THIS WEEK IN TECTORIA

A community blog celebrating Victoria's booming tech sector

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Got a cool story about technology and creativity in Victoria? Email stories, tips, pictures, links and anything of interest to Tessa Bousfield at: tectoria@viatec.ca

SendtoNews signs NASCAR highlights deal

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Sendtonews screenshotThe Times-Colonist reports on Victoria-based SendtoNews. The three-year-old company has announced a deal with NASCAR for the exclusive rights to distribute online video highlights of races.

“It sets a new standard,” said CEO Greg Bobolo. “It really is that validation and it has accelerated all of our other discussions. “NASCAR was brutally invasive to make sure we were the right company. Now with everyone else we are talking to on that tier-one sports landscape, there is a confidence level. They think ‘if NASCAR is OK with them …’”

SendtoNews is a cloud-based distribution platform that connects content from major organizations with the media. The report adds the company is housed in a new downtown office and has “22 employees, 15 of them in Victoria. The rest are in bureaus in Vancouver, San Francisco, New York and Toronto and later this summer they will open a London office.”

Indochino.com raises $13 million in funding

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One of the more interesting stories from the past few weeks is Indochino.com raising $13 million in a second round of funding. Indochino is an online menswear retailer, best known for custom suits, that was founded by two graduates of the University of Victoria, Kyle Vucko (CEO) and Heikal Gani (CEO).

Founded in 2007, Indochino now has 55 employees in Vancouver and Shanghai, China. That’s steady growth after raising $4 million in funding in 2011.

Coming up with a business idea is one thing, mastering the technology is a second but these young entrepreneurs (they have the former president and COO of Yahoo on their board) are ensuring their young business is well funded to help maintain the growth.

UVic prof to explain mysteries of the Higgs particle

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Michel LefebvreIf you are really into particle physics, then the University of Victoria physicist Michel Lefebvre is giving a talk about the quest to discover the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider, which lies buried beneath the French/Swiss border near Geneva.

The talk takes place at UVic’s David Lam Auditorium in the MacLaurin Building on 9 April at 7pm. It’s free.

According to the UVic website….

Prof. Lefebvre’s research focuses on hadron collider physics.  Following activities in the UA2 experiment at CERN’s proton-antiproton collider, he acted as founding spokesperson of the ATLAS Canada Collaboration in 1992.  The ATLAS detector is currently studying proton-proton collisions at the energy frontier, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN; The discovery of a new particle has been announced on July 4th 2012.

VIATeC 2013 Awards

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSDVc2DCNpY&w=550&h=330]

The 2013 VIATeC Awards will take place on June 20 at the Victoria Conference Centre. Put the date in your diary or iPhone or Outlook. Last year’s event featured a large scale light sabre battle where many people displayed their inner Jedi. I suspect there will be food, music, some laughs and a lot of technology. Nominations close on April 9.

Starfish Medical solving the right problems for customers

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Starfish Medical is Canada’s leading medical device development services company, and it’s right here in Victoria. Their mission is to improve health care by enabling and supporting entrepreneurial medical device companies to be successful. At their core, they’re about solving the right problems for their customers.

On a tour of their medical device facility recently, Starfish President, Scott Phillips showed off some medical devices in various stages of completion – a blood platelet analyzer, brain biofeedback device, skin cancer analyzer, heart valve tester, a device that measures implanted lenses, and a chiropractic device. The latter involved the technical experts at Starfish to re-envision the device by carefully thinking through how the chiropractor and the patient interacted with it. “It’s humbling as an engineer,” Phillips said “to work hard at getting the technology right, and then find you haven’t solved the right problem. Our engineers work closely with our industrial designers on the human interface, which is critical to making the device work properly.”

Philips is understandably proud of Starfish Medical’s evolution to a $7 – $8 million company after 13 years. “We hire smart people and have our act together as far as metrics and management systems which are the essence of being a successful company.” Along with that, Starfish has broadened and systematized its approach to solving problems and now helps other companies ask deeper questions so they too can be successful.

An ISO13485 registered company, Starfish Medical employs about 50 people, more than half of whom are engineers. Others are technical and industrial designers, and those who work in manufacturing, quality compliance and regulatory systems, marketing, business development and administration. Regardless of their function, Phillips makes sure everyone fits with the company’s culture that is guided by five principles:

  • Dig deeper to solve the right problem
  • Cut to the chase
  • Respect people and trust their intentions
  • Learn and systematize
  • Be open and welcome accountability

What do employees say is the best thing about working at Starfish Medical? “They like the culture, they like their peers and they like doing interesting work. Those are consistently the top three in our surveys,” said Phillips. He has his sights set on growing the company and says there will be opportunities across the board within the expertise they currently have.

As chair of the VIATeC board and a participant on roundtables, Phillips sees huge value in being part of Victoria’s hi tech community. Employees connect to other experts in their field, they participate on roundtables, and attend social mixers. “I’m a big believer in building community.”

What do you think will encourage VIATeC’s growth in the future?

He points to two recent innovations that will help. Accelerate Tectoria that guides and supports local start-ups and Experience Tectoria that brings together top notch education, networking and music. “Connecting entrepreneurs to each other, and to grassroots initiatives like these is just a taste of what’s to come,” he said. “It would be wonderful to see our collective $2B in Victoria tech industry revenues grow to $5B.”

MaryLou Wakefield

Front page treatment for MetaLab’s Andrew Wilkinson

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Boulevard CoverWhat’s going on here? A young Victoria tech entrepreneur on the cover of a lifestyle magazine! Andrew Wilkinson, 27, of MetaLab gets the cover boy treatment from Boulevard Magazine and inside tells the story behind the rise and rise of his company, an interface design agency founded in 2006. If you are fan of Tumblr, then you have probably encountered their themes. I have just one question for MetaLab – how does the unlimited annual vacation work?

 

New app helps hospitals turn the page on pagers

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Smartpager screenshotIt was great to see Mike Ferguson and Ben Moore on the front page of one of our local newspapers recently. The duo are from SmartPager Systems – a mobile software company based in Victoria.

SmartPager is based in the DataTech Business Centre in Saanich and the firm has developed a smartphone-based app and back-end call centre software designed to replace the out-dated pager system still used by most hospital doctors.

The system launched in January. It allows users to send and receive confidential patient information, discussion and diagnoses via texts, audio messages, and images on smartphones through a cloud network. It has intelligent paging functionality including the ability to page until read and move the message to the next person in the chain if it is not answered.

SmartPager’s largest client group involves about 85 doctors working out of the Centre for Orthopedic Research and Education (CORE) in Phoenix. CORE surgeon Dr. Jason Scalise says it wasn’t hard to abandon pagers.

The reliability of paging networks is eroding daily, he says, and that standard texting between doctors and staff presents a “grey area” in terms of what is allowed under HIPAA. “The entire paging infrastructure in the U.S. is physically failing,” Scalise says from his office in Phoenix. “If a page doesn’t get through, the recipient and sender would never know.

Moore was alerted to the problems of traditional pagers while spending time at a local hospital after his newborn daughter suffered complications.

Sounding the alarm: forest fire monitoring with FTS

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Fire monitoring from FTSIn the second of a series of articles dedicated to Victoria success stories in the technology sector, MaryLou Wakefield of Wakefield Communications profiles Forest Technology Systems.

Since1980, Forest Technology Systems (FTS) has produced simple, reliable data collection equipment for forest management agencies that make up the single largest fire weather monitoring network in the world. In the late 1990s, the company expanded with hydrology monitoring systems specifically for harsh environments and remote locations.

“Our mission is to produce products that save lives,” said Eric Embacher, Director of Marketing and Product Management, who attributes a large part of the company’s success to the relationships they’ve developed with customers. “We tend to have old world values and a belief that ‘customer is king’ which permeates the whole organization.”

Customer challenges come in many shapes and sizes in the fire weather monitoring business and FTS works hard at understanding them. Perhaps the most pressing need is to get timely, accurate data in order to make informed decisions. “Our job is to ensure we understand what types of data our customers need, how frequently they need it, and at what level of accuracy. After that, it’s looking for ways to improve on the technology,” said Embacher.

A recent example involves a radio voice transmitter that receives up-to-date weather alerts from portable weather stations around the perimeter of a fire. Working closely with clients to better understand conditions on the ground and how the device could be improved, FTS recently launched ‘AirTalk’ with improved voice clarity and volume, as well as multi-language capabilities.

What do employees say is the best thing about working at FTS? “It’s the culture,” said Embacher. “We work hard and acknowledge work/life balance. We celebrate birthdays and have barbeques in the summer and a kids party at Christmas.” As a nod to the team’s hard work, the company flew its entire workforce (about 50 employees) from Victoria to Seattle via Kenmore Air for a day of fun and team building at the Boeing Manufacturing plant.

Currently FTS employs electronic technologists, research and development, sales and marketing, hardware and software engineers, service technicians, and shipping and receiving. Embacher expects FTS to expand beyond the North American market for fire weather monitoring and grow the hydrology side of its business within North America. ‘We use VIATeC as the hub for finding the right people through networking and posting positions on the VIATeC job board.”

Embacher agrees with the direction VIATeC is moving to ensure the high tech sector continues to grow and develop. “I’d like to see VIATeC have even more of a presence downtown,” he said.

MaryLou Wakefield