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.
The Council of Academic Hospitals of Ontario’s online magazine highlighted WaveCheck on February 3, 2014 as a more personalized approach to cancer treatments because of the technology’s ability to effectively monitor chemotherapy response.
WaveCheck’s technology, invented by Dr. Gregory Czarnota of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Professor Michael C. Kolios of Ryerson University, allows women and men undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer to know if their treatment is working at the beginning of treatment (within one to four weeks) rather than at the end of treatment (typically four to six months).
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among Canadian women, excluding non-melanoma skin cancers. It is the second leading cause of death from cancer in women in this country. The Canadian Cancer Society estimated that, in 2013, 65 Canadian women would be diagnosed with breast cancer every day, totaling 23,800 women a year; and 14 Canadian women would die from breast cancer every day, totaling 5,000 women a year. According to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, one in nine Canadian women is expected to develop breast cancer during her lifetime; one in 29 will die from it.
The Bioprinter project, a three-way initiative from MaRS Innovation, the University of Toronto and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, was featured on Canada AM on January 29 during a segment with…
Whirlscape‘s Minuum keyboard demo on a smartwatch was profiled on The Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet on January 27, 2014.
Whirlscape Inc.’s Minuum keyboard was featured on the January 27, 2014 episode of Discovery Canada’s Daily Planet.
Lucas Cochran, Daily Planet’s technology correspondent, covered the technology that’s perfect for small devices and big fingers, noting that Minuum’s creators are successfully combating the small amount of space available on wearable technology, like smart watches.
Check out the video here. The profile, in Cochran’s Digit@l segment, begins at the 1:10 mark.
The radio segment, called “Crowdfunding Science,” aired on January 25, 2014 and discussed the lack of funding researchers have access to for commercialization, making it harder to advance research that could be helping people in a variety of industries.
WaveCheck’s crowdfunding campaign is an example of how MaRS Innovation gets creative when traditional funding channels take too long or run dry, speeding up the commercialization process.
