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Welcome to the MaRS Commons Magazine – showcasing the latest in startup industry news, events, tweets and feature articles.

Startups

The world’s biggest hackathon comes to MaRS: #AngelhackTO

Posted: May 22, 2013   by: Jennifer Marron

Last Saturday morning, over 180 energetic developers and designers came to MaRS for AngelHack’s Toronto hackathon, quashing initial worries about potential low attendance levels due to the long weekend.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a …

Industry Trends

Canadian high-tech startups: New report highlights secrets to their success

Posted: April 23, 2013   by: Neha Khera @ MaRS

Over the past five years, approximately 183 Canadian high-tech companies have been acquired by other companies. On average, it took these companies eight years to reach this milestone, reaching an average valuation of US$100 million …

Jolt

JOLT Info Session – Monday, May 27

Posted: 19 May 2013, 9:22 pm by: Jolt

JOLT is a micro seed fund and early-stage technology accelerator that puts entrepreneurs in front of experienced mentors and investors successfully grow and develop their startups on a global scale. At JOLT, we're dedicated to building high-growth web and mobile … Continue reading

What We Are Reading

Laptop U

Nathan Heller

Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of the distant past. At seventy, he has owlish eyes, a flared Hungarian nose, and a tendency to gesture broadly with the flat palms of his hands. He wears the crisp white shirts and dark blazers that have replaced tweed as the raiment of the academic caste.

Innovator: Stephen Lake's Muscle-Reading Remote Control

Olga Kharif

Over microbrews last April at a pub near Ontario’s University of Waterloo, engineering student Stephen Lake, 23, and two friends discussed using wearable devices to improve motion-sensitive computer interfaces. Nintendo’s wireless Wii remote offers ways to play using hand gestures, but like similar gadgets requires stationary sensors and loses accuracy beyond a certain range. For more freedom of movement, Lake wondered, why not track users’ electrical impulses, wherever they’re standing?

Ontario’s EdTech Innovation Ecosystem

Vicki Saunders

Startup Genome placed Toronto as the 4th best place to start a new tech company behind Silicon Valley, New York, and London shattering Canada’s reputation as a risk-averse, low innovation economy. Area startups, who provides profiles, rankings and data on 25,000 startups in 25 cities lists more than 660 startups in Toronto alone .

Ontario’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is booming.