University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) graduate Whirlscape Inc. released a video on February 25, 2014 showing how their Minuum keyboard can make typing on Smart TVs and consoles easy.
UTEST is currently accepting applications for its third cohort. Apply now.
Minuum, the “little keyboard for big fingers” is making waves in wearable technology with their disambiguation algorithm and advanced language modelling, which can be used on Android devices and smart watches.
Read Darrell Etherington‘s article about Minuum on Smart TVs and consoles in Tech Crunchand coverage in Geeky Gadgets, an online technology review and resource publication.You can also read more about the U of T science behind Minuum here.
MaRS Innovation-U of T accelerator program among Canada’s best
The University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology accelerator program (UTEST) is now accepting applications for a third cohort until April 17, 2014.
Applicants must be current students or faculty at U of T, or have graduated within the last two years.
UTEST has just launched a new website with complete application information about the early-stage incubator and a link to the application form:
The 12-month program allows selected U of T affiliates to access office space, mentoring and $30,000 in funding, with opportunities to access follow-on funding from MaRS Innovation later on.
Crowdmark, a graduate of the University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) program’s first cohort, was the focus of a February 17 article by Ivor Tossell, The Globe and Mail‘s technology culture columnist.
Dr. James Colliander, co-founder and CEO of Crowdmark.
Created by U of T professor James Colliander, Crowdmark allows educators to quickly and efficiently grade large amounts of tests and exams. Tossell highlighted Crowdmark’s innovation and ease-of-use for the grader. The product is cloud-based, meaning that a team of educators marking the same group of exams don’t have to be in the same room at the same time. Instead, grading can be done remotely.
Tossell spoke with Colliander and Lyssa Neel, Crowdmark’s chief operating officer and a former MI project manager. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
James Colliander, a professor at the University of Toronto, found himself staring at about 5,000 pages of papers from a national math exam. Traditionally, a cadre of markers would sit around a large table for marathon grading sessions, assembly line style, each one tackling the answer to one question before passing it on to the next marker.
Mr. Colliander hacked together an expedient: He scanned the pages into a software framework and distributed them to markers digitally. He was essentially able to parallelize the marking process.
Dr. Lyssa Neel, COO of Crowdmark and former MI project manager.
“The markers didn’t all have to be in the same place, so they could move much faster,” says Lyssa Neel, COO of Crowdmark, the company that, with Mr. Colliander as CEO, has brought the idea to market.
Crowdmark is an online service that takes the idea of distributed marking and scales it to an institutional level.
MI’s Fazila Seker and Elizabeth Monier-Williams, campaign co-directors for WaveCheck, were featured in a MedCity News article about successfully crowdfunding in the healthcare field.
The article, in MedCity News‘ Hot Topics section, questions whether a crowdfunding campaign needs to reach its funding goal to be deemed successful.
Seker and Monier-Williams completed an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in December for WaveCheck, a clinical technique developed to let women and men know if their breast cancer chemotherapy is working within weeks of beginning treatment instead of months later when treatment has already ended.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Fazila Seker, the director of technology and venture development at commercialization agency MaRS Innovation, said that one of the trickiest things about the crowdfunding industry is the notion that these platforms have an established crowd that’s lurking around looking for the next best thing.
“You can’t rely entirely on that,” she said. “You need to go out there and do your research and create your own following.”
In “Big-Brain Hunting: The Key to Supercluster Success,” the Huffington Post‘s Pat Lynch investigates how and what makes start-ups successful. Attracting top-talent is listed as a major reason, but so is the environment required to give start-ups the tools they need to flourish.
Lynch highlights MaRS Innovation as a driving force in sustaining the innovation industry in Canada by attracting big ideas and global talent, using former MI project manager Lyssa Neel as an example.
Neel helped launch the education sector start-up Crowdmark, and is now the company’s chief operating officer. Crowdmark is a graduate of University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) program; UTEST is now accepting applications for their third cohort until April 11, 2014.
Bedside Clinical Systems and their flagship product, Bedside PEWS™, were featured in the February 2014 issue of Hospital News.
Bedside Clinical Systems‘ (BCS) flagship product, the Bedside Paediatric Warning System or BedSidePEWS™, was covered in the February 2014 edition of Hospital News.
The article, written by Rajesh Sharma who is president and CMO of BCS, explains how the technology helps decrease the amount of code blues in paediatric patients.
Invented by Dr. Christopher Parshuram of the Hospital of Sick Children (SickKids), Bedside PEWS™ is now in three hospitals in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. The technology received FDA approval last year.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
The program digitally logs, charts, and evaluates seven vital sign items thst sre part of routine clinical assessments and then summarizes them into a singly score. From the BedsidePEWS™ score, care providers can better match the level of care with the patient’s required needs, thereby improving patient outcomes and reducing the number of urgent calls, code blue incidents and related deaths.
“Identifying at-risk patients is significant since approximately 5,000 children in North America experience a code blue event each year, from which too many children die or sustain neurological deficit. BedsidePEWS™ hopes to improve outcomes for these patients and their families,” says Dr. Parshuram.
Minuum keyboard creators accelerate wearable device input technology development
Whirlscape, Inc., creators of the Minuum keyboard, closed an seed funding round of $500,000.
TORONTO, Canada (February 6, 2014) — Whirlscape Inc., creators of Minuum, “the little keyboard for big fingers,” have closed an investment seed round for just over $500,000 (USD). Y Combinator, FundersClub, BDC Venture Capital, and a dozen other prominent angel investors have contributed to the round.
Whirlscape’s plans for the capital involve innovating beyond its participation in Silicon Valley’s start-up accelerator Y Combinator. Whirlscape also aims to consolidate the success of its Minuum keyboard for Android touchscreen devices—available on Google Play—whose positive reviews have boosted sales since the New Year.
Since launching the Minuum keyboard in 2013, Whirlscape has grown to a dedicated team of 10 working to enable new ways to type, and to unify input methods across the rapidly emerging field of wearable and ubiquitous computing devices such as smart watches and Google Glass. Whirlscape has recently demonstrated the Minuum keyboard working on Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smart watch.
“Our vision for the future of hyper-personalized input devices involves letting you choose your companion device for its input capabilities,” said Will Walmsley, CEO of Whirlscape. “By simplifying the concept of the keyboard, we allow text entry to occur in places where it was previously unthinkable, removing barriers to communication. Your keyboard can now be anywhere you want it to be, out of the way, yet immediately accessible.”
Whirlscape, Inc. was in the first cohort of UTEST, the MaRS Innovation and University of Toronto accelerator program for early-stage technologies. UTEST is now accepting applications for their third cohort.
OtoSim™ device’s integration into medical students’ curriculum to help improve diagnosis accuracy by 44 per cent
A $200,000 donation led by Mr. Ralph Chiodo of Active Green + Ross will help establish a Student Training Fund in Otoscopy at U of T in partnership with OtoSim Inc.
TORONTO, ON (Feb. 5, 2014) — The University of Toronto (U of T) is creating a Student Training Fund in Otoscopy in partnership with OtoSim Inc., thanks to a $200,000 donation led by Mr. Ralph Chiodo, founder of Active Green + Ross. Other donors include some franchisees of Active Green + Ross and others among Chiodo’s friends and associates.
The Halldale Group, a publisher specializing in simulation and training information, covered this funding announcement.
Through the donation, undergraduate medical students will have access to better otoscopy training through the use of the OtoSim™ in their curriculum. Otoscopy, the diagnostic examination of the ear, is one of the most poorly-acquired medical skills in students, general practitioners and pediatricians, achieving a fifty per cent accuracy rate.
Ralph Chiodo’s donation allows OtoSim Inc. to provide 66 otoscopy training units, known as the OtoSim™,to U of T. The devices, which can be networked to facilitate mass training exercises, will help undergraduate medical students to be effectively trained to diagnose ear problems using an otoscope.
Watch how the OtoSim™ can be used in mass training exercises.Nearly 100 second-year medical students voluntarily attended the OtoSim™ training session to better prepare their otoscopy skills for the clinic.
“We are excited to be the first official OtoSim™ mass-training site and thank Mr. Ralph Chiodo for leading the charge on fundraising for this unique learning opportunity,” said Ian J. Witterick, professor and chair in U of T’s Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.
“A clinical study demonstrated that with only a couple hours of group training, the accuracy of third-year medical students increased from 54 per cent to 78 per cent,” said Dr. Andrew Sinclair, OtoSim CEO and former senior director at MaRS Innovation. “Mr. Ralph Chiodo’s donation will help us to ensure that more medical students graduate with a much higher proficiency in this critical primary physical examination skill.”
Deal led by MaRS Innovation and Innovation York to strengthen Slyce’s mobile image recognition application for retail e-commerce
York’s technology will help Slyce in developing a mobile app that can be used to take pictures of a product in-store, enabling a user to purchase the item from the retailer immediately on his or her smartphone.
TORONTO, Feb. 4, 2014—Slyce today announced that it has acquired a computer vision technology developed at York University that quickly analyzes and aggregates similar images.
Through the acquisition, Slyce also hired former York PhD student, Dr. Ehsan Fazl-Ersi, to lead the integration of the intellectual property into Slyce’s Visual Search Platform as their new head of Research & Development.
Slyce is a premium provider of visual search technology for retailers, brands and publishers. Their platform allows customers to take a picture of real-world products with their smartphone and then find direct or close-matching products from the retailer’s catalogue, which they are able to purchase on the spot.
“Identifying and classifying an object captured within a scene is difficult due to the effects of background clutter, lighting variations and viewpoint changes on the object’s appearance,” says Fazl-Ersi, who designed and developed the technology with his PhD supervisor, Dr. John K. Tsotsos, a professor in the Lassonde School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member and former director of York’s Centre for Vision Research.
“This is a much bigger problem for mobile applications where the algorithm’s speed and efficiency are the difference between losing a consumer or making a sale,” says Fazl-Ersi. “Our technology will provide higher accuracy when quickly identifying retail items so that consumers can choose among similar items according to style, colour or pattern using a mobile device.”
The researchers partnered with MaRS Innovation and Innovation York, York’s commercialization office, to file patent protection on the initial technology, develop a commercialization plan, secure grant funding, facilitate business development meetings and negotiate the resulting transaction.
MI’s Dr. Raphael Hofstein (left), the Honourable Minister Reza Moridi (centre) and Dr. Mark Poznansky of the Ontario Genome Institute on the January 2014 cover of Biotechnology Focus.
In a January 24, 2014 Biotechnology Focuscover article, author Shawn Lawrence discusses MaRS Innovation President and CEO Dr. Raphael (Rafi) Hofstein‘s recent visit to learn more of the emerging science and technology markets in Singapore and Japan.
The trip allowed Hofstein to discuss current MI projects, specifically start-ups XLV Diagnostics Inc. and DVLR Therapeutics Inc., whose products could benefit from Singapore’s proximity to medical technology markets in India and China.
Crowdmark
