Tag: waterloo

• First impressions of the new Focals by North

  I am on my third Fitbit device. The first one I got was their very first release. I wanted to try it out and so I put in a pre-order. It was pretty cool, but it wasn’t yet great. So I eventually stopped using it. The second one I got was better, but I somehow lost it, possibly at a bar. Its whereabouts are still unconfirmed to this day.

  The FitBit Inspire, which is what I am using now, has really stuck with me. I bought it for the heart rate monitor and for sleep tracking, which is why an Apple Watch wasn’t for me. But the ability to read incoming text messages on my wrist has, surprisingly, also proven to be a feature that I like.

  Up until a few months ago, this was the only wearable tech that I owned. However, this spring I was given a pair of smart glasses: the new Focals by North. They are a much better and sexier version of Google Glass. (You can read about my Focals fitting, here.)

  The premise behind Focals is that they are the next step toward conflating real life and tech. In other words, instead of pulling out your phone or looking at your wrist, now you can remain engaged and get the information you want by looking straight ahead. The objective is to help you stay present. And they certainly help with that.

  Focals are the opposite of Snap’s Spectacles in that the former allows you to consume information, whereas the latter is all about narrow types of content creation. With Focals, you can read and respond to texts, get directions, talk to Alexa (there’s a microphone), see your appointments (and the weather), and even get speaker notes when you’re giving a presentation.

  

  Now that I’ve had some time to test them out, here’s what I would tell you.

  Because I don’t wear glasses anymore (I got laser eye surgery so that I could avoid things on my face), it was a bit of an adjustment. While very well designed, they do have some heft. The arms are thicker than normal glasses. So I found myself using them more as sunglasses (they come with great clip-ons). Perhaps I would feel differently if I still wore glasses.

  I’m also not a huge fan of the Loop (pictured above), which is the 4-directional joystick that you wear as a ring and use to control the glasses. For me, it simply feels like a bit too much tech to wear on a regular basis. Though I will say that, for what it is, it is well designed and easy to use inconspicuously. The other input mechanism for the glasses is your voice.

  With all that said, Focals by North are exceedingly cool. The Canadian company is creating a new category and the glasses do feel like a hint of what’s to come next in the world of wearable technologies. In the same way that I was surprised by just how useful (some) notifications on my wrist could be, I am impressed by the ability to see notifications right in front of me.

  North has also been consistent with rolling out software updates and new features. Similar to my experience with Fitbit, the product keeps getting better. Over the last month, they announced conversation awareness (notifications are delayed if the glasses think you’re busy talking), as well as integrations with Google Fit and Google Slide.

  Sometimes all you need is one really strong use case for a product or service to work and I think presentations could be one of them for Focals. Having presentation notes float in front of you means you’re not looking down at your notes and away from your audience. And being able to move from slide to slide with your thumb transforms the Loop into now a pretty slick clicker.

  I am looking forward to seeing this space develop and I am excited that a Canadian company has jumped out in front. If you’d like to check out Focals for yourself, there are permanent showrooms in Toronto and Brooklyn, as well as pop-ups all across North America.

  2019.06.10

• Electric scooter startup Lime raises $310 million series D round

  Earlier this month it was announced that the on-demand electric scooter and bike startup, Lime, had closed a $310 million series D round. This values the 18-month old company at around $2.4 billion and brings its total raise to $867.1 million. For comparison, Bird — its main competitor — has raised around $400 million.

  These numbers should tell you about the kind of growth that the “micromobility” startup is seeing. They are now in 15 countries and its riders have taken over 34 million trips. In the last 7 months alone, the company reports that it has seen a 5.5x increase in ridership. They are seen as an affordable last-mile solution. Supposedly 1/3 of its users report an income of less than $50,000 per year.

  Lime entered the Canadian market last fall via Waterloo. They have yet to expand anywhere else, though I suspect we’ll see them in Toronto this spring/summer. One of the barriers is that their scooters (with airless tires) aren’t equipped to deal with snow, so they currently pack them up during the winter months.

  This is in addition to the regulatory challenges they are facing in cities all around the world. But like Uber, I am sure there is a compromise to be had.

  2019.02.25

• My Focals by North fitting

  Over the weekend I went by the new North store on Ossington for the fitting of my new Focals by North glasses. According to Retail Insider, this is the first retail space in Canada that is entirely dedicated to wearable tech (shout-out to Hullmark and CBRE). Full disclosure: I am not being paid by North, but I was asked if I would accept a pair of Focals and provide my thoughts. So I will be doing that over the coming months on the blog.

  Previously known as Thalmic Labs, North is a Waterloo-based company that first attracted attention with the launch of a gesture-control armband known as Myo. What that product did was make digital interactions completely hands-free. It had strong use cases across medicine, music, and business. However, this past October the company announced that it would be moving on from Myo. Enter Focals by North. 

  Focals are custom-built eyewear with an integrated display that only the wearer can see. It is similar to, for example, BMW’s heads up display, and the idea is that it is a way for you to quickly get the information you want, without pulling out your phone and disengaging from the world. The ambition is human-centric technology that integrates seamlessly.

  Here is an example of what that display looks like (it is much better and cooler in person):

  

  To control the display you use both your voice (the glasses have a microphone) and a 4-directional joystick called a Loop, which sits on your index finger like a ring and that you thumb. You can receive and send texts (voice to text), you can get turn-by-turn directions, you can view your appointments and the weather, and you can ask Alexa things.

  The first step in the ordering process is a fitting. And that’s what I did over the weekend. The glasses are all custom made and so they start by doing a full 3D scan of your head in a room that feels like the future. Once that’s done, you pick what frame you want, the color, and your sun clips (an essential accessory for day drinking in Trinity Bellwoods). Total cost: CAD 1,299.

  While exceptionally cool, it is premature for me to really comment on the tech at this point. I’m expecting my Focals in 8-10 weeks. But is it interesting to opine on the current state of eyewear tech.

  Most people believe that the problem with Google Glass was the fact that you had to be a Silicon Valley nerd in order to want to wear them out in public. They looked and continue to look ridiculous, which is why Snap went fashion first with their Spectacles. I have always found this product really intriguing. I want to use it. But I’ve stopped using Snapchat entirely and I don’t really have a strong use case for them.

  Snap’s Spectacles are about capture and content creation, whereas Focals are about discreetly feeding you information that you would otherwise have to pull out your phone (or watch) to view. There’s no camera on Focals. That’s not what they are about. But they are obviously fashion first.

  The question for me is whether the experience will truly be seamless and integrated, or if I’ll still be disengaged – gazing off into my glasses (space) while I ask Alexa to UberEats me a chicken shawarma wrap. I’ll let you know in about 8-10 weeks. If you’re looking for more on Focals by North, check out their website and this CNBC piece. Go Canadian tech.

  2018.12.09

• Planning dinner, smart cities, and privacy

  

  This evening I attended the 27th Annual Toronto Planning Dinner. It’s an annual dinner for people in planning and development, put on by the University of Waterloo Planning Alumni of Toronto. Thank you Wood Bull LLP for the invite.

  The keynote speaker was Dr. Anthony Townsend. He is the author of SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. I haven’t read it (yet), but his talk offered a preview of it and I think it would be of interest to all of you.

  It deals with many of the topics that we discuss on this blog, one of which is the interrelationship between our physical environment and the networks and software layers that we are now building on top of it.

  These layers have the potential to augment and enhance our cities (maybe make them smarter), but they also have the potential to do us harm. One important issue that Townsend brought up is that of privacy.

  Cities used to enable anonymity. 

  When essayist and art critic Charles Baudelaire wrote about “modernity” in 19th century industrializing Paris, it referred to an ephemeral and fleeting kind of urban environment. Pass someone on the street and you may never see them again. That must have felt sad at the time.

  Today we live in a fish bowl. 

  Networks connect us, check us in, ping us when we are nearby people we know, and help us find people to meet and date. And we already have devices, like Alexa, that spy on us in our homes so that companies can serve us targeted ads. (This is deplorable by the way.)

  Will the city of the future endeavour to do the same as we equip it with more “smarts”?

  I guess that’s why Townsend believes that privacy will define a big part of 21st century urbanism. There’s no doubt that it will be very important.

  2017.11.10

• New York, San Francisco, Toronto

  Yesterday it was announced (here, here, and here) that Toronto-based Top Hat has raised $22.5 million (USD) in Series-C funding. The round was led by New York-based Union Square Ventures.

  I am always excited to see Toronto-based startups doing well and I am particularly excited by this remark in USV’s blog announcement:

  “Also worth noting is that Toronto continues to impress us with its quality and diversity of companies. We now have five investments there, placing Toronto third as a location in the USV portfolio after New York and San Francisco.”

  Here is another quote from Fred Wilson’s blog:

  “Toronto is a great place for startups. In addition to five investments of ours that are HQ’d there, I know of at least one other USV portfolio company that has much of their engineering team in Toronto. The talent, mindset, and quality of the people in the Toronto/Waterloo tech/startup community is really top notch and we love investing there.”

  Go Toronto. 

  (Of course, Toronto really means Toronto-Waterloo. That’s the geography of the ecosystem.)

  2017.02.17

• Moving to the big city

  When I was 18 years old, I
  moved from the suburbs of Toronto to Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour
  west of the city.

  I largely did this for two reasons.

  Firstly, I had started
  visiting friends at both Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of
  Waterloo while I was in high school, and I thought that I wanted
  that kind of University town experience.

  Secondly,
  I started University as a Computer Science student and I figured that Waterloo
  was a pretty good place to study that. Research In Motion (later renamed to
  Blackberry) was an important company at the time and interesting things were happening.

  Though
  to be clear, I was a student at Laurier and not at the University of Waterloo – the better of the two schools for Computer Science – because I didn’t have
  the grades for the latter.

  But a
  funny thing ended up happening. I hated living in Waterloo. I felt so out of
  place. So much so that I spent every weekend back in Toronto visiting my
  friends who had instead decided to go to the University of Toronto.

  And I
  remember vividly how I felt during those weekends. I would stand in my friend’s
  apartments – most of which had dens and solariums that were hacked into
  bedrooms so that they could afford to live there – and I would look across the skyline and
  think to myself: why the hell do I not live here?

  So I
  transferred to the University of Toronto. And that solved that.

  The
  reason I bring up this story today is that I was reminded of it while reading a recent CityLab article by Richard Florida called, The
  Self-Confident City.

  The three
  main arguments in the article are:

  (1) Where
  we choose to live has a massive impact on our life outcomes.

  (2) Self-confident
  people – according to a recent study – seem to be drawn to big cities.

  (3)
  Self-confidence can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy
  for people in big cities.

  Now,
  I don’t know if it was really self-confidence and youthful hubris that told me I needed to live in a bigger city than Waterloo. (It was probably part of it.) All I know is that I
  wanted to live in a super dynamic place that felt bigger than me. I wanted to
  feel like I was a small fish in a big pond trying to make some sort of
  meaningful dent.

  That
  was true for me when I was 18. And it remains true for me today at 32.

  2016.03.31

• Toronto is at the center of an emerging megalopolis

  

  High speed train by asean leung on 500px

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  With the recent talk around downtown Cleveland’s resurgence, I am reminded that for those of us living near the Great Lakes, we are living in one of the most important urban agglomerations in the world: The Great Lakes Megalopolis.

  In 1962, French geographer Jean Gottmann wrote a seminal book called, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. And in it, he described the remarkable clustering of cities in the northeast, running from Boston in the north to Washington D.C. in the south. He called this the Northeast Megalopolis.

  The term megalopolis simply refers to a clustering or chain of generally adjacent metropolitan areas.

  Then in the 1960s and 1970s, architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis started writing about the emergence of what he called the Great Lakes Megalopolis. In his mind, a contiguous urban region was forming that stretched all the way from Chicago in the west to Quebec City in the north east. And at its economic center was the city of Detroit.

  More recently, Richard Florida, as well as others, have been referring to these urban clusters as mega-regions. And in the case of the Great Lakes, Florida broke the area down into two distinct regions: Chi-Pitts in the west and Tor-Buff-Chester in the east. (I think you can guess how the names were derived.)

  According to his research, these two mega-regions have a combined population of almost 60 million people and an economic output equivalent to almost $3 trillion. That places it in line with the Northeast Megalopolis. But according to the Brookings Institution, the output coming from the Great Lakes could be closer to $4.5 trillion.

  Whatever the case may be and whatever you want to call it, the Great Lakes Megalopolis is unquestionably an economic and cultural powerhouse. But this has me wondering whether or not we’re doing enough to unleash its full potential.

  When I attended Joe Berridge’s talk last week on Toronto as a global city, I asked him how he thought we should be organizing our cities and regions. Do city-states make sense? Should we be rethinking the relationship between provinces/states and cities?

  His response was that we should be creating agencies and entities with regional authority (as opposed to fighting to make any constitutional changes). For example, the Toronto region should not have an array of competing transit agencies (as it does today). It should have one regional transit authority that blankets the region. People, ideas, and capital don’t follow borders.

  So with that in mind, what opportunities are there for us to unite the metropolitan areas within the Great Lakes Megalopolis?

  The first idea that comes to my mind is a high speed rail network that seamlessly connects to each city’s local transit network. Imagine a Great Lakes bullet train that could zip you across the region. It would completely reorganize the spatial landscape.

  Here’s an excerpt from a recent report by the Independent Transport Commission called, Ambitions & Opportunities – Understanding the Spatial Effects of High Speed Rail:

  There has been a global shift of economic power and influence from nation states to cities and city-regions. Today’s successful cities collaborate across existing boundaries to form polycentric metropolitan regions. As a result cities function in a much less self-contained manner than they did fifty years ago. Longterm trends in the pattern of urban settlement reflect the interplay between opportunities for dispersal afforded by greater mobility, and economic and social forces promoting concentration.

  But what else could we be doing to empower the Great Lakes Megalopolis? 

  I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. I think there’s a strong case to be made for thinking at the scale of the megalopolis and not just at the scale of our own backyard.

  2015.06.25

• Why Toronto-Waterloo needs all-day two-way urban rail service

  

  This morning I stumbled upon an interesting Medium article talking about the need for an all-day two-way urban rail service between Toronto and Waterloo. 

  The argument is that along this corridor sits a technology ecosystem that is second in size only to San Francisco-Silicon Valley and that current connectivity levels represent a missed opportunity of epic proportions. Presently this rail service will feed you into Toronto during the morning rush hour and take you back out in the evening rush hour. But that’s it.

  According to this report prepared by the City of Kitchener (which is beside Waterloo), efficient train service would stitch together an ecosystem of approximately 12,800 technology companies, 2,800 startups, and 205,000 technology employees. It would also connect 6 universities and 4 colleges, many of which are ranked top in the world.

  There’s an argument here that this is exactly the sort of thing that governments should be doing to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. Rather than trying to be heavily involved in actual startups, they should be creating an environment that maximizes output and then getting out of the way. 

  I think this makes a lot of sense. Don’t you?

  Image: The Innovation Express

  2015.04.13

• Toronto’s “Instagram for doctors” raises $4 million

  

  Earlier this week it was announced that Fred Wilson and his firm Union Square Ventures have just led a $4M Series A round of venture funding in the Toronto-based startup Figure1. Figure1 is essentially “Instagram for doctors.” Here’s how it works (via WSJ):

  Today, more than 125,000 health-care professionals use Figure 1 to view or share free medical imagery, including photos of patients with personally identifiable details blurred out or excluded; x-rays; charts; and still images taken from MRI or CAT scans, for example.

  The app’s users include board-certified doctors, registered nurses, medical and nursing students, physicians’ assistants, and others who use the app and share images for teaching and studying purposes, or even to request community feedback about a possible diagnosis.

  With this round, USV is now up to 3 investments in the Toronto/Waterloo region (I think of us as one center). The other 2 are Kik (out of Waterloo) and Wattpad, which is actually headquartered here in the St. Lawrence Market.

  What’s exciting to me about all of this is that it’s further evidence of a growing and thriving Toronto/Waterloo startup ecosystem. And while to some it may not seem like a big deal for yet another mobile app to receive funding, it’s actually great news.

  Because as these companies grow and become successful, they’ll not only create new jobs in the region, but also create a tremendous amount of wealth and expertise. And when this wealth and expertise gets reinvested into future startups, you end up with a powerful snowball effect. That’s how startup ecosystems are built.

  It’s also great to see companies staying put, because the pull towards more established startup hubs can be significant. When my friend Evgeny raised a Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz last year, he told me that they asked him to move 500px down to California. As is the case with a lot of VCs, they like their portfolio companies to be nearby.

  But ultimately 500px decided to stay headquartered here in downtown Toronto. And they did that for a few reasons: There’s lots of great engineering talent here and it usually comes at a discount relative to California (5-15%). He also finds that employees here are more loyal. There’s less turnover. In California, everyone is looking for that next best startup to join. Here 500px gets to be that big fish in a small pond.

  Anyways, a big congratulations to the Figure1 team. I hope they continue crushing it and that they stay put in Toronto. If you’re a healthcare professional, you can click here to download the app.

  2014.08.10

• BlackBerry started our forest

  A friend of mine posted this article on my Facebook wall yesterday: “A Snowier Silicon Valley in BlackBerry’s Backyard.”

  It essentially talks about the fact that despite the rapid decline of BlackBerry (it just reported $4.4 billion in losses), the Kitchener-Waterloo region is thriving. Many companies—both local and international, such as Google and Motorola, Square, Desire2Learn, Kik and others—have all hung their shingle in the area. 

  Part of this certainly has to do with the University of Waterloo, but much of it also has to do with the legacy of BlackBerry. In fact, you could argue that BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion) is what started at all.

  In reading the New York Times article I was reminded of a post that Fred Wilson wrote last year called, “The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs.” It’s a great post. In it he talks about how he looks for the company that gave birth to the hub. In Silicon Valley he argues that it was Fairchild Semiconductor and in New York it was Doubleclick.

  Once started, he likens the hub to a growing forest. The big trees (mature companies) start dropping seeds and new trees then start to grow (more startup companies). This is important, because it kick-starts a non-linear cycle of entrepreneurial growth.

  Here’s how he maps out Silicon Valley:

  “In my mental model of Silicon Valley, the first “tree” was Fairchild Semiconductor (founded in 1957) which begat Intel (founded 1968) which begat Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977), which begat Sun (1982), Silicon Graphics (1981), and Cisco (1984) which begat Siebel (1993) and Netscape (1994), which begat Yahoo! (1995) and eBay (1995), which begat Google (1998) and PayPal (1998), which begat YouTube (2005), Facebook (2004), and LinkedIn (2003) which begat Twitter (2006) and Zynga (2007), which begat Square (2010), Dropbox (2008), and many more.”

  Using this logic, Fred Wilson argues that Silicon Valley is about 10 cycles in and New York is at about 2. So what about Kitchener-Waterloo? Well if you buy into the argument that BlackBerry is what started it all, we’re really only into our first cycle. BlackBerry created a lot of wealth and talent, and now it’s being deployed into local startups. Our forest has begun.

  Part of me worries, though, if Kitchener-Waterloo is the right place for a startup hub over the long term. Sure it has the University of Waterloo, but does young talent want to be there? At about 320,000 people, it’s no San Francisco, New York or Toronto. And we’re already seeing a significant pull towards urban centers.

  But let’s look at it from the perspective of Southern Ontario as a whole. We’re at a critical moment in our evolution. The mother tree has caught a disease and it’s starting to take its toll. It may be able to fight it off, but right now it’s not looking promising. Thankfully, there are many young trees sprouting up to replace it. But we’re going to need to take special care of them, because they’re probably our best shot at creating our own thriving forest.

  2013.12.24