Innovation + Job News

Toronto-based Public Mobile launched its cell phone service in May 2010 and by the end of 2011, had approximately 200,000 customers, targeting the cost-conscious end of the mobile voice and data market. The still has those budget-wise customers in mind as this month it announced it would be expanding to provide two new services: music downloading and financial transaction services.

Unveiled last week, Siren Music gives Public Mobile customers unlimited music downloads to their phones for a montly flat rate. (Currently the company offers only Android phones.) Participating music labels include major players Universal Music Canada, Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada, which will give customers a wide array of songs from which to choose—one million at launch, and about five million later this year.

Public Cash Services, meanwhile, provides financial transactions such as cheque cashing, and also offers a prepaid MasterCard. These services will "give customers the ability to make unlimited bill payments for just $5 per month and money transfers overseas at industry leading rates," stated CEO Alek Krstajic in a news release. These discount services are aimed at those who might not be the best candidates for a credit check, such as students and immigrants who haven't established a financial history in Canada, and are available at 37 locations.

The diversification comes as Public Mobile also prepares to bid in the next wireless spectrum auction, in response to the increasing demand for smartphones and data services among its customers.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Alek Krstajic, CEO, Public Mobile

While solar cells are becoming more common across North America, we are far from making the most of this green energy source. One challenge is increasing the number of people who choose solar over other energy sources; the other is that the solar cells most commonly in use come with several significant problems.

The dominant kind of solar cell right now is silicon, which itself is quite difficult to manufacture and relatively expensive to produce. Moreover, the solar cells which result are more fragile than the industry would like: they can be shattered by something like a severe hail storm, which limits their appeal and use. 

Among solar researchers, therefore, the big goal right now is to come up with something that is easier and cheaper to produce, and also more durable. One such candidate is what's called a colloidal quantum dot solar cell, which meets those goals—but comes with its own liability, At its current early stage of development, CQD cells are much less efficient than silicon solar cells.

Recently, however, researchers at the University of Toronto and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have made a breakthrough on that front, setting a record for producing the most efficient CQD cell ever.

Solar cells need to reach about 10 to 15 per cent efficiency in order to be commercially viable. As recently as 10 months ago CDQ cells were at about five per cent efficiency; now researchers, under the leadership of U of T engineering professor Ted Sargeant, have hit the 7 per cent mark—a 37 per cent increase in efficiency, and an important step along the way to make these much cheaper cells ready for the market. The results were published in the July 29, 2012 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Liam Mitchell, Communications & Media Relations Strategist, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, University of Toronto

Porter Airlines is known for its fresh approach to air travel: rather than paring down service and customer experience elements as other airlines have done in recent years, with cuts in everything from baggage allowances to free meals to the legroom between seats, Porter has gone in the other direction. With stylized staff uniforms, a user-friendly website and perks like free coffee and shortbread in their airport lounge, Porter has attracted customers by trying to make the experience of flying more fun and more friendly.

Based on Toronto's small island airport,  however, Porter is an airline with a fairly limited geographic range. Currently it offers flights to 19 cities in the eastern half of North America; running long-haul flights out of the island airport isn't a viable option. So last week Porter announced its first interline partnership, with Qatar Airways. The agreement will allow Qatar passengers who begin their journeys in Doha to fly to Porter destinations as part of a single itinerary, connecting in either Montreal or Washington, DC.

"We had a lot of airlines who had approached us over the years," says Brad Cicero, communications manager for Porter. But the airline had to do some work before it could enter into any such arrangements, upgrading its back-end systems to handle more complex itineraries and monitor bookings effectively. Once Porter was ready to look for partners, it focused on other airlines that shared its customer-friendly approach.

"Qatar was always high on the list," explains Cicero. "We like their approach to service." (Qatar Airways was ranked the world's best airline last month, for the second year in a row, by Business Insider.) It's the first of several partnerships the airline is planning; Cicero says "anywhere from three to five could be in place" by the end of 2012. 

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Brad Cicero,  Manager, Communications & Public Affairs, Porter Airlines

Both Toronto and Canada punch above their demographic weight when it comes to Internet activity. As evidenced by our eager involvement in everything from Facebook to Flickr (Toronto has some of the highest participation rates on both platforms), we are a city and a country that has embraced the digital world enthusiastically.

Hoping to make that online experience better is CloudFlare, a company that provides web optimization to its thousands of clients, and which opened its first Canadian data centre in Toronto this month.

CloudFlare provides a suite of tools and services that help its clients' websites run more effectively and efficiently: everything from improving page load times to providing detailed analytics to blocking malicious attacks, says Joshua Motta, who is in charge of special projects for CloudFlare. For instance, CloudFlare will take information from client servers (think larger files that can slow a website down, like images) and set it up at their distributed data centres; when you load that client's website, some of the information is coming from CloudFlare's local data centre, making the page load more quickly for you and reducing strain on the client's servers.

Canada, says the company, is their seventh largest source of traffic worldwide. Considering the size of our population, that's substantial. The downtown Toronto data centre will help CloudFlare better serve Canadian web users, which are concentrated, unsurprisingly, in the GTA.

"Where we locate our data centres is typically in the most critical data centre of any given region," says Motta, "because that is where there is the greatest connectivity."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Joshua Motta, Special Projects, CloudFlare

It was just three months ago that we first wrote about ShopLocket, when the startup launched a beta version of their ecommerce platform. It turns out co-founders Katherine Hague and Andrew Louis were onto something with their idea.

It's an embeddable tool that you can add to your website, blog, Facebook page—just about anywhere you might be creating content online—and sell something quickly and easily, without needing to go to a third party site (like eBay) or take on the trouble and expense of setting up a full-fledged online storefront. ShopLocket announced recently that they've closed their first round of seed funding: $1 million from several venture capital groups and private investors.

Hague and Louis's first step, upon learning that financing would be forthcoming: staffing up. When they started, it was just the two of them, plus a paid intern who served as a community manager. They've since added two positions—one business development and one software engineer—and will have a graphic designer joining them in the fall. Louis says they also plan to add some contract positions.

"We get the biggest bang for the buck by using the money to hire people," says Louis, "but now there's also room to start using paid advertising and promotions." Then he adds, intriguingly: "The key is finding ways to make the most of a still pretty limited budget. We can't do TV advertising, but we can spend a bit of money cooking up a promotional stunt."

Louis says it's still early days for startup economy here. "Canada has had some companies do really well, but nothing at the scale of Facebook or PayPal. So generally, [we found fewer] people able to help a startup out at the very early stages, both in terms of early investment or mentorship."

But that's getting better and has been balanced out by the fact that the region remains relatively strong. It's one of the reasons ShopLocket was able to go from beta to financing so quickly, in fact. The company is partly financed by US investors who were "actively looking outside of their own country" for opportunities, and found Canada's stable economy appealing.

Toronto also has "an educated and talented population, and access to large markets" Louis points out—both very useful when you're trying to grow quickly. 

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Andrew Louis, Co-founder, ShopLocket

City Hall faces many challenges: some huge and headline-grabbing, like improving a strained transit system. Some much more fine-grained and less noticed—but no less essential to the residents who rely on them.

Falling into the latter category is the logistical problem of distributing social assistance to individuals who, in virtue of their very need for that assistance, may be hardest to reach. Torontonians of all backgrounds receive help from Ontario Works, but among them are many who do not have basic logistical supports, like a bank account. Effectively supporting these people is one of the smaller-scale but persistent problems that vexes municipal governments.

Leading the way with an innovative new approach to handling this challenge: the City of Toronto, in conjunction with local company SelectCore, provider of cashless financial services to what it describes as "underserved markets." Together this month they announced the details of a new system for delivering Ontario Works. Called the City Services Benefit Card, the smart cards will replace cheques for recipients who don't have a bank account.

It's a system that, if all goes according to plan, will benefit everyone involved: the city will save on administrative costs, recipients will save on steep cheque-cashing fees and a local company will benefit from a deal that is expected to yield between $15 and $18 million in business during its initial 42-month term.

"The City of Toronto is really leading the charge" with this system, says Derek Robertson, executive vice-president of compliance for SelectCore. It is the first city in Canada, and possibly in North America, to move to this kind of paperless system. (A few cities in the United States use debit cards, but none that Robertson knows of use what we'll have here: EMV chip cards.) Any concerns that the residents who need to use these cards might run into trouble have quickly been allayed, says Robertson; since the cards were introduced in mid-July, the company "has not experienced a significant spike of customer service calls."

The company currently has about 50 staff, including some recently hired new information technology and account management staff to meet the demands of the partnership with Toronto. It will be, Robertson hopes, the first of many public sector contracts, as governments increasingly look to streamline their operations.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Derek Robertson, Executive Vice-President of Compliance, SelectCore

The GTA has always had investors ready to put their money behind local startups, but that community has never been more organized, more communicative, or more active, says Bryan J. Watson, executive director of the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO).

NACO recently released the results of a national survey it conducted to assess the level of activity among angel investors in Canada; they found that a whopping 80 per cent of all investments made in 2011 across the country were made in Ontario, with a large percentage of that activity taking place in the Toronto region. (NACO won't provide city-by-city breakdowns due to privacy concerns; the value of some specific deals might be identifiable if they did so.)

This is a marked increase over 2010, when 62 per cent of investments were made in Ontario.

"The biggest difference," Watson says, "is that the GTA [investment] community is much more organized say four years ago—even a year ago." It's only in the last year that angel investment "has gone from an activity that was one promoted... to one that started to occur naturally." (The full study results are available online [PDF].)

The most attractive area for investment, unsurprisingly, is in the information and communications technology sector, which Watson says continues to be "pretty hot." Following on Ontario's green energy push there is "still a lot of interest in clean tech—often with enabling technology, often with a little bit of web and control systems."

The technological theme emerged again in the third sector Watson cited as being attractive for those looking to invest GTA startups: medical technology: "Specficially the devices and diagnostics side of things." Toronto investors are also expressing "a lot of interest in web-enabled technology or big data tecnology—using online infrastructure and analytics" to develop new tools and platforms.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Bryan J. Watson, Executive Director, National Angel Capital Organization

For the first time in history, more people throughout the globe and in Canada live in cities than in rural areas. Cities are becoming more prominent in policy discussions, in setting environmental standards and in shaping the day-to-day lives of their billions of inhabitants. Cities, for their part, are still learning how best to cope with these demographic shifts.

Helping us to understand how cities work, and to explore the innovations which might make them work better, is a new institute that will open this fall at the University of Toronto.

The idea for the cross-disciplinary Global Cities Institute started about six months ago, says newly appointed director Patricia McCarney. The institute will be housed in a new campus building that includes a state-of-the-art visualization theatre, and the anchor activity will be work surrounding the Global City Indicators Facility (GCIF), which was created in 2009. GCIF's goal is to create a standardized "authoritative compilation of validated, self-reported, worldwide urban data"—information which allows researchers to compare cities across a large number of metrics. Until GCIF, says McCarney, "there [was] no common platform for cities to have a set of indicators." GCIF was originally funded by the World Bank (which chose Toronto to be the home of this indicators work) and has grown rapidly; it now has 200 cities belonging to it worldwide.

With that growth, McCarney says, came the need to process the growing cache of data: "We decided that we were at a turning point—we started to think about visualization of the data, to build analytics around the data and to start to think about how to build research into the university and to start to think about how to improve city mangement and city governance." And so the Global Cities Institute was born.

Governance doesn't just mean governments: McCarney sees international agencies, banks "and increasingly also industry partners" as playing a role in the cities of the future.

As for its location in Toronto, McCarney says:  "I work in cities around the world and they always look to Toronto as a successful city, they always look to Toronto as a demonstration of what is good in cities. Despite [the fact] that people complain—that we're slow, or whatever—we're still seen as having one of the best quality of life, high efficiency in services, creative talent, innovation. We're a great place to have an innovation."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Patricia McCarney, Director, Global Cities Institute

For years, teachers and professors have struggled with suppressing the use of cellphones in classrooms. As the phones got smarter, students got more absorbed, and the fight against distracton grew only more challenging as laptops and tablets became ubiquitous, too.

Going with the flow instead of against it is software company Top Hat Monocle, which was started—fittingly—by two students as a graduate project. Described as a "classroom response system," Top Hat provides instructors with a suite of tools they can use both during class and after to make learning more interactive, and provide students with real-time feedback. A professor can use it, for instance, to administer a quiz at the end of a lecture, and both she and her students could see the results instantaneously, while still in class together.

Top Hat formally launched in 2010, and secured its first found of financing—$1.5 million—in November 2011. Last week it announced a major new round of funding: $8 million, drawn from several venture capital investors. The significant influx will help the company accomplish two key goals, says chief revenue officer Andrew D'Souza.

"One, we're really hoping to expand the functionality and increase the interactivity." (One such expansion: in the fall the company will be adding the capacity to "turn your in-class experience into a competetive type game," where students challenge each other to test their familiarity with course material.) Second, says D'Souza, the financing will "really drive the sales and marketing." More precisely, the aim is to grow from a current base of 200,000 users to one million users in the next two years.

Top Hat currently has 35 staff, and is now hiring at the rate of 2 to 3 positions a week; the target is to hit 80 staff in total by year's end. The majority of those positions will be at the company's home base here in Toronto, where they do product development and are hiring "aggressively," particularly on the engineering side. The company also has a distributed sales team, and a small office in San Francisco; staffing in those operations will be growing as well.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Andrew D'Souza, Chief Revenue Officer, Top Hat Monocle

The Centre for Social Innovation wasn't, as it happens, looking for additional opportunities to grow.

CSI, which offers shared spaces geared to small- and medium-sized social innovation organizations, started out with one facility on Spadina, in 2004, and had been adding rapidly to that: they bought a building in the Annex in 2010, expanding to a second location, and are currently implementing plans for a third site, as part of the massive Regent Park revitalization effort. They had a fair bit on their plates already.

But then came the call from New York. A real estate company had recently purchased, for nearly $1 billion, the Starrett-Lehigh building. At 2.3 million square feet, it's one of the 10 largest office buildings in Manhattan. They were looking for innovative tennants, they wanted CSI and they weren't going to take no for an answer.

The developers are trying, says CSI CEO Tonya Surman, "to find a way to bring some magic and life to the building—to do something that had more life, more energy, more community." Slated to open this winter, CSI Starrett-Leigh will offer mentoring, networking and tennant support services similar to its Toronto locations.

It's something that CSI, after eight years developing its co-location model—one which incorporates community animation and other engagement tools—is uniquely equipped to do. And it is, she adds, a model that is very characteristic of this city.

"I do think that Toronto and Canada—we're better at collaboration than most other cities and countries. I think that there's something in our DNA that's related to our history, our diversity.... We've had to learn to work across differences better than others. The DNA of collaboration runs in our blood."

"Toronto has played a leadership role," Surman says, in exploring new economic models that rely on innovation. It's leadership, clearly, that others are eager to benefit from.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Tonya Surman, CEO, Centre for Social Innovation

Last August we reported that 500px, the explosively popular Toronto-based photo-sharing platform, was ramping up, growing to eight staff members, up from just two. That, as it turns out, was just the beginning.

The company is now up to 22 staff members, and plans to grow to 30 or 40 by year's end. On top of that, 500px has just made its first acquisition, last week announcing it had entered into an agreement to purchase another Toronto company, Algo Anywhere.

Algo is a young company—founded just 10 months ago—that has been working on applying academic research in artificial intelligence to real-world online environments. The first major tool they developed is called Recommender, a platform for providing personalized recommendations for customers on e-commerce and other sites. It's this expertise in personalizing a website user's experience that caught 500px's eye, says Oleg Gutsol, the company's CEO.

"Algo's technology was very attractive to us because it will allow us to greatly enhance the experience of our users on the 500px platform. We will be able to deliver better image search and discovery results, display more relevant content, personalize photo recommendations for browsing and purchase."

The financial details of the acquisition haven't been disclosed, but the deal does include job offers for Algo's staff. Algo's principals, Zach Aysan and Adam Gravitis, will become chief data scientist and chief software architect, respectively. 500px is also currently looking to hire a user experience designer and several software developers.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Oleg Gutsol, CEO, 500px

Like many startups, Shopcastr is learning to roll with the punches.

Founder Matt O'Leary began his adventures in online shopping experimentation in July 2011, with an idea called Hipsell. His idea was to create a "beautiful shopping experience in the classified space"—essentially to "disrupt" existing sites like Kijiji and Craigslist and help users "unleash the power of [their] basements." What he quickly learned, however, is that the stock in people's basements runs out very quickly; it's retailers who have the capacity to meet ongoing consumer demand.

At least, they have the products to do so. Putting those products online, however, isn't the easiest task. Order satisfaction, suppy management, keeping listings updated—there are a host of new tasks that come with opening an online version of your shop, tasks which can be difficult and expensive for small retailers to manage. And so after conducting a series of customer-discovery interviews, O'Leary changed his approach and developed Shopcastr, a platform that enables small Toronto retailers to easily conduct online sales. He's racked up more than 600 participating stores so far, with the help of an initial $150,000 round of seed funding.

Now Shopcastr is planning to take its model of hyperlocal online shopping to new cities. They've just announced $1 million in new financing from a number of investors, including initial backer Mantella Venture Partners (MVP) and the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund.

First on the expansion list: sites for New York and San Francisco, which O'Leary is aiming to do by the end of the year. His next Canadian target is Vancouver.

To accomodate this growth, Shopcastr is hiring, hoping to double their current staff complement of six within the year.

"We are in desperate need of some additional support on the tech side more than anything else," O'Leary says; they are looking for at least one more developer and some design talent to start in the coming months.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Matt O'Leary, Founder & CEO, Shopcastr

Toronto's position as a centre for game development strengthened again this month, as Rockstar Games announced it would consolidate its Canadian operations with a new facility in Oakville. The studio will also be adding more than 50 jobs.

Some of those positions are transfers from Vancouver, where Rockstar is shutting down; others are new hires to accommodate future growth. Among the list of positions they are currently seeking to fill: programmers, animators and visual effects artists.

The Toronto studio of the major game-maker has been involved in the development of several key titles, including several installments of Grand Theft Auto, and most recently, Max Payne 3.

The Ontario government has provided support and tax incentives to help Rockstar with the move, Minister of Economic Development and Innovation Brad Duguid announced via a statement to the press, though the financial details were not disclosed.

The move to Toronto comes hot on the heels of Ubisoft's expansion in Toronto. While we've been known for the strength of our independent gaming community, as well as for training excellent animators, it's only recently that major gaming studios have shown such a keen interest in the region.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Rockstar Games

Shipping isn't, let's face it, a particularly rivetting subject. Parcels and waybills and tracking numbers are hardly the stuff entrepreneurs' dreams are made of. They are, however, necessary in every business: shipping is one of those mundane but utterly essential services companies need in order to function effectively.

Responding to that need is FedEx, which officially opened a new 89,000-square-foot facility in Markham earlier this month. Markham—itself getting used to its new role as a city, having just graduated from being a town—is now home to nearly 900 high-tech companies and 400 other company headquarters.

Its needs, in short, are growing.

"It's not by any mistake that we found ourselves in Markham," says Jason Anderson, a spokesperson for FedEx. "A lot of business [in the GTA], we're finding. is coming directly out of the Markham area." That business will be served by 150 staff working at the new site, which has been in development for 18 months and is built to accommodate further growth in the coming years.

While it's not yet clear just what kinds of companies will be most contributing to that growth, it is certainly the case that when shipping companies get busier, it's a sign of economic health. As Anderson puts it: "FedEx is a good economic bellwether."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Jason Anderson, Media Relations, FedEx Express Canada

Sometimes you need a certain app for your mobile device: a photo editor, say, or a task manager. But how do you find the apps you don't even know you need?

Enter AppHero, a five-person startup that has just secured $1.8 million in financing to expand and enhance their service.

In brief, what AppHero does is process a range of information about your and your online activities, and use that to suggest apps that might interest you, even though it might never have occured to you to look for them. If your Facebook activity suggests that you like hiking, for instance, and your search engine activity indicates you've just booked a vacation, AppHero might put those two pieces of information together and suggest an app which maps hiking trails near your holiday destination. And then, based on whether you choose to go ahead and download the suggested app or ignore it, AppHero refines its future recommendations accordingly.

It's a process that company founder Jordan Satok likes to call "serendipitous discovery," and it has piqued the interest of several venture capital firms who are providing this round of seed money.

"The financing will help us attract some of the best people," says Satok, "amazing machine-learning experts that we're hoping to join us." (Machine learning, a subdiscipline in the field of artifical intelligence, focuses on designing computers that can improve their performance as they receive new data.) Those experts will help AppHero increase the quality of the recommendations it provides, fine-tuning the algorithms it relies on further. The seed funding may also allow for expansion to other platforms (AppHero is currently available for the iPhone and iPad).

AppHero is currently seeking an engineer to join their team; other job opportunities are expected to follow soon.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Jordan Satok, Founder and CEO, AppHero