For those of you who don’t know about the MaRS Experience!Tech 2008 event, here’s the pitch.

This event brings you two great events under one roof. We’re broadcasting the plenary sessions and keynote live from IDC’s annual Directions Conference in Boston, combined with local and U.S. tech superstars featured in our MaRS Master Class panel sessions in Toronto. These sessions will cover six individual tracks of content across key IT sectors.

Add to that the opportunity to engage with promising tech companies selected to demo in the Experience!Tech 2008 Showcase area and top it off with Tom Kelly from IDEO in Palo Alto closing out the day with a blockbuster keynote. It all comes together on March 19 at MaRS. More information on the event can be found on our Experience!Tech 2008 site.

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Times Square, NYC

At the 3rd Annual Stem Cell Summit held today in the New York Hilton Hotel, several ground-breaking discoveries were disclosed that bring us closer to personalized medicine: advances in patient-derived stem cells, diabetes and insulin, as well as in the clinical trials and services in the stem cell sector.

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A market in my hometown is blending community involvement and creative financing to support the expansion of their store.

Brothers Jamey and Robert Lionette of Lionette’s Market in Boston’s South End are pitching their plan, dubbed a Community Supported Market, to their neighbors.The Boston Globe reports that:

“…People who invest $10,000 will get a two-year stipend of $125 per week at the store (for a total of $13,000 in food). For $5,000, investors get a $55 weekly stipend for two years; $2,500 gives investors a 10 per cent discount on store items for two years…

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MaRS Innovation — a commercialization partnership of 14 Toronto-based academic research institutions — is among 11 new Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECRs) announced last week in Ottawa.

As a CECR, MaRS Innovation will receive $14.95 million for a five-year program to accelerate the commercialization of promising research from its member institutions. The Founding Board Chair of MaRS Innovation is Mary Jo Haddad, President and CEO of The Hospital for Sick Children.

More information:

• CECR news release: “Government of Canada announces 11 new Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research”
• MaRS news relase: “Ottawa Funds MaRS Innovation”

Photo by Mark Davis/© 2008 WGBH Educational Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

MaRS tenant AXS Biomedical Animation Studio worked with Boston-based film director Mark Davis and paleoartist Hall Train on a fascinating NOVA TV special, which premieres on tonight, February 26, at 8 pm on PBS.

If you’re even a little curious about dinosaurs and the origins of birds, you won’t want to miss The Four-Winged Dinosaur.

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In Praise of Slow

Did you know that today, February 25, 2008, is the second annual Worldwide Day of Slow Living? If that’s news to you, let’s slow down for a minute and talk about the growing international slow movement.

Carl Honoré, a Canadian journalist based in London, was in Toronto recently to speak about the slow movement at the Ontario Library Association conference.

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Last week’s Entrepreneurship 101 lecture talked about the key communications tools that every start-up business needs — things like an executive summary, a pitch deck and a business plan. What was not discussed was the writing skills required to put these documents together effectively.

Question of the Week
As scientists and engineers, we receive little training in writing, be it for a grant proposal or a business plan. Do you think that this is a gap that MaRS could address?

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The first cloned dog with his dad: on sale now!

Wow, movies have come to life. Eight years after the opening of the movie “The 6th day” (2000), in which Arnold Schwarzenegger buys a cloned pet for his daughter at the store, RePet, fiction has become reality. A company has opened for business offering to clone your deceased pet for the paltry sum of US$148,000.

I guess with all the advances in stem cells in the last few years (see “Major breakthrough in stem cell science”, “Memory improved by stem cell transplantation” and “Aggregate scientist reports spinal repair breakthrough”), it was only a matter of time before companies began offering cloned pets for sale. Enter RNL Bio Co., a South Korean biotechnology company.

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The beginning of December marked something besides the start of snowfall. It marked an unofficial opening of some rather large floodgates. On December 4th, MaRS, in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group, The Toronto City Summit Alliance and the Centre for Social Innovation held the first ever national Social Entrepreneurship Summit.

The full Summit proceedings are now available on the Summit website.

Find out what the over 250 attendees from across the country heard from the fabulous keynote speakers from Canada, the US and the UK. While social entrepreneurship has been a hot topic as of late, the Summit seemed to ramp up the discussion even more, seeing the emergence of new partnerships and projects. Check out the highlights and the photos to get infused with the Summit experience.

This Global Attention Profiles map shows what countries were included in the New York Times news coverage of December 1, 2003. Countries in red received the most attention, while pink and blue countries received smaller and smaller amounts of media coverage.

That was Ethan Zuckerman’s emphatic message at the recent Ontario Library Association conference in Toronto. Zuckerman, a research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, studies the intersection of technology and developing countries. He co-founded Global Voices Online, a “global citizens’ media project” at Berkman that collects and distills web content from across the world, particularly from the Global South; he’s also behind the Global Attention Profiles project (GAP), which monitors the geographic distribution of media attention.

Zuckerman provides a much-needed counterpoint to Thomas Friedman’s Gospel of Globalization, the idea of the digital revolution as great global equalizer. Zuckerman argues that an Internet connection alone cannot correct the vast disparities between developed and developing nations. While he recognizes the democratizing potential of such technology, he emphasizes the fact that persistent structural and systemic disadvantages keep Friedman’s dream from becoming reality.

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