arts and culture : Innovation + Job News

"In our society there are very few people who think they are musical." 

And those people, maintains Shaun Elder, are underestimating themselves. It's why Elder, with the help of Toronto development studio Moonrider, created a new app called Piano Invention, which allows users to create their own musical compositions without relying on the traditional music vocabulary and notation. Instead, they move around objects on the screen to produce different sounds, and layer them. (Moonrider has developed a broader platform which allows users to manipulate sounds using visual information, says Elder.)

The goal, Elder says, is "trying to get people to fell like they can learn something about music without necessarily needing to spend 10 years on it." 

Elder is hoping to engage young people who love music but have not had any formal music education. Though the app's creators had originally targeted kids in the 7+ age group, they've been hearing from early users that children as young as two have been playing with it. 

"There's a million apps that will help you remix or mash-up," Elder says when we ask what makes Piano Inventions unique, "anything that's loop-based. But classical music isn't loop based, it's chord based."

As for taking inspiration from Glenn Gould: in part that is a natural hook, as the celebrated musician is such a part of local lore and a name many recognize. But it's also a function of Gould's distinctive approach to music-making. He was, says Elder, "kind of like a composer who played the piano," playing musical pieces in ways that vary substantially from how they were written (for instance, in double time). As the musical community marks what would have been Gould's 80th birthday, it's interesting to see how that unconventional approach to music-making is taking on new life, with tools Gould probably never imagined possible.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Shaun Elder, Creator, Piano Inventions

Passing through the grades of the Royal Conservatory of Music's education program is a rite of passage for many Canadians: approximately 100,000 take an exam each year. The program provides for a comprehensive syllabus and testing standards that are clear and consistent across the country. If you move from Moncton to Mississauga, you can pick up right where you left off.

Things aren't so organized south of the border: currently there's not a nationally recognized set of music education standards that provide uniformity in testing or a common curriculum. So when Carnegie Hall, which offers a wide range of music education programs, was looking to help bring some order to this state of affairs, it was natural for the organization to look to Toronto, where the RCM is based.

After some initial meetings and talks, last year RCM and Carnegie announced the creation of a new organization, called The Achievement Program. Its goal is to provide "a framework to help students and teachers set goals musically and then pursue those goals," explains RCM's academic vice-president Angela Elster, "so they can have a sense of benchmark of what they're achieve and accomplishing."

The Achievement Program provides independent music teachers with a curriculum, and will help students across the United States prepare to take RCM exams. Over time, the goal is to have RCM's grade system used widely, providing the kind of national standard that is currently missing.

Last week Minister of Labour Lisa Taitt was in Toronto to announce financial support for RCM and for its contributions to The Achievement Program. The $7.5 million in funding will go to RCM's ongoing development, and her announcement highlighted this new business venture.

Both RCM and Carnegie expect to see growth in staffing as enrollment in The Achievement Program ramps up. As Elster points out: "shared mission and values [aren't] enough—we need a sustainable business model for all three organizations."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Sources: Angela Elster, VP Academic, Royal Conservatory of Music; Sarah Johnston, Director, Weill Music Institute; David Batchelor, Chief Marketing Officer, Royal Conservatory of Music

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

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

We reported a year ago that Ryerson Digital Media Zone-based startup HitSend was a local digital company to watch as it launched its first product, SoapBox. Now the company has announced that SoapBox is the discussion platform for The Walrus magazine's new online conversation tool, The Walrus SoapBox.

The partnership with what is probably Canada's most respected magazine of ideas represents just the latest in a steady stream of announcements for HitSend. Announcing the initiative, Walrus publisher Shelly Ambrose said the SoapBox platform offered an "innovative and exciting new realm" for the magazine. 

HitSend CEO Brennan McEachran says that the combination of SoapBox, a platform designed to enable the sharing and development of ideas, and The Walrus, a magazine devoted to exploring ideas, was a natural fit. "When we met each other we noticed it right away... they're one of our more well-known clients, so we're excited."

Over the past 12 months, McEachran says they've grown from one or two clients to a roster of about 20, including Chapters/Indigo and a project with Vitamin Water launching soon. In September, a new talk platform for Ryerson students will launch university-wide.

During the past year, the HitSend team has also doubled in size to eight employees.

"Over the next couple months," McEachran says, "it's all about spreading the word and building SoapBox."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Brennan McEachran, CEO, HitSend

The Academy of the Impossible, a new "open source social enterprise" that aims to provide new educational opportunities will officially open its Junction Triangle office and educational space with a party December 16. The project was created by executive director Emily Pohl-Weary and director Jesse Hirsch using a small grant from the Atkinson Foundation and support from Hirsch's organization Metaviews.

"I've been running this writing group, Parkdale Street Writers, since 2008, and we've been camping out in other people's spaces—the library, the community centre—and we were looking for a home," says Pohl-Weary. "Jesse Hirsch does a lot of talks and workshops on media and technology and he was looking for a place where he could turn two-hour workshops into longer-term learning and action. So the Academy of the Impossible is a space for those, and we're hoping we can incubate ideas and projects for students and members."

Pohl-Weary describes the model for the school as collaborative: "The people who use it will be creators and shapers. It more like a conversation, or a learning network, than a lecture."

The Academy launches with nine faculty members, including Hirsch and Pohl-Weary, but the executive director says that the innovative arts, cultural and social project is a labour of love for all of them. As time goes on, some of the programs will generate revenue, she says, and a fundraising strategy will emerge.

The December 16 opening party runs 5pm to 9pm at 231 Wallace Ave.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Emily Pohl-Weary, executive director, Academy of the Impossible

Founded in 2006 by Toronto entrepreneurs Alan Lau and Ivan Yuen, the mobile e-reading app company Wattpad, has a written an exciting story for itself this year.

"The easiest way to explain the concept is that it's like YouTube for books," says marketing coordinator Pamela Odina by phone. "People can share their own stories. We've got partnerships with some major publishers, there's a real mix of content."

That mix now extends to more than 1,000,000 free titles, and continues to grow. As does the company. This summer, Wattpad added their 1,000,000th registered user, and have added another 300,000 since then. But Odina says even those numbers don't tell the bigger story. "Many of our users are not registered, they're just reading. We get 7-million visitors a month."

On the heels of that success, the company announced $3.5 million in financing in September and moved into new office space near Yonge and Sheppard. Odina says the company is currently focused on building its team to develop more products and platforms. From the two founders five years ago, the company started the year with six staff and just hired number 11 this month. Odina says they plan to add another nine or so staff over the next year.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Pamela Odina, Marketing Coordinator, Wattpad