Winners of the 2018 Bootstrap Awards Green Award: Riverwood Acoustics
Founder/CEO: Ben Seaman Riverwood Acoustics manufactures and sells premium wireless speakers made of 100% reclaimed birch riverwood.
Innovation Engineering & Technology Award: SanEcoTec Ltd.
Founder/CEO: Els Vanbeckevoort SanEcoTec Ltd. develops sustainable water treatment practices. The focus of its business to date has largely been on the development of AVIVE™, which provides an alternative to chlorine in secondary disinfection of drinking water; the AVIVE™ water treatment process involves the use of hydrogen peroxide, which is considered safer, more cost-efficient and healthier to the ultimate consumer.
Best Mobile Application: GoFor
Co-Founder/CEO: Brad Rollo GoFor is an Uber-like platform meeting the unique needs of the construction industry. The app allows users, both construction professionals and do-ityourselfers, to have small to medium-sized orders of building materials delivered immediately.
Best Guerilla/Social Marketing Campaign: Digitera
Founder/CEO: Jordan St. Jacques Digitera provides comprehensive digital marketing services that aim to, for example, increase traffic to a company’s website, strengthen a company’s social media presence and successfully implement blast/ email marketing campaigns.
Bootstrap Capital Award: Spatial DNA Informatics Inc.
Founder/CEO: Todd Lewis Spatial DNA Informatics Inc. is a systems integration firm, focussed on integration of location-based data into enterprise systems. Its “PeopleFlow” platform tracks the movement of people and things in indoor spaces for retailers, manufacturers and workplace experience professionals; it provides complete end-to-end service delivery of an installed sensor network and an analytics platform to understand flow / footfall in retail, manufacturing and workplaces.
Community Impact Award: KindVillage
Founder/CEO: Tanya Woods Kind Village develops software and organizational solutions to increase the social impact of businesses, employees/citizens, charities/non-profits and government in local communities.
Co-Founder/CEO: Elizabeth Audette-Bourdeau Welbi has developed an app that uses the data collected by wearable devices, such as Fitbit or Apple Watch, to build a specialized profile of each individual’s vital signs, day-to-day routine and habits – including heart rate, sleep quality, physical activity, weight, blood pressure and more – and to notify their caregivers of any changes that may indicate a problem.
Jason Lee’s journey from Siberia to SmartCone to make life safer by Craig Lord
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ravelling through Bolivia, Siberia and the Middle East early in his career, Jason Lee realized the many security and communications projects he was working on all shared a common flaw. “During that 10-year journey, the one thing that really stuck out to me everywhere was there wasn’t enough help to keep people safe.” Lee recently joined Techopia Live to talk about how this critical missing piece for soldiers, first responders and construction workers drove him to found SmartCone Technologies, which manufactures a connected device in Ottawa that he hopes can make life safer for the people trying to save lives themselves. The SmartCone, as it stands today, is an easy-to-deploy device in emergency situations, in construction zones or anywhere sensors are needed to quickly gather data. Its array of sensors can detect anything from hazardous gases to approaching footsteps, and it connects to the cloud to deliver information to off-site managers. When Lee first started work on the project back in 2009, the Internet of Things hadn’t really been imagined yet – but that’s exactly what he was already working on. The problem is that while today developers have access to a variety of miniaturized tech to construct connected devices, those chips were tough to source a decade ago. Size was important to SmartCone, though. The device itself is placed in a tube just a few inches wide, Lee says, because “anywhere in the world” you can find a three-inch pipe. “So that gave our customers the ability to be able to mount it in an area. We wanted to give the freedom to people to do that,” he told Techopia Live. With the prevalence of IoT in today’s market, SmartCone has been able to accelerate development. The firm has partnered with IBM Watson and other large companies to implement the device in numerous applications. Lee says there are many use cases for the
SmartCone founder and CEO Jason Lee. Photo by Mark Holleron SmartCone, but the company is better off focusing on constructing reliable hardware and making sure the platform can plug in to whatever a prospective customer wants. “Inviting these companies to run with it and making it their own has been the secret to our success so far,” he said. One of those early customers is the City of Ottawa: SmartCone has been deployed at the O’Connor bike path and Waverley Street intersection to warn drivers about approaching cyclists. Lee says the device isn’t just about making Ottawa streets safer in the moment, it’s about the future of smart cities. The data collected by SmartCone includes information on near-misses, where a collision could have occurred. Reducing these is nearly as important as actual accident reductions, he said, because no one needs to be hurt to gather useful data. “As the planners begin putting new measures in, maybe a new signal or maybe brighter lights, we can track and map the difference it’s making. We’re saving lives without having to have an accident. That, to us, is the foundation to us of what the smart city is.” Lee told Techopia Live that the SmartCone can currently do about five per cent of what he wants it to achieve. With the increasing popularity of IoT and smart city applications, he believes the device can be a gamechanger in the lives of workers and everyday citizens.
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The 2018 Bootstrap Awards will be presented on Tuesday, March 6 at the Marshes Golf Club in Kanata. The awards are powered by The Ottawa Network, presented by Smart & Biggar and will feature special guest speaker Code Cubitt of Mistral Venture Partners.
Techopia Live brings Ottawa’s hottest startups and coolest tech execs to your screen every week. The live tech show airs at 12:15 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays on Techopia’s Facebook and Twitter channels. Check out our ever-growing video archive of 80+ Ottawa tech interviews at bit.ly/TechopiaLive, and if you’re reading our digital edition, click play below.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2018
Founder of the Year: Welbi Technologies Inc.
TECHOPIA LIVE