Tag: Plasticity Labs

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Bonfire Interactive, Eyedro Green Solutions, and Plasticity Labs Graduate from the Accelerator Centre

Waterloo (Ontario), CANADA, Thursday, December 11, 2014 – The Accelerator Centre® (AC), an award-winning centre for the cultivation of technology entrepreneurship located in Waterloo, Ontario, today announced the graduation of three technology startups, Bonfire Interactive, Eyedro Green Solutions and Plasticity Labs from its internationally recognized Accelerator Program.

Trusted with more than $3 billion in public spending decisions, Bonfire Interactive is the easiest, simplest and friendliest way for purchasers to accept and evaluate supplier quotes and proposals as part of an RFx process. The company was founded by Corry Flatt, a serial entrepreneur with a passion for building products and companies from the ground up.

Eyedro Green Solutions is a software and electronics design company making electricity usage easy to understand. Co-founded by Trevor Orton and Nick Gamble, Eyedro provides consumers and businesses with simple solutions for monitoring their electricity use in real-time.

How does happiness drive performance? This question, and their own life-changing experience drove co-founders Jim Moss and Jennifer Moss to create Plasticity Labs, a company dedicated to helping global organizations connect their employees, measure emotional intelligence in real-time, increase engagement and create the happiest, highest performing workplaces. The company recently closed a $2.1 million financing round led by Fibernetics Ventures.
“Today’s graduates are all exceptional companies with significant market traction in their respective industries and we are delighted to celebrate their achievements to date,” says Paul Salvini, CEO of the Accelerator Centre. “Our focus and mission here at the AC is to equip entrepreneurs with the knowledge and skills they need to not just get a business off the ground, but take it to the next level of sustainability. I’m proud to say that our Accelerator Centre graduates are responsible for building tomorrow’s tech sector success stories.”
About the Accelerator Centre

The Accelerator Centre® (AC) is dedicated to building and commercializing technology start-ups. The AC provides an essential combination of mentorship, educational programming, professional office space, networking, and access to funding, with a goal of building successful companies. Over a two- to three-year period, we help entrepreneurs move from start-up to scale-up, accelerate their time to market, and attract customers, investment and revenue.
Since 2006, the Accelerator Centre has developed and nurtured over 130 early-stage technology start-ups, creating 1100+ new jobs, and generating more than $350 million in revenue and funding. Forty-three companies have graduated from the Accelerator Centre, and more than 85 percent of these companies have remained in Waterloo Region.

For more information visit www.acceleratorcentre.com.

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AC Client Plasticity Labs' inspirational story featured in The Toronto Star

In September 2009, Canadian professional lacrosse player Jim Moss was training for the new season by running up a mountain.

Just 48 hours later, he couldn’t walk.

Moss and his wife Jennifer, who was seven and a half months pregnant, were told that Jim had contracted a rare auto-immune disease and would lose all use of his legs.

“I was losing my profession. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to walk again. We were just about to have a baby. I had lost 85 per cent of my salary, and we lived in the most expensive zip code in the United States,” he recalls.

In other words, happiness was in short supply.

And yet, Moss’s hospital bed became the unlikely incubator for an ambitious project to create happier, healthier workplaces.

As his recovery process began, Jim realized his mood was having a significant impact on his physical rehabilitation. He began taking notes on the small things that brought him joy during his convalescence. Although he had not yet realized it, he was tapping into the theory of neuroplasticity. Its premise: that positive behaviour can rewire the brain and body for the better.

A month later, Jim Moss walked out of hospital.

It was almost certainly not the sole reason for his rapid recovery, but Moss was sufficiently convinced by the science of gratitude to begin studying it in earnest. The couple returned to Canada, settling in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. And four years after Jim’s collapse, their company, Plasticity Labs, launched a product whose understated goal is “helping a billion people find what makes them happier.”

The office was a natural starting point.

“I’ve been in a workplace that was negative,” says Jennifer. “I had to constantly fight and battle being in a negative environment, and then try and bring positivity into the home. And it was very, very difficult to do.”

Enter the Plasticity app, which celebrates its one year anniversary this month. It’s described by Jim as a “mash-up of Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, with a shot of Survey Monkey.” It’s the first attempt in the world, Jim says, to combine a social platform with research-based analytics in a single technology

Here’s how it works: employees log-in to the phone app daily by rating their happiness on a scale of 1 to 100 and explaining the reason for their score.

Once inside, the app works like “a really positively focused Facebook stream.” Employees socialize online and share their successes — an exercise guided by the principles of neuroplasticity.

To read the full article click here.