A foot in two worlds
By Erica Alini - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 0 Comments
How a growing number of tiny Canadian-based start-ups are making the leap into big foreign markets
Natalie Castellino/Maclean's
Ray Newal needs few words to describe his first attempt to conquer the Indian market. “What ended up happening,” he says, “was . . . nothing.”
The 35-year-old entrepreneur is the co-founder of Jigsee Inc., a Canadian start-up whose technology enables video streaming on older model cellphones and shaky networks. India, he says, where mobile subscribers number 800 million but only a privileged few have BlackBerrys and iPhones, looked like the perfect target market. But a first attempt to reach out to consumers by partnering with a Mumbai-based powerhouse quickly fizzled.
Months after Jigsee teamed up with Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, the world’s largest distributor of Bollywood and South Asian entertainment content, in 2009, Newal knew something was wrong. It took a move to India to find out that Hungama was trying to pitch his company’s technology to high-end smartphone users, who plainly didn’t have as much need for it. “That,” says Newal, “is when the awakening occurred.”
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Your own personal art ‘mixtape’
By Mike Doherty - Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments
Big galleries may not like it, but Artfinder is revolutionizing art appreciation
Photographs by Jenna Marie Wakani, Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt
Your next trip to an art gallery may go something like this: first, you download an app onto your phone and flip through reproductions of the work you’re going to see. At the gallery, you take pictures of paintings; your phone recognizes them, and the curator’s voice in your earbuds gives you information. One work in particular captivates you, but prints aren’t available in the gift shop; no matter—you order one online. While you’re at it, you “like” the work on your social networking profile, and a link tells you there’s another gallery nearby with work by the same artist.
This is the future of art appreciation, according to Artfinder. The start-up company’s office near the British Museum in London may be in an unassuming schoolroom-like space, but its project is ambitious. With digital reproductions of over 500,000 artworks from major galleries around the globe in its database and the backing of financial giant Wellington Management and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s company Greylock Partners, it’s aiming for a revolution in the art world.
Art “hasn’t really been digitized as an experience. We’re trying to fix that,” says CEO Spencer Hyman, his long frame curved over a laptop at his office’s one table. He’s delivering a one-on-one version of the sales pitch he’s been giving galleries and museums since the company’s founding in October. Hyman seems in equal parts enthusiastic art-obsessive, tech geek and smooth salesman: exactly what you’d expect from someone whose resumé includes creating software for Amazon, digitizing board games for Hasbro Japan, and acting as COO of music social networking site Last.fm.
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A cozy but violent game
By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments
Taxpayers would be subsidizing violent games through the new interactive digital media tax credit
Getty Images
When Ubisoft set up a studio in Toronto last July, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty stood in front of a giant flat screen TV displaying graphics from Assassin’s Creed II.
The game was developed in Canada by the type of “creative minds” Ontario needs, he said, undaunted that taxpayers would be subsidizing violent games through the new interactive digital media tax credit. But the release of another new game has prompted anger from at least one politician. In Medal of Honor, players can don the persona of a Taliban fighter and shoot American soldiers. “I find it wrong to have anyone, children in particular, playing the role of the Taliban,” said Defence Minister Peter MacKay.
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Small but smart
By Colin Campbell - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 2 Comments
Why some schools don’t want a Big Five monopoly on research
The University of Waterloo has emerged as one of the leading research centres in quantum computing and digital media. Its computer science and mathematics faculty is the largest in the world. In terms of the number of grants and funding it attracts per faculty member, it is among the most research-intensive universities in the country. But Waterloo is not one of the so-called Big Five universities, who recently proposed in an interview with Maclean’s a radical rethinking of the higher education system: boosting government research funding and resources to the biggest universities—i.e., them—while having other schools shift focus toward undergraduate education.The proposal of the Big Five—British Columbia, Alberta, Toronto, McGill and Montreal—understandably doesn’t sit well with Waterloo’s president, David Johnston. “How sad it would be to say, ‘We don’t see Waterloo being of high priority for funding because you don’t happen to be in the Top Five universities,’ ” he says. “Simply because you’re big doesn’t mean you’re great.” Continue…
