Innovation + Job News

When asked to imagine the future of innovation, most of us tend to conjure up ever-fancier gizmos and gadgets: Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, say, or the replicator from Star Trek which produces anything from a cup of tea to a uniform in a shimmer of light.

Many of the innovations we might actually benefit from, however, are less about hard edges and new materials, and more about using the natural world to our advantage. These innovations are still high tech, but they also rely heavily on organic processes. In the real-world and not-too-distant future, bacteria may clean up chemical spills and cells may be engineered to heal themselves.

Helping faciliate those developments: the just-expanded and renovated BioZone, a centre for applied bioengineering research at the University of Toronto.

BioZone "came about because a lot of the research we do now is at the intersection of biology and engineering," says director Elizabeth Edwards. As a society, she goes on to add, "the problems we are facing are really complex, and we need integrated teams to work on solving them." This includes everything from finding alternative ways to make renewable energy to meeting the nutritional needs of a planet with an expanding population.

In addition to the 130 researchers working out of BioZone, the centre also has outside partners and policy experts involved, and initiatives like a commercialization committee which aims to help take that research and make it available more broadly. "I would like to see more biologically-based innovations in the marketplace," Edwards says. The hope is that the expanded facility will allow the centre to support exactly that.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Elizabeth Edwards, Director, BioZone

It was only a few weeks ago that we told you about BufferBox, a new network of parcel pick-up stations had just launched in the Toronto area. With a growing list of stations—they're up to about 14 in Toronto and Mississauga and have more going in by the end of the year—and a contract with Metrolinx to help target commuters, things seemed promising for the new startup.

And now, they are looking even more exciting. BufferBox has just announced it has been acquired by Google. Neither BufferBox nor Google would confirm the financial details, but TechCrunch is reporting the purchase price was in the neighbourhood of $17 million.

BufferBox services are free until year's end. When paid service begins they expect they'll be charging $3 or $4 per delivery. The goal is to have approximately 100 stations in the GTA by the end of 2013. Google, meanwhile, is likely looking for a challenger the Amazon Locker parcel delivery program (which is not available in Canada), and is hoping that BufferBox can expand and scale quickly.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Brad Moggach, Sales & Marketing Director, BufferBox; TechCrunch

When engineer Nikola Tesla died, it was as a penniless eccentric. Though he had attained wealth and recognition for his many technological breakthroughs and patents, later in his life he lost hold of those achievements as he pursued a great many further experiments.

Over the past decade or two, his reputation has undergone significant rehabilitation. Like many innovations, it turns out, his work faced several setbacks before it found a firmer footing. The car company founded in 2003 and named after him—Tesla Motors—makes electric vehicles, with motors based on his original designs. And earlier this month, Tesla Motors opened its first Canadian store to help showcase those electric vehicles. It's located, perhaps surprisingly, in a mall: Yorkdale, where it's part of the shopping centre's recent renovation and expansion.

Vice-president of worldwide sales George Blankenship highlighted that seemingly incongruous location choice in a press statement, explaining that Tesla's primary goal "continues to be focused on informing as many people as possible about EVs.... Customers in our store are invited to ask questions and engage with informative product specialists to learn more about the many advantages of driving an electric car."

It's certainly an education many of us lack right now—for the moment, electic cars remain novelties in Toronto. We are, however, slowly building up more infrastructure to support them. Charging stations are available in several locations across the city, and a city-run pilot project for several more is in the works.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: George Blankenship, Vice-President, Worldwide Sales and Ownership Experience, Tesla Motors

"While nearly all high growth technology startups have historically emerged from no more than 3-4 startup ecosystems, namely Silicon Valley and Boston, this trend appears to have reached its end. Simultaneous with a global explosion of entrepreneurship has been an explosion in the rise of new startup ecosystems around the world, and a newfound maturity in others."

So begins a new report from the Startup Genome called the Startup Ecosystem Report (available for free online, though registration is required). And among those ecosystems that are currently flourishing: Toronto, which ranks the highest in Canada on the report's index, and eighth in the world. (Vancouver is right behind us in ninth; more surprisingly Waterloo is further behind, at sixteenth.)

All cities in the index are compared to Silicon Valley (which predictably is the benchmark first-place ecoysystem) across a variety of metrics. While we are similar to Silicon Valley in terms of our level of ambition, our technology adoption rates, our sector mix and mentorship support, one key area of difference, according to the report, is that "startups in Toronto receive 71% less funding than SV startups. The capital deficiency exists both before and after product market fit."

While that may sound like grim news, it actually provides a very useful roadmap for future growth. The report goes on to conclude that the current under-investment in Toronto-area startups "presents a large opportunity for investors. Moreover, "policy makers can help closing the funding gap by attracting late-stage venture funds through tax breaks and incentives, and investor-friendly policies."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Startup Ecosystem Report

There is a certain honesty about the startup social platform Wantster: refreshing, useful or perhaps abrupt, depending on your point of view.

Wantster, in a nutshell, is a platform where you collect photos of things that you want, and can share them with others. Conceptually it's not unlike Pintrest, which allows you to collect and share images of things that you like—though Wantster cuts to the chase by forcing us to admit that the things that we like are also often the things that we covet.

It will strike some as crass, perhaps—and others as an incredibly helpful time-saver during the holiday shopping season. (The company's tagline: "Create lists of the things you want and follow others to see what they want for any gift giving occasion." No Santa snail mail required.)

No matter your perspective, some good news in terms of the local startup scene: Wantster, which launched in April, has just closed $4 million in financing. The investment comes from Evanov Communications, an independent radio broadcaster which operates several stations in Toronto (among them the multilingual AM530 and Proud FM 103.9) and several more across the country.

Wantster's frankness may be tapping into something: the company says that "well over" 500,000 wanted products have been posted since the launched. While the company's co-founders haven't divulged what how they plan to use the investment, it seems that at least some of the arrangement includes using the old-media radio stations to develop interest in the new-technology digital platform.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Wantster

Anyone who has had the frustrating experience of telling the nice automated voice at the other end of a customer service help line "no, I meant change of address" over and over again, only to be prompted to repeat themselves, knows that speech recognition software still has a long way to go.

Even more difficult is getting software to not only recognize what you're saying, but translate it into another language. The most advanced translation programs still only get it right about 75 per cent of the time—they still get one word out of every four or five wrong.

Until now, at least. Last month Microsoft's chief research officer, Rick Rashid, unveiled what appears to be a breakthrough in speech recognition and translation software. The new software, which provides simultaneous translation, not only cuts down substantially on errors, it mimics the voice of the original speaker when it produces the translation. (Video of a key part of Rashid's presentation is online; the voice recognition and translation demonstration begins at the seven minute mark.)

The breakthrough is based on research conducted by Microsoft and the University of Toronto, which was published in 2010.

"By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks," writes Rashid in a recent blog post, "which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods."

Essentially, this works by processing a great deal more data than previous speech recognition programs had done, allowing the software to more closely mimic the human mind in its attempt to process language. The result is a 30 per cent decrease in errors, according to Rashid, and a much more natural translation experience. That is, if hearing your own voice speaking another language, one you don't even know, doesn't freak you out.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Rick Rashid, Chief Research Officer, Microsoft

Steve Cosman was out travelling in Peru with some friends, and ran up against a very ordinary, very modern problem. Everyone had photographs of their trip, but they couldn't easily exchange them. It's a glitch many of us encounter on our own, even—without adding other people into the mix. We have photos on camera memory cards, on our phones, uploaded to our Facebook profiles, on old computers we haven't thrown out yet, all images we want to keep, often taken at the same time, but none of them in the same place or accessible in the same way.

Enter MyShoebox, a Toronto start-up that launched less than a month ago and has already racked up more than six million uploads.

MyShoebox is, as its name suggests, a virtual shoebox—a place where you can upload all your photos from any camera or device, search and flip through them easily, and store them securely. It's a way for people "to be able to unify their photo collections" to prevent them "becoming fragmented over multiple devices," explains co-founder Kalu Kalu. He and Cosman started MyShoebox in the hope of helping us make better use of our images as technologies multiply. The app is available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Androd operating systems, and provides free, unlimited storage for photos up to a certain resolution (1024 pixels). A pro version costs $5/month, allowing users to store photos at full resolution.

With several thousand people signed up already, MyShoebox is "definitely looking to hire," Kalu says. In particular, their current three person team is looking for engineers.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Kalu Kalu, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, MyShoebox

As more and more of us live in cities, the challenges of maintaining urban environments multiply. The Centre for Urban Energy at Ryerson University is dedicated to studying some of these issues, ranging from renewable energy sources that are scaled for cities to building techniques which reduce our need for energy in the first place. To help develop the community of people working to address these challenges, the CUE has just launched a new accelerator program: i-CUE.

The Innovation Centre for Urban Energy is a business incubator—essentially an innovation lab within the centre—that will provide support for up to 10 projects at a time. Ryerson students and faculty, and members of the community at large, are all able to apply. The goal is to provide those with a "mature business idea" some tools to help get it off the ground, says executive director Dan McGillvray, which can mean anything from guidance for writing government grant applications to help overcoming technical challenges.

If a proposed project fits within the centre's scope and makes a convincing case, i-CUE will offer three months of free lab support to develop a business plan. If things are moving well, you might get another three months, McGillvray says (albeit with a bit of "pain" in the form of paying to offset some of the lab's costs). On the other hand, "you might be asked to go." It is, he says, "a fail fast model... It's not a lab where you will live forever; it's a lab where you will graduate out... into another location—[because] now you're business."

Four companies are currently being incubated at i-CUE. Among them is one project led by Ryerson students aimed at educating the public about energy conversation, and another developing public charging stations for mobile devices.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Souce: Dan McGillivray, Executive Director, Innovation Centre for Urban Energy

Every year leaders from the venture capital, communications and media industries gather for the Canadian Innovation Exchange, a one-day forum dedicated to the country's innovation economy. (This year's CIX takes place in a couple of weeks—at the MaRS Discovery District on November 27.) And every year, a panel of experts selects the CIX Top 20—leading technology-based companies who are showcased at the forum. This year's list has just come out, and there's good news for local entrepreneurs: about half the finalists are Toronto-based companies.

Finalists are divided into two categories: information and communication technology, and digital media. Among the Toronto finalists in the first category are B2B marketers Influitive, audience engagement platform Viafoura and consumer goods software makers Nulogy.

Among the rising stars in the digital media category are liveblogging company ScribbleLive and e-commerce platform Shopcastr. We profiled Shopcastr just a few months ago, when they closed $1 million in new funding.

The other Toronto CIX Top 20 are:
·         Sitescout, which helps small businesses manage their digital advertising;
·         Language learning tool PenyoPal;
·         Employee engagement platform Employtouch;
·         Jibestream Interactive Media, which develops digital wayfinding systems (including 3-D directors for Pearson airport).

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Canadian Innovation Exchange

As Canada's population ages and baby boomers make increasing demands for healthcare support that allows them to live vibrantly and independently, research into technologies and therapies that can provide better quality of life for seniors is ramping up.

The lastest announcement: the federal government is investing nearly $1 million in five research projects aiming to improve seniors' activity levels, including two based in Toronto, at York and the University of Toronto. The projects are funded via the European Research Area on Ageing (ERA-AGE), a Europe-based research program; Canadian participants will be working with colleagues from several European nations, as well as Israel. The overall funding envelope for the projects is approximately $5 million.

The projects tackle a range of issues in seniors' day-to-day lives, ranging from assistive technologies to navigating the complexities of urban life. Toronto researchers will be working on two projects—each of which will receive about $225,000—Healthy Ageing in Residential Places (York University), and Hearing, Remembering and Living Well: Paying Attention to Challenges of Older Adults in Noisy Environments (University of Toronto).

The York University project is exploring ways to use technological supports in the home to allow seniors to maintain both physical and mental activity. The University of Toronto initiative is looking at methods of helping seniors communicate effectively in noisy environments, when it can be harder to make sense of a great deal of incoming auditory information.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Office of Alice Wong, Minister of State  for Seniors

The Hospital for Sick Children and MaRS Innovation have partnered to create a new vehicle for commercializing new medical technologies.

Bedside Clinical Systems was formed in March of 2011, with a focus on developing tools that help with clinical care for children. After some pilot studies they are now launching their first tool: Bedside Paediatric Early Warning System (BedsidePEWS).

BedsidePEWS is based on research conducted by a Sick Kids scientist, Dr. Christopher Parshuram, who has a particular interest in patient safety. For several years, says Bedside Clinical Systems CEO Rajesh Sharma, he had been "developing a tool to be an early indicator for kids who might be in danger of cadiac arrest."

That tool is deceptively simple: provide a way for nurses and clinicians to input a patient's vital signs and key health indicators into a monitoring system whenever they are checked, and use those inputs to create a single numerical score to assess the severity of the patient's condition. The advantage, however is that  "it takes the subjectivity out of it," Sharma says. Clinicians no longer need to make tricky judgement calls about, say, whether to wake up an attending physician at 3am if they're not sure whether a patient needs urgent attention. They have an objective measure to rely on.

BCS currently has two full-time staff, and plans to grow to a team of between four to six next year, as they hire for both technical and marketing positions to help find and support customers for this new tool. MaRS Innovation works with member institutions to commercialize "market-disruptive intellectual property."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Rajesh Sharma, CEO, Bedside Clinical Systems

Last week Canada's Governor General came to town, to offically open the Centre for Research in Image-Guided Therapeutics at Sunnybrook.

The new $160 million lab—official acronym: CeRIGT, pronounced "see right" (since they focus on imaging technologies)—was built with the help of $75 million from the federal government's Canada Foundation for Innovation.

About 80 per cent of health-related research happens in hospital-based enterprises, says Dr. Michael Julius, vice president of the Sunnybrook Research Institute, but because a hospital's first and primary focus is providing care to its patients, that research "often gets lost." The new lab's goal is to bring the clinical and research worlds closer together, and foster opportunities to use research to have a more immediate impact on the care that's provided.

"This infrastructure is novel," he says, "in that it is a physical plant that brings our science and their teams, and our clinicians and their teams, all working together shoulder to shoulder."

Julius gives a few examples of the kinds of collaborations that are already in progress, calling them harbingers of what's to come. One such instance: researchers who are monitoring cancer therapies as they are administered in real time, enabling clinicians to decide whether a particular course of treatment is working within a week rather than by running tests on patients three or four months later.

The lab includes 30 private sector partners, and will create opportunities for about 10 or 15 new principal researchers, each of whom may have a team of up to 10 trainees and assistants.

Author: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Dr. Michael Julius, Vice President, Sunnybrook Research Institute

A problem that we all know about: most mainstream media outlets are currently worried about their futures, facing a dangerous mix of declining revenue, audience fragmentation and eroding public trust.

A problem we discuss less often: the education we offer aspiring journalists hasn't fully caught up to these developments.

Most journalism schools still offer the sort of training they did 10 or 20 years ago: the basics of composition, interviewing, fact-checking and so forth. They've added some instruction to accomodate changes in technology—students can now learn about best practices in social media, for instance—but they haven't adapted to one of the most basic shifts in the industry: newsrooms are relying more on freelancers, ess on staff reporters, to fill their pages and broadcasts. Thus, while graduates of these traditional programs may be able to produce good stories, they haven't been trained to market or sell them to editors—which many, lacking a permanent full-time job, quickly discover is a necessity.

A new fellowship program at U of T is hoping to reverse the traditional order of operations (learn to be a journalist, then acquire a beat and develop subject-specific knowledge): begin with professionals who already have subject-matter expertise, and teach them how to use that knowledge to launch careers or side-businesses in journalism. Because participants already have some professional experience and standing, says program director Robert Steiner, the goal is to "make it about the work, not the degree." This means that participants are focusing on learning how to generate story ideas, pitch them to outlets, and make the most of their expertise by actually doing all of those things (with the help of expert guidance)—not at a university newspaper or through internships, but by pitching major media outlets just a few weeks after starting the program. Early signs are promising: so far one participant has written what became the lead story in the Star's GTA section last week; several others have been published in national newspapers as well.

Steiner freely admits this program won't save journalism as an industry—nor is that his goal ("one of my most liberating moments in this whole experience is when I realized that I wasn't out to save newspapers") but he does hope it will attract some interesting new talent to the field at a time when traditional training methods may not quite be doing the trick.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Robert Steiner, Director of the Fellowship in Glorbal Journalism at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

Every so often—and especially at this time of year, when many of us are ordering presents and holiday gear—you come home to one of those annoying notices flapping on your door. Missed delivery.

To help shoppers (and the businesses trying to send them their goods) avoid that frustration, a new network of parcel pick-up stations has just launched in the GTA called BufferBox. There will be eight stations in Toronto by the end of this week, with several more elsewhere in the region. Another 10 are expected by year's end, with the goal of expanding nationwide.

To use the service, someone signs up with BufferBox and selects a home location—one of the pick-up stations that have been installed—and then provides that address to a company when ordering items for delivery. When the parcel arrives, BufferBox puts the package in a locker within the station, and then sends you an email with single-use PIN, which you use to open the box and retrieve your item.

The initial set of locations is geared to commuters and transit users: in its first partnership, BufferBox is working with Metrolinx and has installed parcel boxes in five GO stations (Union, Clarkson, Burlington, Oakville, and Port Credit). Three other parcel stations are in 7-Eleven locations, and in the near future, BufferBox also hopes to announce a supermarket partner.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Brad Moggach, Sales & Marketing Director, BufferBox

"Just a year ago, Ontario’s Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress... published a report that quantifiably demonstrated that in per capital GDP, measured in comparison to 16 other large states and provinces in North America, Ontario ranked 15th. A lack of innovation combined with lower productivity is a significant problem for everyone—especially in Ontario. No amount of handwringing will solve it. No amount of cheerleading should make us believe we are doing better than what we really are. And no amount of naysaying should stop us from tackling this problem head on."

Stark language from Anne Sado, president of George Brown College, who addressed the Empire Club earlier this week. She was there to present findings from a new George Brown study called Toronto Next: Return on Innovation, which surveyed more thn 300 Toronto-area employers to learn more about the state of innovation locally. Sado wasn't just interested in describing problems, however—she was much more interested in proposing some solutions.

There are reasons to be hopeful that the situation can change. For starters, the issue isn't a lack of funds. Companies have the money; they are just risk-averse. "GTA businesses are more interested in productivity than innovation or creativity," said Sado, suggesting that what we need to effect is a cultural shift in our understanding of what innovation is, exactly, and why it's so important.

At George Brown, she explained, they defined innovation as "the process of creating social or economic value from something that already exists"—a contrast with the businesses they surveyed, which defined innovation in terms of novelty (creating new processes or products or thinking in new ways). Because of this definition, Sado believes, those businesses don't see any strong or direct links between innovation and productivity—most new inventions both cost a lot and fail, after all—and thus they don't value innovation enough.

In her speech Sado emphasized that one major key to advancing innovation is collaboration, and especially collaboration between post-secondary institutions and the private sector. This both facilitates the development of those iterative improvements, and mitigates some of the concerns about risk, since various parties can each contribute in their areas of expertise, and work together to improve products before they are brought to market.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Anne Sado, President, George Brown College