Digital : Innovation + Job News

Way back in 1995, the company that would become Destiny Solutions was founded as Destiny Web Designs, putting the best practices of the then emerging World Wide Web to work for Toronto business clients.

"One of our clients was the University of Toronto's continuing education department. We built out their site in the late 1990s and realized there was a huge opportunity in creating applications for this new market in higher education," says senior vice president Jonathan Tice. The needs of continuing education departments are different than those of traditional "tuition cohort" models, and new administrative tools were needed to help grow the potential of those departments. 

He says that U of T was the first university in North America to put its systems fully online in 2001, and the reputation the school's then-president, Mary Cone Berry, had as an innovator gave the newly born Destiny Solutions a great advantage. "That relationship made it easy to make Stanford our second client."

Eleven years later, the Yonge and Eglinton-based company is the leader in providing specific administrative solutions for non-traditional learning departments at some of North America's biggest and most prestigious schools, including Georgetown, Duke, Penn State, Stanford and University of Toronto. It's a market that has begun to rapidly transform education itself. Tice cites US education department executive Richard Culatta's impression that "this is education's Internet moment."

"We're growing quite quickly," says Tice. Currently at 40 employees, the company is hiring for nine positions now. Tice says they've been growing their staff at a rate of about 25 per cent per year—revenue growth has significantly outpaced that. "We really can't hire fast enough, but we're very specific about who we hire. We serve clients who are the best in the world, and we're really looking for A-players."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Jonathan Tice, Senior Vice President, Destiny Solutions

Toronto entrepreneur Katherine Hague has been involved with startups since she was a teenager. Last year, she designed a theme for the celebrated Ottawa online retail startup Shopify, and then wanted to sell some T-shirts of her own in a Shopify store.

"I realized it would look pretty silly in a storefront, with just one product," she says. The cost, hassle and time involved in setting up an online shop for a single product—in order to achieve the level of professionalism she wanted to project—convinced her she needed an alternative. Looking around at the options for ultra-small-scale vendors, mostly eBay and Craigslist, convinced her she'd need to create that alternative. Shoplocket was born.

"We wanted to make it as easy for people who had something they wanted to sell as it is to post a video or a photo," she says. "The challenge for us was knowing what to leave out, so it would be optimized for the majority of users who need the service." Those users include people who don't want to learn any code or to design and maintain a storefront. They just need a way to sell things that looks professional and is easy and quick.

Working out of the Extreme Startups accelerator at Yonge and King, Hague and her partner Andrew Louis officially launched Shoplocket in open beta late last month. Hague says they have attracted 4,000 users in those few weeks, and have hired a Canadian manager and brought on two co-op students. Hague expects Shoplocket will close a funding round sometime this summer.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Katherine Hague, CEO, Shoplocket

Bay Street-based management software firm Blueprint has announced that they've recently raised $15.9 million in venture capital to finance growth in the US, Europe and Asia.

The company, which makes requirements definition and management software to streamline IT operations for large institutional clients including banks, governments and insurance companies, already has offices in four US cities.

Founded in 2002 as Sofea Inc. the company set out to tackle the "requirements definition" problem facing companies. It was rebranded as Blueprint in 2007 as it entered the US market. The company has shown consistent growth since then, more than doubling its client base, to more than 200 clients, since spring 2010.

The new round of financing, led by Tandem Expansion Fund, comes as the industry prepares for rapid expansion.

"The requirements definition and management software market is at a tipping point for explosive growth over the next two to three years," said investor Roger Wilson of BDC's IT Venture Fund in a statement.

Blueprint expects to benefit from that growth. "We have demonstrated that we can dramatically improve the software development performance of our initial set of Global 2000 customers, leaving us well positioned as a leading requirements platform as global demand takes off," said Blueprint president and CEO David Nyland in the company announcement. "For this we need to grow our presence in the US, EMEA [Europe, the Middle East and Africa] and Asia.... We are now significantly strengthened by our financial partners who have validated our business plan and are supporting us with expansion capital to enhance our global penetration."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Robert Bartlett, Blueprint

One of the most promising startups to emerge out of Ryerson's Digital Media Zone incubator over the past year was Scanly, an app that gave students discounts from various retailers through their mobile phones. Business prospects appeared so encouraging after the company's launch in September 2011, the founders applied to and were accepted for a session at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator that may be the most renowned in the world.

Interestingly, the company has returned reimagined, reinvented and renamed.

"As we prepared to go to California and scale up Scanly, we realized that expanding it beyond Ryerson would be very costly and risky, and that the business could never become truly big," founder Martin Drashkov writes about the experience. "Abandoning a product and starting anew is always tough, but thankfully we had the support of the Y Combinator partners and the awesome YC Alumni community."

The reinvented company recently launched in its new incarnation, Kyte, an app that allows any Android phone to be turned into a children's phone. "After doing some research, we realized we could write an app that runs on Android phones and completely locks down the phone into a limited, kid-mode, while letting parents control the phone from the web," writes Drashkov. "We had stumbled on a very interesting idea—we would be the ones to make sure every child in the world can get a smartphone!"

The app allows parents to control their kids' web experience and track their location by GPS. Work on the new product began in January. The Y Combinator process of mentorship helped with the development process. Finally, Kyte launched at the accelerator's Demo day last month.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Lauren Schnieder, Ryerson DMZ; Martin Drashkov, Kyte

Last week, the prestigious Branham300 listing of the top information technology companies in Canada named York Mills-based firm SecureKey among the top 25 "up-and-coming" ICT firms in Canada. While the company welcomed the news, SecureKey EVP Robert Blumenthal noted, "It's a recognition milestone, not a business milestone."

Of course, over the past year, as the online security ID tech startup has grown to 100 employees from 60, it has hit plenty of business milestones too. Most notably, SecureKey secured a major investment from chip-manufacturing powerhouse Intel and announced that the SecureKey configuration will be included in millions of Intel products being manufactured over the next year.

Blumenthal says the firm's technology solves the increasingly ubiquitous problem of secure online logins. For the sake of convenience, most username and password combinations are unsecure and often reused from website to website. More complicated (and secure) login procedures become too much trouble for users. The gold standard, he says, is a two-step process, "something you have and something you know," such as a bank card and PIN code combination. SecureKey's technology uses a small, portable "applet" contained in cards, USB keys or devices to create a similar authentification process.

Blumenthal says that next week SecureKey will launch the first phase of a collaboration with the Government of Canada that will enable citizens to use banking credentials to interact securely with the government.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Robert Blumenthal, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, SecureKey

Three-year-old classroom education innovators Top Hat Monocle are hiring now in Toronto as they move their headquarters from Waterloo to the big city.

"We're currently in a co-working space in Toronto as we await our official office space later this quarter," says CEO Mike Silagadze by email.

The company was founded by University of Waterloo students Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini when, for a class project, they decided to try to put the mobile devices students carry with them to use as learning aids. The reaction to the project was so good that they launched the concept as a business with $300,000 from Waterloo-area angel investors (they have since raised a total of $1.5 million in investment).

Three years later, their products are used on more than 85 university campuses around the world—including Harvard—and the company has seen more than $5 million in sales, according to a recent report.

Today, they continue to grow. Top Hat Monocle has opened a San Francisco office. The HQ relocation to TO, Silagadze says, is motivated primarily by recruiting purposes, "It was very hard to convince top candidates to move to Waterloo, and we in fact lost a few people that way. So long term, the right decision was for the company to be in Toronto."

The company currently has 24 full-time employees. Perks include weeks available to work on personal projects, catered staff meals and video game tournaments. The company is hiring developers, designers and sales reps right now—lots of them. "We'll likely need to hire another 20 to 30 sales reps and another 10 developers in the next six months," Silagadze says. "It's going to be a busy time."

Sources: Mike Silagasze, CEO, Top Hat Monocle; Yahoo! Small Business advisor

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

Early this month, local business information platform builder Locationary announced a deal with US-based company Localeze. The new partnership should see the company's platform penetrate the global market in location-based data.

"It's pretty interesting," says Locationary CEO Grant Ritchie. "Localeze has data agreements with most of the largest web providers. So this should see them moving into data management with out platform and technology."

That platform has been built steadily since late last summer when, as Yonge Street reported at the time, $2.5 million in investment capital allowed the company, based in Toronto's Entertainment District, to focus on building out its technology. "We used that capital to put our heads down and develop and launch this platform and to beta test it," says Ritchie. The technology, called Saturn, "is like a universal translator for local data," allowing data arriving in different formats to be integrated into one system.

Ritchie says that over the past year or so, his company has doubled the size of its staff to 16 full-time-equivalents, and continues to grow. "I could see us doubling again over the next six to 12 months," he says.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Grant Ritchie, CEO, Locationary

Saint John, New Brunswick-based group buying website Spinzo is preparing to launch in Toronto. The company is staffing up—hiring sales and marketing staff—in anticipation of bringing its "progressive savings" model to the GTA.

The variation on popular group discount sites adds a "more people equals a better deal" innovation. That means the price of an item falls when more people sign up to buy it. The platform also allows purchasers to bid a price they are willing to pay, committing to buy it only if the price reaches a certain level.

CEO Emmanuel Elmajian says this model attracts a better caliber of business to offer deals.

"If you look at many of the [traditional group buying sites], you see they tend to attract lower-end merchants," says Elmajian. That's because such sites use deep discounts as the main selling point. "A lot of businesses, restaurants in particular, don't want to do that." He says they might offer a 20 per cent discount as a base, and then up it to 30 per cent or more if a certain number of people bid. "Then maybe they want to cap the discount at 40 per cent. That's perfectly fine."

The more-people-equals-lower-prices approach, he says, also "brings viral back into the equation." Buyers have a strong incentive to publicize the deal.

The company launched in testing phase earlier this year, with more than $500,000 in investment from private and public partners led by Growthworks. Elmajian says the company has a sales person working in Toronto now, and is looking to add another one or two, in addition to hiring a marketing coordinator. Spinzo should be live, offering deals to the general public sometime in the next month and a half.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Emmanuel Elmajian, CEO, Spinzo

"I cannot wait to start my business," Noura Sakkijha told StartMeUp Ryserson as it announced she was the winner of this year's $25,000 Slaight Business Plan competition. The company she's starting, Majoura, is a crowdsourcing platform for designers, allowing them to get feedback from consumers before manufacturing and distributing products.

In addition to $25,000 in seed money, Sakkijha will get mentoring from StartMeUp, an organization designed to foster entrepreneurship among students at Ryerson University.

To win this year's competition, Sakkijha beat out 31 other entrants, including four other finalist companies: Soapbox (recently profiled by Yonge Street), engineering consultants Peytec, homelessness documentarians Make Treks, job board My TaskRunner and discount postboard Bank My Coupons.

Past winners of the contest include former Yonge Street subject Damn Heels.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Piotr Makuch, StartMeUp Ryerson

Founder and CEO William Mougayar explaining the "big concept" behind Toronto social media startup Engagio this way: "We're entering a phase of frustration in the social web." People actively take part in conversations in blog comment sections, on Twitter, on Facebook and other platforms every day. "How do you keep track of all that conversation? The solution is to aggregate it all in a unified inbox."

That's Engagio—a single inbox to track conversations across social media platforms. Mougayar says it's an idea whose time has come. The company was founded last October, launched its product as a private Alpha in December, and by early February it was able to announce $540,000 in seed financing.

That quick start means the company is growing rapidly. Already this year, Mougayar says, Engagio has hired four staff members, and continues to hire. "If you extend the horizon out six to eight months," he says, "I expect we'll add eight to 10 more employees to the team."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: William Mougayar, CEO, Engagio

Professor Hoi-Kwong Lo of the University of Toronto, working with fellow U of T researcher Bing Qi and Spanish professor Marcos Curty, has published research on a new encryption method that could present a quantum leap forward in the attempt to thwart hackers. And that's a literal quantum leap.

The method, Measurement Device Independent QKD, is detailed in the physics Journal Physics Review Letters. It is an advancement in the field of quantum encryption, the technique for securing data transmitted over the Internet from hackers.

"Standard quantum encryption method is currently being used by various Swiss banks in encrypting critical data traffic. I have personally been an expert in the task force on the standardization of quantum key distribution products in Europe," says Lo.

The complicated field employed to secure information from prying eyes has long suffered from an "Achilles' heel" in the form of photon detectors, a problem Lo's group proposes it has solved. "We believe that our new method will significantly contribute to the standardization process and can be a game-changer in future quantum cryptographic products," Lo says.

The research team, who have already tested their method as a "proof of concept," expect to have a prototype available within five years. Lo says that the product could be commercialized within five years—and possibly much sooner—of the building of a prototype. "We are very interested in bringing our new method to the market. Currently, we are looking for industrial partners that will help us to co-develop our prototype."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Hoi-Kwong Lo, Professor, University of Toronto

Following on the smash success of its educational app PocketZoo, which went to number one in the iTunes App Store's education section after its release almost two years ago, Toronto app developer Tiny Hearts recently released its second product, InstaMatch, this February.

"It's been really well received so far," says company founder Robleh Jama. "We've gotten some great reviews from TechCrunch and others, and it was featured by Apple as a 'new and notable' application." The app turns images captured by the popular Instagram app into a card-matching puzzle game.

The company was founded in 2010, Jama says, because he loved apps and wanted to create apps he'd want to use himself. He says PocketZoo in particular was inspired by his becoming a new father. "I wanted to create an app I could use with my daughter." Since then, his company has tweaked the app, released a version for the iPad and grown to three employees working out of both the Ryerson Digital Media Zone and a shared workspace in the east end called Work Republic. All the way along, Jama's company has been self-financing.

"I'm not a big believer in spending time chasing investment," he says. "I think your customers are your best investors."

Jama says Tiny Hearts will soon be hiring three more staff—a developer, a marketing representative and a summer intern—as it improves InstaMatch, prepares an Android version of PocketZoo and gets ready to work on a new app.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Robleh Jama, founder, Tiny Hearts

"It's been a big week for us," says InGamer Sports co-founder Nic Sulsky. The MaRS-assisted Toronto startup announced March 14 that it had closed its first funding round and landed former NBC sports digital head Rick Wolf as executive vice-president. Both moves position the company for widespread growth as it launches its products in the US market this September.

As reported by Yonge Street in 2010 and 2011, the company has bootstrapped its way to growth since launching in time for the 2010 hockey playoffs. The InGamer platform allows sports fans to engage in online, real-time fantasy sports contests while watching live events. After growing steadily in Canada and internationally through partnerships with sports television networks, Sulsky says the recent developments position the company to rapidly grow.

"This was huge. The funding allows us to focus on the big picture now, which is a monstrous opportunity to grow. And Rick, with his reputation south of the border, his experience in fantasy sports companies and his background in broadcasting, validates our vision. This allows us to take the next steps to take our $1 million to become a $100 million company," says Sulsky. "And then, of course, on to turning  it into a $1 billion-dollar company."

The team at InGamer has steadily grown, from the two founders to 11 staff today. Sulsky says they continue to hire developers to add to their team.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Nic Sulsky, InGamer Sports

Over the past year, innovative Queen-and-Spadina-based startup Shiny Ads has raised more than $1.36 million in capital and added two new staff members to its team, bringing its total number of employees to six.

Launched in January, 2010, the service offers an automated self-serve way for media companies to accept and serve small advertisers on online and mobile platforms. The company had grown to four staff by last March, when president Roy Pereira says the company raised $470,000 in capital to finance growth in a round led by Intertainment Media, Maple Leaf Angels and York Angels. That private fundraising triggered a $197,500 loan from the federal government agency FedDev Ontario. Pereira says that after receiving the money from FedDev, the company hired two new sales staff—bringing its sales team to three—to kick-start growth.

"We have subsequently raised another round this January of $700,000" from the original three private investors, Pereira says.

The next step is hiring two more software engineers.

"Our pipeline is better than it has ever been and we are closing larger premium publishers," says Pereira. "Overall, that gets us into a better place for a larger financing round later this year that will allow us to grow even faster."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Roy Pereira, President, Shiny Ads