Tag: ac grad

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AC Grad TitanFile nominated in 2015 best of the National Law Journal Reader's ranking survey

TitanFile Inc., a secure file sharing and correspondence platform for legal professionals and other businesses, today announced the company has been nominated in the 2015 Best of The National Law Journal Readers Rankings Survey.
This marks the fourth year The National Law Journal Readers Rankings Survey has been conducted. It gives the legal community the opportunity to acknowledge those who they believe to be the best providers of legal products and services in a variety of spaces. TitanFile has been nominated in the “Who is the Nation’s Best Information/Document Management Provider” category.

Click here to vote.

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AC Grad ChangeIt uses small change to make a big difference

ChangeIt is a Waterloo company that has come up with a new way to give, through purchases made using a credit or debit card. “Fewer people are carrying cash or coin with them. We are now even paying for coffee with a credit or debit card,” he says. “So what happens to all those spare change donations that were a lifeline for a lot of charities?”

That is the problem ChangeIt set out to tackle.

Card customers of participating financial institutions go to the ChangeIt website, register their card, and sign on to having purchases “rounded up” to the next dollar or two dollars. They also fill out which of the 86,000 Canada Revenue Agency registered charities they would like their change to go to. At the end of the month, “rounded up” numbers are added together and donated to the charities of their choice. You see the donation as a single charge that comes off your card once a month.

To learn more, click here.

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AC Grad Kik introduces hashtags to bring mini social networks to its messaging service

Messaging app Kik is embracing one of the hallmarks of social networks after it introduced hashtags to its service. An update to the iOS and Android apps today turns hashtags into clickable links to chat groups where Kik believes like minded users can congregate to discuss topics, share photos/information and (potentially) meet new people.

It’s been a busy year for Kik. The Canadian company recently raised $38 million and completed its first acquisition (buying messaging app GIF Relay) — 2014 has seen it push into content and monetization with the launch of an in-app browser to bring the internet to chats, promoted chats to (finally) involve brands, and more safety features.

To read the full article, click here.

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AC Grad Clearpath Robotics wants to do for robotics what BlackBerry did for smartphones

With a vision to automate the world’s dullest, dirtiest and deadliest jobs through their unmanned robots, Clearpath Robotics Inc. is making an international name for itself. The company’s co-founders, Matt Rendall, Ryan Gariepy and Bryan Webb, were recently included in ‘40 Under 40: People to Watch in 2015’, a list published by online magazine Business Insider, that placed the young Canadian entrepreneurs alongside Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

“That recognition is helping create more credibility and buzz around Clearpath Robotics as a major player in our industry,” says CEO Matt Rendall, 30. “Big names aside, what’s really exciting is we’re the only guys on the list in robotics. That says something about the quality of the company we’ve built.”

Founded in 2009 while they were still mechatronics engineering students at The University of Waterloo, Clearpath Robotics is committed to building robots for good – on land, water or in the air. The company’s robotic solutions are used for research and development in over 30 countries in academic, mining, military, agricultural and industrial markets. High profile customers include the Canadian Space Agency, NASA, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. Although the company has military clients such as Canada’s Department of National Defense as well as the U.S. Army and Navy – their Grizzly robotic utility vehicle (RUV) is designed for heavy industrial and military field robotics – Clearpath was the first robotics company to join the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, calling for an international treaty to ban the use of robots as lethal autonomous weapons.

To read the full article in The Globe and Mail, click here.

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AC Grad Cross Chasm makes green vehicle purchase decisions easy

CrossChasm Team Photo Nov 2014aWith a widening number of alternative energy vehicle choices, from natural gas powered, to hybrids, to electric, drivers now have more options than ever before when looking for a greener ride. But every company – or consumer – looking to purchase, must go through a difficult decision making process to determine which vehicle best suits their planned usage and driving habits.

CrossChasm, founded in 2007 by University of Waterloo engineering grads and ChallengeX (a competition sponsored by General Motors, the US Department of Energy), winners Matt Stevens and Chris Mendes is a company dedicated to making that decision process for fleets and consumers easier.

CrossChasm joined the Waterloo Accelerator Centre soon after the company’s inception. It then spent three years at the facility “learning to build not only a product, but also a business,” says company CEO Matt Stevens.

To read the full article, click here.

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AC Grad Magnet Forensics helps retrieves the hidden digital evidence online crimes leave behind

The Internet. Social media. Chat rooms. The applications consumers use to navigate and manage their daily lives are also tools used as exploitation methods for bad guys.

ISIS is turning to Twitter to recruit others to its terrorist organization. Pedophiles use chat rooms and Facebook to lure innocent children to meet them or send them pictures. Cyber attackers are using phishing schemes to send emails to steal a person’s banking information. An employee uploads confidential corporate information to Dropbox and walks out the door.

Someone has to stop them. Someone has to help the law enforcement professionals responsible for our public safety, win the day.

Magnet Forensics is a technology company founded in 2011 by former Waterloo Regional Police Officer Jad Saliba. A specialist in digital forensic crime with a background in computer programming, Saliba began developing tools back in 2009 to help he and his fellow police officers uncover the invisible digital fingerprints criminals leave behind when they use technology to commit a crime.

“Almost every crime committed leaves behind some kind of digital evidence,” says Adam Belsher, CEO of Magnet Forensics. Adam, a former Blackberry executive, joined Jad in 2011 to help lead the company and craft its growth strategy. “Smartphones, a laptop computer, GPS technology in a car, a NEST thermostat—all of these devices leave behind digital traces of a person’s daily activities. Many of these devices are also connected to the Internet. So when a criminal uses technology—either directly or indirectly in the commission of a crime, all of that information is of investigative value.”

Magnet Forensics’s Internet Evidence Finder (IEF) helps law enforcement professionals find and recover evidence from hundreds of Internet, business computing and mobile artifacts; analyze the information to get to critical evidence fast; and present that information back in an understandable form for improved collaboration with colleagues or in a court of law. The company’s tools are now in use in more than 2,500 organizations in 93 countries around the world, and IEF has been instrumental in retrieving critical evidence required for convictions in some very profile criminal cases.

To read the full article, click here.

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AC Grad Karos Health fosters health-care collaboration

In a remote part of Northern Ontario, a patient shows up at a hospital with symptoms that mystify the doctors.

After getting images from a CAT-scan, as well as blood work and other tests, doctors need to consult with a specialist in Toronto. Fortunately, that specialist is just a few mouse clicks away, thanks to software solutions from Karos Health Inc., a growing Waterloo company that makes it easy for doctors to share information and collaborate, no matter where they are. The best idea is to “move the data, not the patient” whenever possible, says Karos president and founder Rick Stroobosscher. If the patient does need to be moved, the entire medical file, including images, notes and lab results, should instantly be at the disposal of the team at the next facility, he adds.

Stroobosscher founded Karos Health in 2006, launching it from his own home. He previously worked for nine years at Mitra Imaging, a medical information technology company based in Waterloo that was acquired in 2002 by Belgium-based Agfa-Gevaert Group and renamed Agfa Healthcare. Mitra was an early player in the technology used to store, archive and display radiology data and other clinical images electronically, and connect all of that to the rest of a hospital’s information system. After Mitra, Stroobosscher began to think about the next step — how to better enable health-care providers to work together not just within a hospital, but “across a city, a province, a state or even countries.”

That led to Karos, which initially moved into the Accelerator Centre in Waterloo and now is located in office space on Father David Bauer Drive. In August, Karos acquired its first company, Medical Insight based in Copenhagen, Denmark, a move that gives the company “a fantastic base to work from in Europe,” as well as complementary technology, Stroobosscher says. Karos now employs 50 people, including 30 in North America, mostly at the offices in Waterloo, but also in the United States, as well as 20 in Europe.

To read the full article, click here.

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AC Grad Clearpath Robotics is changing the world with its life-saving robots

It started with a singular goal: to prove that robots weren’t evil. It was 2008; Clearpath Robotics CEO, Matt Rendall, and his co-founders Ryan Gariepy, Patrick Martinson and Bryan Webb, were students at the University of Waterloo. At the time, armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan shaped the public’s perception of robots. “Everyone was talking about drones and bomb-disposal robots,” explains Rendall. “We wanted to show that you can use these same systems for a much more humanitarian purpose.”

The team never commercialized their initial concept—a landmine-clearing automaton—but stuck with the idea of using robots for jobs too dangerous for humans. Five years later, Clearpath is a bustling, multimillion-dollar concern with 70 employees at its Kitchener, Ont. headquarters. The company now has a high profile in robotics circles, anyway, thanks to its yellow-and-black unmanned Kingfisher vehicles, which are used in commercial applications such as mining. (You can now find the Kingfisher measuring tailings in potash mines—a procedure that would otherwise expose people to harsh chemicals.) Clearpath has also gained big inroads selling robot technology to research laboratories. Clients include the Canadian Space Agency and MIT.

Clearpath is one of 10 corporations named by Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions and Richardson GMP Ltd. to its current list of Canada’s Passion Capitalists, which recognizes organizations for their energy, intensity and sustainability. This year’s winners don’t just rely on their intellectual, human and financial capital to get ahead, says Paul Alofs, a former Disney and HMV executive who inspired the awards with his book Passion Capital. They have something more: “Not just passion, which is an emotion, but a tangible asset called passion capital,” says Alofs. Passion capital, he contends, is built by channeling the emotion into concrete actions that are energetic, intense and sustainable. Alofs believes Clearpath has this kind of capital “in spades.” “They believe very deeply in their product and what they’re doing,” he explains. “In their own way, they have changed a small corner of the world.

To read the full article, click here.

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AC Grad Kik raises $38 Million in Funding, buys GIF startup Relay

Kik Interactive, Inc., maker of chat network Kik, announced it has acquired Relay, a leading GIF messenger, and raised a $38.3 million Series C round of funding. The addition of Relay brings Kik to the forefront of visual messaging, an increasingly popular form of communication, especially among teens and young adults. This is Kik’s first acquisition, made with a combination of cash and equity at undisclosed terms.

Kik now has more than 185 million users. Each day, more than 50 percent of active users share content with their friends, including photos, videos and mobile websites developed specifically for Kik. In August 2014, the company launched Kik Promoted Chats, enabling brands to chat and share content with Kik users in a one-to-one setting, while tracking and optimizing their results.

To read the full article, click here.