digital : Innovation + Job News

Earlier this year we wrote about JOLT, a technology accelerator created by the folks at MaRS Discovery District. Back then, executive director Susan McGill explained that the goal was to facilitate the rapid and efficient development of startups by funding and mentoring them in groups, rather than one by one.

Last week McGill unveiled the first group of startups that have been selected to participate in JOLT. Each will receive $30,000 in seed funding, as well as work space, design and development support, and guidance from an advisor. The participanting start-ups are:
•  tout.it, a social media platform aimed at sports fans
•  SlingRide, a tool for connecting drivers and passengers who want to cut costs by ridesharing
•  eProf, which creates "interactive virtual classrooms"
•  Venngage, a user-friendly tool for creating infographics
•  ShelfLife, a socially-driven e-commerce platform for collectibles
•  Greengage, which wants to help employers help their employees become more environmentally friendly

"These startups beat out dozens of other applicants from all over Canada," wrote McGill in a note introducing the first JOLT group last week.

In a few months they'll try to build on that success, taking what they learn at MaRS in order to pitch venture capitalists on the services and products they've been refining.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Susan McGill, Executive Director, JOLT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was just in September that Wattpad announced it had secured $3.5 million in Series A financing. Now, nine months later, they've closed another round of funding—a whopping $17.3 million.

"We still have a lot of money in the bank," says Allen Lau, Wattpad's co-founder. "The [original] plan was to raise Series B next year, but the traffic was growing so quickly that we thought it was a good time to raise a bigger round and secure the future."

Wattpad is a social media platform for sharing stories; it currently hosts five million user-generated pieces of writing in 25 languages. A key focus for the company and its users is fostering relationships between writers and readers: authors engage with their audience while developing story outlines, for instance, or seek feedback as they publish a novel in chapters. The growth was so strong, explains Lau, that "we ended up spending time and effort in sustaining activities—adding more servers, making sure our infrastructure was scaling up—rather than improving the product per se."

The Series B financing, spearheaded by San Francisco's Khosla Ventures (also including former Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang and current investors Union Square Ventures and Golden Venture Partners), will enable Wattpad to focus on enhancing its product, with a particular emphasis on the streamlining the user interface and boosting social functions on its mobile apps. They'll be doubling their current staff complement, going to 40 from 20, and are currently seeking a talent acquisition specialist manager to help them manage that growth. Lau says they will be primarily seeking developers, designers and community managers.

Citing an old business maxim, he adds: "The best time to raise money is when you don't desperately need the money."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Allen Lau, CEO and co-founder, Wattpad

Kobo last made headlines in November 2011, when it was sold to Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc. In its first major venture under new ownership, the Toronto-based eReader company is set to launch a self-publishing platform at the end of this month.

The venture, called Kobo Writing Life, aims to help writers manage their own publications more effectively, as well as retain a greater percentage of royalties than with competitors currently in the market. Writing Life will provide authors with real-time analytics and data to help them fine-tune their offerings, via a metrics dashboard; users will then be able to tweak specific elements, like cover art or price in individual markets, on the fly. Writers will receive 70 per cent of the royalties from any publications priced between $1.99 and $12.99, and 45 per cent from books priced outside of that range.

Mark Lefebvre, Kobo's director of publisher and author relations, told us that Writing Life began when Kobo asked writers "What can we do to make it easier, not only to get into the catalogue but to become more successful?" One key reply, he says, was provide more information: writers want to know how their publications are doing in as much detail as possible.

Lefebvre sees three kinds of writers especially benefiting from the new platform: what he calls "the Terry Fallises," who have fully developed works but can't get an agent or publisher; writers who have traditional publishers but have some pieces (say shorts stories or novellas) that don't fall into their usual type of writing; and writers who are already self-published in Canada and want to explore foreign markets.

Kobo began the project with just a "bare bones" staff, Lefebvre says. It's tripled over the past three months, with about 30 people in total working on Writing Life. The company is aggressively hiring staff to work both on Writing Life and other products; about 35 positions are currently open at the company.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Mark Lefebvre, Director of Publisher and Author Relations, Kobo

French video game developer Ubisoft opened a Toronto studio in September, 2010. Finally the company has released details about that studio's inaugural production: the sixth installment in the Tom Clancy video game series Splinter Cell, called Splinter Cell: Blacklist.

Unveiled at the Electronic Entertaintment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles this month, the game (whose protagonist is black-ops agent Sam Fisher) will incorporate new movement and voice recognition features. The game has been in development for two years, and is expect to launch in the spring of 2013.

When Ubisoft first launched in Toronto, it was with four staff. They are currently at 220, says communications director Heather Steele, and they plan to grow to 800 staff by 2020. She added that Ubisoft is currently hiring "in all different functions."

While Toronto is known for its indie gaming community, Ubisoft is the first major player to open up a production facility here. Steele says they draw inspiration from those independent developers, and says the company hopes to "round out" the local gaming culture with its larger game products. Until recently the Toronto studio was also working on the development of another game, Rainbow Six; they have completed their deliverables on that project and are turning their attention exclusively to Splinter Cell for the time being.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Heather Steele, Director of Communications, Ubisoft Toronto

Last week Telus announced that it would be making major investments in Ontario over the next three years: $650 million, which would support the creation of more than 900 jobs. This week the company explained what that would mean for the GTA—and it's very good news. Of that Ontario investment, $280 million and more than 600 new jobs are coming to the Toronto region.

"The positions are to help keep up with increasing client demand for Telus services, as we bring the world's fastest wireless technology 4G LTE  to Ontario," Telus's Elisabeth Napolano told us. "We need more people to service those customers." This demand comes from mobile subscribers who are seeking to do more with and on their phones: web browsing, video streaming and the like. Wireless demand is exploding as customers become used to treating their phones as mobile computers, using correspondingly more data on the go.

4G is the latest iteration of mobile communications standards, which allows for high speed Internet access on mobile devices. (Specifically, according to Telus, this means peak download speeds of up to 75 megabits per second and an average of 1,225 megabits per second.) 4G is currently available in select cities across Ontario; the just-announced funding will beef up this coverage and expand its range—the goal is to have 95 per cent of Ontarians able to access the 4G network by the time Telus completes this round of upgrades in 2014.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Elisabeth Napolano, Telus Media Relations

"Trading technology is really complex stuff," says Lynn Suderman, director of communications for Questrade, Canada's largest independent provider of online trading services. Questrade is hoping to make it easier soon, with the launch of a new suite of software in early June that will help clients make their investments more easily, and with better information at hand.

Questrade's goal is to dramatically increase usability in a software sector that is isn't known for it. On the one hand, clients need to be able to actually understand the transactions they are contemplating, since most aren't professionally trained investors. On the other, the information required to make those transactions is detailed and often hard to parse. Building software that can process all the relevant data—from various markets and exchanges, from the client's account information, and from Questrade itself—and do so in a very secure environment compounds the design issues.

The upshot, says Suderman, is that "what most platforms provide is either a very basic view, where you just get to buy and sell, or it's a patchwork of all sorts of complex pull-down menus that are meant for professional trades."

Questrade's new platforms will be available for desktops, mobile phones and tablets, and they will follow web design trends in allowing clients to completely customize their screens: change displays, modify order and placement of information, select how detailed that information is, add and subtract widgets, and more.

In order to support this platform relaunch, Questrade has been and continues to be looking for new talent. In addition to a spate of recent hires, the company currently has 11 positions to fill in Toronto, and 11 more elsewhere.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Lynn Suderman Director of Communications, Questrade

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

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

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

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

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

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