies launched at MaRS and by incubators such as Ryerson University's Digital Media Zone and OCAD, Murray touted the importance of Toronto.

"There are things that can only happen in this country's financial and cultural capital, things that cannot happen anywhere else. In a knowledge economy... if you do not have a large city, you are North Dakota, or Montana," he said. He added that Toronto has taken up the challenge of leading the country. "We are not a place of small ideas, we are a place of big ideas that go to big places and change our world in real time."

To continue to foster that environment, Murray announced a $2.25 million commitment over the next three years for MaRS so that it may continue its mandate to foster innovation in Toronto by harnessing expertise from across academic and business sectors to aid in launching and developing companies. MaRS will become on of 14 centres in the province-wide "Network of Excellence" being built to foster innovation.

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

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

At the recent CIX conference, Green Mantra Recycling Technologies was honoured as Canada's Hottest Innovative Company in the CleanTech sector. That's high praise, but to those who have long followed the recycling industry, it will appear completely justified.

Green Mantra has developed a proprietary technology that can recycle products such as plastic bags and bottles -- they've long been thorns in the side of recyclers because plastics are made of different compounds that cannot be recycled together -- and turns them into waxes and greases. The products are commercial quality and can be sold for uses such as industrial lubricants, car and floor waxes and candles. The process produces no greenhouse gases.

Founded by Indian-born Pushkar Kumar, the company is currently headquartered at MaRS. "I bring a unique international perspective to GreenMantra -- having grown in Indian business environment, I have an acumen to successfully run operations in cost effective manner," Kumar writes in his profile. A graduate of the Richard Ivey School of Business, he says that, "Canada is my new home and I want to work towards improving the place."

The company's business model sees municipal recycling stores (through which less than 5% of plastics currently wind up recycled) as a resource for materials to supply a manufacturing business that sells wax on the market to manufacturers of consumer and industrial products.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Pushkar Kumar, Founder and CEO, Green Mantra Recycling Technologies

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

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

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

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

During the last municipal election, the Town of Markham employed a novel approach to getting voters engaged. DIY Markham used Facebook, Twitter and other social media to get people involved. In a presentation in Ottawa last week, a two PhD students at Carleton University presented a study of the project as a model for other governments to follow.

"The Town of Markham's integration of social media into the 2010 municipal election highlights its experience in dealing with some of the common concerns raised by government," PhD student Nicole Goodman writes in her report. "The steps that it followed to ensure all legal and political conditions were satisfied could be used as a model for the development of social media programs by governments and election agencies elsewhere."

The innovative project was run for the GTA municipality by the digital consulting firm Delvinia. Company CEO Adam Froman says that the campaign was used alongside more traditional voter outreach initiatives to make Markham a "leader in e-democracy and public engagement."

In a statement sent out by Delvinia, Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti said, "Social media is now a critical element of any municipal communications campaign. We know that social media users represent the highest proportion of our election demographics and expect this trend to increase dramatically. Markham now has an effective and proven platform to capitalize on this in future."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Susan O'Neil, Delvinia

Toronto's Innovative Composites International was born in 2007 when some former Magna engineers struck out to find applications for a new type of thermoplastic material they had developed. The composite compound they developed, suitable for building things (shipping containers, houses) is lightweight, fireproof, hurricane-proof. As company spokesperson Clive Hobson says, the composite can be used to build "virtually anything" and is "virtually indestructible."

Now up to 22 staff members at the Front Street office and the Michigan manufacturing facility, the company brought its product out to market last year. Since then, it's started to see tremendous growth -- their materials have been used to construct a 125-foot pedestrian bridge in Chicago, and they just signed another contract for storage containers last month. All the while they've continued to innovate with their product line, as evidenced by their late-January announcement of three new patent applications.

But Hobson says the potential for growth an order of magnitude larger is on the horizon: the company is on the list of six finalists for contracts to rebuild the shattered country of Haiti in cooperation with the Clinton Foundation. While Hobson says there are a lot of "ifs and buts" remaining in the tendering process there, but the firm is optimistic that they and their partners may soon be constructing 5,000 or more homes using ICI's materials. "I'm trying not to use hyperbole, but that would be represent a 'home run' in terms of growth in revenue." Hobson says ICI would need to construct a new manufacturing facility to accommodate such an order -- and hire approximately 100 more staff (representing a sixfold increase in employees). A decision on the Haiti rebuilding contract is expected within the next 60-90 days.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Clive Hobson, Innovative Composites  International Inc.

It's a little early in the company's development to say they're attracting buzz, but development-stage startup Unata has already landed on the watchlist of tech entrepreneur and CommunityLend CTO John Phillip Green.

Specific information on the tech startup's developmental product is still under wraps, but according to founder Chris Bryson, Unata is developing customer loyalty applications that are "data-driven" applications that will both generate customer loyalty and allow companies to "really understand their customers better." Bryson, who was formerly employed by Aeroplan, thinks that while some programs in the UK are delivering more of the potential of loyalty programs, the field is ripe for reinvention, especially in North America. Hence the company's pre-launch tagline, "Loyalty 3.0."

The project is funded fully by angel investors, and Bryson is currently looking to double the size of his team. Until now Unata has consisted of three developers, and they are looking to add three more immediately. Bryson says the company should have much more to announce by mid-to-late February.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Chris Bryson, Unata

As it appeared would be the case when we wrote about them in April 2010, the cloud backup innovators Asigra had a banner year in 2010, growing their staff by more than 20 per cent and becoming the only Canadian company featured in the prestigious Gartner Magic Quadrant report.

Asigra was the first company in the world to offer secure backup systems online (this was before everyone started calling it "the cloud"), and according to Asigra marketing director Amrita Chandra, meeting the challenges of being the innovator in the field is now paying off. "One of the biggest advantages we have is that our product is rich and deep," she says from Asigra's University Heights office. "We've been doing this for decades -- a lot that's been adopted as standard industry practice is what we've been doing for years."

And as the company now claims more than 250,000 customers, Chandra says the market is finally catching up to the company. "The challenge of building something new is that you wind up doing a lot of education. When you're first to market, sometimes you're there before the market is there. For us, we were there when the market was in its infancy, so now the great thing is we've got this history and all these great customer references ... we have companies that have used our products for years."

As such, the boom time continues for job seekers at Asigra, as the company looks to add an additional 30 staff to their team this month.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Amrita Chandra, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing, Asigra Inc.

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

Rick Nathan is the managing director of Kensington Capital and co-chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) conference. "What we're trying to do at CIX is strengthen commercialization in the technology sector in Canada," he says of the mandate of the organization behind the annual meeting of Canada's best and brightest technology innovators.

Last week, CIX announced a new program to further that mission, called the Canadian Technology Accelerator. "It can be a challenge, when you're in Toronto, to break into the whole Silicon Valley culture of get noticed. This program is a great chance for an emerging tech company to jump into the heart of Silicon Valley for three months," Nathan says.

The program, run in conjunction with the federal government's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and with the Consulate General in San Francisco, will give three early-stage Canadian tech firms the opportunity to spend three months working, rent free, out of the Plug and Play Tech Centre in California.  Nathan says the companies will have improved access to Silicon Valley venture capital and an opportunity to establish a presence in the Bay Area, the heart of North America's digital sector.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Rick Nathan, co-chair, Canadian Innovation Exchange

Solar panels installed by GEMCO (Glennbarra Energy Management Company) at three city-run agencies will provide hot water through solar power. The zero emissions water heating is expected to meet almost half the hot water needs of the Toronto Zoo, Birchmount Community Centre and True Davidson Acres. The truly inspired touch is that the installations and the water will cost the city no more than regular hot water usage would have, thanks to an innovative financing arrangement through the Toronto Atmospheric Fund.

"The innovation we provide is a utility-style service -- we install and maintain the solar system and the city facilities get hot water at the same price as fossil-fuel heated water, without up-front capital costs, operations and maintenance responsibilities or pollution," Darren Cooper, President and CEO of GEMCO, said in a statement.

The 237 solar panels that will provide the power were financed through the Toronto Atmospheric Fund, who expect to get a competitive return on their investment. The city agencies have contracted to pay rates equivalent to what they would pay a carbon-based utility for their water usage for the next 20 years. Glennbarra expects to see a profit as a result of that contract. Everyone wins.

Tim Stoate of the Toronto Atmospheric Fund says that this type of financing arrangement represents a new model for clean energy companies and users that offers both financial return and environmental benefits.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Tim Stoate, Toronto Atmospheric Fund; Darren Cooper, GEMCO

Getting to work at a company whose product was recently named by the Huffington Post as one of the "Most Underrated Innovations of 2010" might be attractive to some people. That the company will soon have doubled its size in the past year may also be a plus. But how about sharing an office with a "giant talking doughnut"?

Freshbooks, the billing software company based in Toronto and taking the world by storm (see our previous articles on them here and here) is looking to add 17 new staff -- from a VP and a Chief Technical Officer right on down to IT support -- and to ensure potential hires get the tone right, they created an unconventional video (scroll down after the link to see it). It features a talking doughnut (who likes the good looking co-workers), a staffer who's under the impression he works for Facebook, and a "Stereotypical Canadian Hockey Guy" chatting up the company's dental plan.

But the company's growth is no joke: when we wrote about them in January 2010, the company had gone from five to 38 employees in four years. Today, according to company "Firestarter" John Coates, they now have about 60 staff and are hiring "pretty much constantly." Coates notes that their number of users has doubled year-over-year pretty much every year since they launched, to a current peak of 2 million people using Freshbooks.

Now, about that talking doughnut? "It's a casual, laid back office -- if someone wears a suit, we ask if they have a job interview. But it's also not," Coates says. "We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we take the product and our users seriously."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: John Coates, Freshbooks; The Huffington Post

The Town of Markham, just outside Toronto, bills itself as "Canada's High-Tech Capital." Already, the town is home to more than 800 technology and life sciences companies, including AMD Microprocessors (whose new processor took the recent CES convention by storm). It's a reputation the municipality is looking to build on with their "Markham 2020" plan, which urbanist Richard Florida called "the tightest, the smartest and the best" such plan he'd ever seen when it was released in 2009.

Late last year, the physical focal point of that plan opened its doors. The Markham Convergence Centre is a 30,000-square-foot home for technology business incubation in the heart of the town. As of its opening, it becomes the new home of York Region's existing technology and life sciences organizations including NCMDD/YORKbiotech, ISCM, Innovation York, Markham Small Business Centre, Markham Board of Trade and York Technology Alliance. The Mayor of Markham, Frank Scarpitti, declined to comment for this story -- his office cited a major announcement regarding the MCC coming at a press conference this week. Last May, Scarpitti said of the MCC, "This facility will allow Canada to compete globally in the medical devices industry while attracting highly skilled jobs to our community."

Since it opened it's doors in October 2010, it has already begun accomplishing that, according to Jeremy Laurin ISCM. "Still early days here, we get a lot of industry traffic already," Laurin writes in a post this month on the MaRS blog. "The MCC offices see some of York Region's top industry and academic people here on a regular basis. That's a good sign." Laurin notes that he expects the incubator concept to come alive at MCC this year.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Office of the Mayor of the Town of Markham; yorkregion.com; Jeremy Laurin, ISCM; Markham Convergence Centre
 

Recently Jon Dogterom, the resident cleantech expert at MaRS, wrote a blog post about the consistent superiority of hydrogen fuel cells as a sustainable energy source, and noted that "Canada has long been regarded as the worldwide leader in hydrogen technology -- a position we will need to maintain as the rest of the world starts to recognize hydrogen as a superior energy carrier." Dogterom singled out Mississauga's Hydrogenics as a likely key company in helping us maintain that position.

The GTA company is a world leader in the hydrogen fuel industry -- they've been at it for over 50 years -- with offices in five countries. In mid-January Hydrogenics announced that they had landed the contract for a hydrogen fuelling station in Instanbul, Turkey, the first in that country. Hydrogenics has landed five such contracts in the past year, and Hydrogenics President and CEO Daryl Wilson says that the number -- such stations are competitive in price with traditional gas stations at $500,000 to $2 million each, plus architecture and construction -- will likely continue to grow. "There's a hype cycle for new technologies," he says, when they become trendy in the press. Wilson notes that when that cycle arrived for hydrogen fuel in the 1990s, the industry was not yet developed enough to deliver on its promise. "Now we've reached the point where the cost side and the performance add up to commercial application that are viable. That's taken the past 10 years." Unlike conventional stations, of course, hydrogen stations, once built, manufacture the hydrogen on the premises from water and electricity.

Wilson points to a European transportation study announced in November 2010 that concluded hydrogen fuel cell technology was a key part of the continent's car production future -- and significantly, predicted that the cost of hydrogen fuel would be equivalent to gasoline and electricity by 2025. Wilson says the industry has already seen the infrastructure being set up for a hydrogen fuelling network in some locations -- Germany plans to construct 1,000 such stations across the country, of which Hydrogenics have built both of the two so far completed, while Hydrogenics has built eight refuelling stations in the Los Angeles area. Of the 220 hydrogen fuel stations in the world, Hydrogenics has build or is building 40 of them.

"This highlights the strength of Hydrogenics," Wilson says, "and the respect we have when it comes to hydrogen generation technology and hydrogen fuelling stations."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Jon Dogterom, MaRS; Daryl Wilson, Hydrogenics