In The News

London, England's mayor Boris Johnson is turning some heads with his ambitious, but enviable city cycling plan. In addition to a plan that promises $1.4-billion over 10 years to "build bike paths, create bike parking lots and re-engineer intersections for bikes," Johnson tells the Globe and Mail he wants to change the look of cycling by encouraging "more of the kind of cyclists you see in Holland, going at a leisurely pace on often-clunky steeds." 

 

Writer Marcus Gee says, "It is just the kind of message a big-city mayor should be sending. Although more and more people in cities are choosing to travel by bike, it is still a minority pursuit. For the majority, it is too scary, too uncomfortable or too inconvenient to justify leaving the car behind."
 

He compares London's "staggering" $1.4-billion budget to Toronto's $90-million to be spent in the same period. Although Gee makes note of our city's recent attempts with the separated lane on Sherbourne Street and others in the works, it is miniscule in comparison to London's plans to create a 24-kilometre bike "superhighway" that is fully separated from traffic and encompasses the length of the city's core. 
 

"Cycling will be treated not as niche, marginal, or an afterthought, but as what it is: an integral part of the transport network, with the capital spending, road space and traffic planners’ attention befitting that role," Johnson told the Globe.
 

Envy indeed. Johnson's newly appointed cycling commissioner Andrew Gilligan told the Globe and Mail that with more cyclists "there’s less traffic, less competition for parking, more seats on the Tube." 
 

Read the full story here. 

Original source: Globe and Mail

Between South by Southwest (SXSW) and Silicon Valley's annual Launch Festival, Toronto startups were all over the news this past week. 

 

SXSW is traditionally known for its music conference, but these past few years its interactive counterpart has been making the headlines. Entrepreneurs and small businesses flock down to Austin, Texas to launch or exhibit their products. Accelerator events have become just as much a part of the draw. This year 48 companies, including one Toronto startup, presented products.

 

Synaptop showcased its cloud-based operating system, an application that allows users "to collaborate on shared documents in real time," says an article in Cantech Letter. Users can also watch movies or listen to music simultaneously.

 

We spotted other Toronto startups in the mix. The Financial Post reported Shopify, ShopLocket and Tunezy all made the trek. 

 

North of 41, a Toronto-based company that aims to help local entrepreneurs by facilitating cross-border discussions, named cloud-based business app Big Picture App the winner of its Best Canadian Startup contest. 

 

Over in Silicon Valley, MaRS sent ten startups (including its entire winter JOLT accelerator cohort) down to the sold-out LAUNCH Festival to help give these small businesses exposure to potential investors and partners, as well as an opportunity to learn through networking events and various panel discussions. 

 

Included in the mix was InteraXon, chosen from the Demo Pit to demo its brain-sensing headband on stage to the Grand Jury and an audience of 1,500 people. Instaradio and Epilogger also pitched on the main stage, but they weren't the only local representation. The Working Group, Canadian Film Centre, HitSend, Konekt.me, Notesolution, and WeblishPal also attended.  

 

Read the full stories here, here, and here.  

Sources: Financial Post, Cantech Letter, MaRS

A recent article in New York Times magazine highlights the Monkey Paw's unique affinity for oddball books, claiming the small Toronto shop might be "publishing's great new hope."

 

Stephen Fowler opened the shop in 2006 along Dundas West near Ossington. Described as "antiquarian," the used bookshop "is an idea masquerading as a bookshop. It’s a cross between a retail establishment and a conceptual art installation," the article says. 

 

But it's not just the shop's seemingly eclectic repertoire that led to the profile, a randomness Fowler likens to the Web. It's the store's latest innovation, one that turns the old new again. 

 

"Recently, Fowler unveiled his splashiest experiment in randomization. In the rear of the Monkey's Paw, you’ll find the Biblio-Mat, a vending machine the size of an industrial refrigerator, created for Fowler by the designer Craig Small. A customer drops a Canadian $2 coin into a slot; the Biblio-Mat makes a buzzing noise, a bell rings, and out pops a book. Fowler calls it the 'the iPod shuffle of books.' But behind the stunt, there is a theory: the idea that the most marginal books can offer the pleasure, the value, we associate with canonical literature."

 

Read the full story here. 

Source: NYT Magazine

In an effort to "boost its voice and image search technology," Google has acquired Toronto startup DNNresearch, a small company founded by University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his grad students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. 

 

The financial details were not disclosed, but the news comes following the $600,000 gift provided through Google's Focused Research Awards Programs last year, TechCrunch reports. Much of the discussion is based not just on DNNresearch's research into voice recognition technology and deep neural networks, but also on Google's desire to acquire the talent. Krizhevsky and Sutskever developed a system that "dramatically improved the state of the art of object recognition" and will move to Google. Hinton will "divide his time between his university research and his work at Google," continuing to work part time at UoT and partially out of Google's Toronto office, as well as the company's headquarters in Mountain View, CA. 

 

TechCrunch summarizes Hinton's many accomplishments, noting he "is the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College in London, holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and is the director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research-funded program on 'Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception.' Also a fellow of The Royal Society, Professor Hinton has become renowned for his work on neural nets and his research into “unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input," the article says.

 

It also notes that the University of Toronto said the team's research "has profound implications for areas such as speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding." Professor Hinton predicted in a Google+ post that "Google’s team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs."

 

Read the full story here.

Original Source: TechCrunch

 

Toronto's Sprout At Work, a startup that provides "corporate wellness solutions using social and gamification tools to inspire employees and employers," has been announced as one of 10 companies chosen to participate in Nike's first TechStars-run accelerator program. 

 

Based in Portland, Oregon, the three-month accelerator program focuses on companies that "straddle" athletics and digital technology. Participants in the accelerator will use Nike's own digital platform, Nike+, as well as the company's points system NikeFuel. Hundreds of companies applied to the program, but only 10 were chosen to participate in the inaugural round. 

 

Startups receive $20,000 in capital to build health and fitness-related technology. Sprout's app-based management tool is designed to help employees set individual and collaborative goals, track activities, and form like-minded groups.  At its core, it is meant to get people moving more throughout the day, claiming healthier employees make better employees. 

 

The program began on Monday. 

 

Read the full story here. 

Original Source: Portland Business Journal

Toronto's Evergreen Brick Works, a community environment centre located along the Don Valley, received media attention this week when a reporter from journalism incubator Student Reporter spoke with EBW's co-founder Geoff Cape. In a piece that explored the role of environmental preservation in the concrete jungle, Cape is quoted as saying, "Cities need natural spaces. Not just manicured parks, but ecosystems." 

 

What makes EBW so alluring is not only its copious ravines, local markets, and community-based programs, but also its innovation. The article reports that the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management is writing a case study to further examine how EBW is "bringing nature to the city" in part by connecting environmentalists and businesses. Not to mention the non-profit's commitment to preservation. 

 

"EBW also strives to affect change at the macro level by testing innovative design principles, and sharing lessons learned through their implementation. The revitalized space is itself a showcase of green design, as Evergreen is headquartered in a LEED Platinum addition constructed on the industrial heritage site," the article says. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification is the standard for how Canada measures a building's efficiency. Platinum is the highest certification a building can receive. 

 

Evergreen Brick Works has several revenue streams that don't rely on government grants, sponsorships or donations. This previous method of operation preventing the non-profit from reaching its full potential as it was required to operate on a project-to-project basis. They turned instead to hosting events and renting space to like-minded organizations, developing local markets, and offering paid parking to subsidize a significant portion of their operational budget. 

 

"The social enterprise model," Cape says in the article, "has allowed us to nearly double in size and feed cross cutting support functions like technology, human resources, finance, and marketing. It's given us a degree of confidence and control over our operations, and has introduced us to a range of other networks and relationships." 

 

Read the full story here. 

Original Source: The Huffington Post

The New York Times has announced collaborations with two Toronto initiatives. 

 

Luminato and the New York Times have collaborated to bring the acclaimed TimesTalks series to Canada for the first time at this year's Luminato Festival. The series features live conversations between New York Times journalists and today's cutting-edge thinkers. Past conversations have included Stephen King, Yoko Ono, Denzel Washington, with interviews conducted by Thomas Friedman, David Carr and more. 

 

Taking place in June, the TimesTalks Luminato will feature the North American premiere of "experimental opera" The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic. This Friday, the performance artist will be speaking at the sold-out TimesTalks at TheTimesCentre, which is being produced in collaboration with the Luminato festival. 
 

“This collaboration with The New York Times will allow us to tell the story of the artistic premieres and creations presented by Luminato to the most ardent arts consumers in the world -- the readers of The New York Times. It is a transformative opportunity for the Festival to share our program through The New York Times, to both arts lovers who will travel to Toronto to see the work and those who will enjoy it through the online streaming option," said Janice Price, CEO of Luminato, in a press release.  
 

Next, remember that HIGHRISE interactive documentary we featured in January? Produced in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, the HIGHRISE project is an interactive series that explores high-rise living. 

 

The New York Times Opinions Pages announced the publication will collaborate with the NFB to create four short documentaries as part of the series to explore "the history and future of high-rise buildings in relationship to issues of equity, segregation and social responsibility in cities around the world."

 

Read the press releases here and here. 

Original Source: The New York Times

 

This weekend's opening of composer Tod Machover's crowd-sourced musical collective A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City, which featured more than 10,000 contributions of sounds taken from Toronto's streets, was so successful it's getting the Edinburgh treatment.

 

STV Edinburgh reports, "Following the success of this event, Edinburgh will have its own piece of music reflecting the feeling of those who have visited the city."

 

Machover will also orchestrate the piece of music, entitled Festival City. 

 

"Festival City invites all who love Edinburgh to reflect with me on how the city sounds through the memory of past visits, the intensity of current participation, the stillness of the city 'out of season' and the multi-layered complexity of performances, people and places during festival time. The goal is to create together a musical work that reflects the magnetic, magical and mysterious qualities of Edinburgh and its Festival," Machover says in the article. 

 

In addition, the Toronto performance received international press. BBC called the Toronto edition a "social media symphony" and reported that "On Saturday 9 March, residents were treated to a ground-breaking concert that was the result of an almost year-long project."

 

Machover is an American-based composer whose innovations in "hyperinstruments" have coined him the grandfather of Guitar Hero. He has been working with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on commission. 

 

Read the full story here. 

Original source: STV Edinburgh

The Canadian Press is reporting that a microscope "capable of diagnosing intestinal parasites in Tanzanian children" has been concocted successfully from an iPhone, double-sided tape, a cheap ball lens, and a flashlight.

 

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a Toronto General Hospital physician, told the Canadian Press that the microscope is "portable, it's relatively cheap, it's very easy to use. And it could be very useful in resource-poor settings that are remote or rural."

 

The article states that "Bogoch and colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute at the University of Basel, and the Pemba Public Health Laboratory in Tanzania field tested the device and reported their findings Monday in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene."

 

They found that the microscopes could be modified to pick up about 80 per cent of infections found in children in developing countries. The microscopes allow physicians to detect the eggs that develop into the parasites responsible for infections. The usual apparatus used to detect these eggs costs $200 and requires electricity, making it hard to access in rural areas, the article reports. 

 

The scientists in this study used an $8 ball lens and attached it to the camera of an iPhone with double-sided tape. They expect a slightly more expensive ball lens to generate better results. 

 

"Our goal really was to use the simplest and cheapest options available," says Bogoch in the article. "We really wanted to be as pragmatic as possible. Because ultimately, the goal is to use these products and use these devices in real world settings."

 

Read the full report here.

Original Source: Global News 

The CBC will air its biopic Jack about the late New Democratic leader Jack Layton this upcoming Sunday. The film documents the late politician's love with his wife and Trinity-Spadina MP Olivia Chow, as well as his rise from Toronto's municipal politics to leader of the federal NDP party before passing away from cancer weeks after the 2011 campaign.

 

Chow told the Canadian Press she hops the biopic inspires viewers to "live in a hopeful and loving way."

 

A special screening was held here in Toronto this past Monday, and additional screenings will be held later this week in Ottawa and Winnipeg. In attendance were Layton's children and several cast members and party supporters. The article writes that Chow is often asked why she supported the creation of the biopic. 

 

"Life is actually quite short and temporary," she told attendees at the Toronto screening. "If we can seize the moment and do as much and live as full a life as we can and make a difference (that’s worth knowing). And we can make a difference … So if we could get people to get a sense that: Yes, they can make a difference, yes they can live in a hopeful and loving way and change the world or change the community, change the neighbourhood, a little bit at a time. And that’s worth the movie and all of us coming together.”
 

Rick Roberts stars as Layton and Sook-Yin Lee stars as Chow. 

 

Digital Journal called the film "an uncritical valentine to the late NDP leader" and gave it mixed reviews. "Part rom-com, part political biography and part hero-worship, Jack ends up being a lightweight homage to a man who made a big mark in Canadian politics." 

 

Jack airs Sunday March 10 at 8 p.m. EST.

Read the original story here. 

Original source: Edmonton Journal

The second annual International Space Apps Challenge has expanded to include Toronto. The two-day technology development "codeathon" that allows people around the world to work together "to address current challenges relevant to both space exploration and social need." 

 

Orchestrated by NASA, last year's event featured 26 locations, two of which were Canadian (Montreal and Vancouver) and one that took place on the International Space Station, and more than 2000 participants. Together, people created solutions to challenges that ranged from enhancing scientific understanding of organisms in space to constellation databases, webcams, and travel apps. Thirty-five solutions were nominated for global testing. Categories included software, open hardware, citizen science and data visualization. 

 

The site says, "Our goal is to provide a platform for people interested in space exploration to get together to work on amazing projects together."

 

This year's event will take place internationally and simultaneously on April 20-21. It has grown to include 50 locations. Interested participants can sign up to be notified when registration opens, which should be any day considering the site says this will be announced in early 2013. 

 

Read more about the contest here. 

Original Source: NASA

Self-proclaimed cyborg Steve Mann is concerned about the Google Glass project. Known as the "father of wearable computing" for his pioneering role in advanced existential technologies, Mann has been experimenting with what he calls "computer-mediated reality" systems since the 1970's and he has been designing and wearing computerized eyewear for decades. 

 

The tenured University of Toronto professor wrote an extensive piece entitled "My Augmediated Life" for IEEE Spectrum, a technology and science magazine where he is both an editor and a chairman. In the piece he details his findings after 35 years of wearing computerized eyewear. 

 

The article outlines various examples of times the glasses, which he wears permanently, have played a key role in one of his life's developments. But his main argument centres around Google's Project Glass, the augmented reality glasses that have become media babes since Google began prototyping developer versions in 2011. These glasses are designed to enhance reality by providing additional information to the wearer's surroundings. 

 

Mann calls Google's Project Glass a "much less ambitious" version than the systems he's developed, but elicits excitement writing, "If Google’s vigorous media campaign for its Project Glass is any indication of the company’s commitment, wearable computers with head-mounted cameras and displays are poised finally to become more than a geek-chic novelty." 

 

He worries Google may be neglecting important lessons, that the company's design decisions could "make it hard for many folks to use the systems. Worse, poorly configured products might even damage some people's eyesight and set the movement back years." 

 

The article goes on to explore darker themes surrounding Big Brother versus Little Brother, potential problems glasses like this could cause for citizens and governments alike, most of which stems from walking around with cameras mounted on our heads. He'll be exploring these notions along with other speakers further in at the Augmented World conference in Toronto in June.

 

Read the full story here. 

Original source: IEEE Spectrum

This past weekend, 36 dachshund dog delegates took post at Harbourfront Centre in a replica United Nations assembly on Human Rights as part of Harbourfront's 2013 World Stage performances. The theatrical experiment was the work of Australian artist Bennett Miller's "Dachshund UN," a travelling show designed to encourage people to think beyond the spectacle of the Geneva convention and consider why its happening.
 

"The raison d’être is a serious proposal to the audience, it’s not just a gimmick  [...] it’s really an attempt to propose the idea of chaos and the utopian world, and also the idea of what active viewership means when there is no control over what is necessarily happening on stage [...] how does an audience fill in the blanks as it were," Salon quotes World Stage artistic director Tina Rasmussen from a video (below) featured on Harbourfront's website.
 

 

In an article about the event featured in Salon, it was reported that the dogs were kept on leashes with their owners hidden nearby to prevent anything "from getting too feral." 

 

The dogs represented 36 delegates and were chosen because they are a diverse breed, according to Rasmussen.  They sat leashed behind country signs from France to Argentina. In the video, Rasmussen says she wants people to ask, "Why and how does this affect me?"

 

The show will move on to Montreal next. Miller's previous animal installations have featured greyhounds and monkeys. Salon reports Miller fell in love with the city and was quite smitten by our raccoons. He is considering them as inspiration for his next subject. 

 

Read the original story here and additional information from Harbourfront here.

Original Source: Salon

 

Toronto's Friends of 2Wheels, a not-for-profit, volunteer-run group that recycles and repairs used bikes then gives them to those in need, was featured this week in BikeRadar magazine.

 

In the article, founder Mihály Felbert tells BikeRadar he noticed similar organizations were repairing bikes then shipping them to places such as Africa and Latin America. Additional charities also wanted cash in addition to donations. Without undermining the value of supplying bicycles to developing countries, Felbert says he saw an opportunity to give back to those within his own city of Toronto to help them on the path to a better life. 

 

"In Toronto there are 13 sectors of the city that are poverty stricken, many are emigrants, new to Canada," Felbert says in the article. "We should help those at our front door before extending limited resources abroad, unless it’s a national state."

 

Friends of 2Wheels is based near the former C.C.M. Weston Factory, the facility that manufactured the majority of bicycles made in Canada from 1917 to 1983. It's also where Felbert grew up and spent much of his youth bin diving for old bicycle parts and making homemade bikes with his friends.

 

That experience has helped him in the repair business. Funding Friends of 2Wheels largely depends on restoring vintage bikes and selling them to front the costs of new bike parts, equipment and tools. Felbert was inspired to start the organization when he saw a rusty old bike at the side of the road one day. 

 

"That’s when it hit me, being green-minded and grassroots-motivated to help people in need,” Felbert says. "The charitable core in me spring into gear." 

 

Read the full article here. 

Original Source: BikeRadar

In last week's innovation and job news, we told you about NanoLight, a new lightbulb spearheaded by three University of Toronto graduates. At the time of the article, the trio had recently launched their Kickstarter campaign with hopes of raising $20,000 to fund what they promise to be the most energy efficient light bulb ever made. Now, one week later and still with time to go, the group has raised more than $235,000 in pledges and counting.

 

An article in Inquisitr reports on the NanoLight's early success. At the time of the article, 4,700 people had backed the project (it has since grown closer to 5,000). Kickstarter works by allowing anyone to help fund a project, usually for an incentive. For $30, backers both support the project and will also receive one 10 watt NanoLight, equivalent to a 75 watt bulb. Many of the group's packages have already sold out. 

 

Gimmy Chu, one of the NanoLight's founders, told Yonge Street that each NanoLight provides 30,000 hours of illumination. 

The light bulbs are expected to begin shipping in May. Following this, the team will begin working on additional highly efficient light bulbs.

 

Read the full article here. 

Read the Yonge Street interview here.
Original Source: Inquisitr