General Business Updates and News

[Spokes]

I would imagine there are a number of developers who will line up to get that building.

[panamaniac]

Does anyone know if renovation work is going on at 144 King St W (Weber Chambers) beside the Mayfair buildings? I noticed today that all the small windows had been opened and there seemed to be some interior walls going up or being taken down. I don't think it's part of the "Mayfair project" but it has a very fine façade.

[panamaniac]

The article could have stood for more vigorous fact-checking.  For instance, I do believe that the Perimeter Institute is home to the "Stephen Hawking Centre" and not the "Stephen Hawkins Institute".

That aside, I would be interested to know more about how the movers and shakers in the high-tech/start-up/entrepreneurial economy contribute to the social fabric of the Region beyond starting a company and creating jobs.  Carl Zehr, quoted in the article above, claimed that downtown Kitchener circa 1997 "was devoid of spirit, it was devoid of people. It was devoid of good ideas".  The Region was built on a strong ethic of community-building beyond becoming the next big millionaire.  Does the current generation of entrepreneurs (following the steps of the Kaufmans, the Breithaupts, the Schneiders and hundreds of others) stepping into the gaps left as the previous generation moves on?

Your post goes back a ways, nms, but this article from today's Record should give you hope:

Waterloo Region Record

By Jeff Hicks  
KITCHENER — A giant chicken pot pie baked in the oven.
Lunchtime loomed and an OpenText work crew of about 40 — part of 125 staffers from Waterloo helping build a Habitat for Humanity townhouse project in Kitchener this week — needed feeding.
In the old kitchen on Kehl Street, two employees from the biggest software company in Canada worked a few feet apart, chopping red peppers and mushrooms.
Kim Jorgensen and Becky Rempel worked side-by-side, chatting and cutting, like they were polka partners just across Ottawa Street in the Concordia Club fest hall.
A week away from a tech-firm office environment, where employees always have their heads in the virtual clouds, introduced them to each other.
In a crowded kitchen on a cloudless Wednesday, they could see each other clearly.
"She works 20 feet from me and we've never talked," Jorgensen laughed.
And thanks to this charity home-building, team-building project, they won't stop talking.
Their corporate titles, with a company that pulls in billions a year and has 900 workers in Waterloo, seem like so much impersonal business-card bluster now.
Jorgansen is supervisor of global services support. That's nice.
Rempel is sales support specialist for cloud services. That's swell.
Now, they know each other exist. They actually know each other.
"I knew about you but we never really talked," Rempel told Jorgansen over a veggie-platter-in-progress.
"Now, we're kitchen buddies."
And that was the main corporate point of this joint OpenText venture with Habitat for Humanity's Waterloo Region wing. It's Habitat's biggest collaboration with a tech firm locally and one the charity pitched to the company and its employees.
"We try to attract companies with big numbers to use it as an employee engagement opportunity," said Jerry Lawlor, Habitat's local director of development.
So it's about more than putting 11 local families in new townhomes by the end of August, once the families' own sweat equity is poured into the foundations.
Eventually, 45 Habitat units will rise on a patch of donated land where old homes once stood, and the total project value will be in the millions, Lawlor said.
OpenText employees are donating $15,000 to the project, with the company promising to match the amount.
Along the way, OpenText aims to boost its standing in the community and the cohesiveness of its growing number of Waterloo staffers before this work week on Kehl Street is done.
"It's an opportunity to do something different," OpenText vice-president Nicolas Heldmann said. "Get away from the computers and keyboards and swing some hammers and dig some holes."
And, for the kitchen buddies, to chop carrots and make chicken pot pie together.
"Because we've grown so much, people don't recognize each other in the hallways," Heldmann said. "They really wanted the opportunity to get to know each other."

[nms]

The article could have stood for more vigorous fact-checking.  For instance, I do believe that the Perimeter Institute is home to the "Stephen Hawking Centre" and not the "Stephen Hawkins Institute".

That aside, I would be interested to know more about how the movers and shakers in the high-tech/start-up/entrepreneurial economy contribute to the social fabric of the Region beyond starting a company and creating jobs.  Carl Zehr, quoted in the article above, claimed that downtown Kitchener circa 1997 "was devoid of spirit, it was devoid of people. It was devoid of good ideas".  The Region was built on a strong ethic of community-building beyond becoming the next big millionaire.  Does the current generation of entrepreneurs (following the steps of the Kaufmans, the Breithaupts, the Schneiders and hundreds of others) stepping into the gaps left as the previous generation moves on?

Your post goes back a ways, nms, but this article from today's Record should give you hope:

It was a nice article and I look forward to seeing more like it as the current generation of entrepreneurs "grow up" and take their place as community builders and supporters.

[Viewfromthe42]

There's a sign up for the parcel of land on King St N, west side, between the hotel by the mall and the gas station on Northfield. Looks like it will be developed into three buildings (despite being called "office/retail"), depending on if it's built to suit. The three buildings seem to have the shape of a street-bordering RBC and Tim Horton's, and a large Shoppers buried in at the back.

[Markster]

Ah, so this greenfield is finally getting developed? Finally, a continuous sidewalk on the west side of King?!

[rangersfan]

Kitchener startup Bonfire looks to save time by digitizing bid process
May 11, 2015 | Andrea Bellemar | CBC Kitchener | LINK

Universities, hospitals and school boards can say goodbye to rooms full of boxes of paper and months of time to make a purchasing decision thanks to a Kitchener company called Bonfire, which has created a way to streamline and digitize the bidding process. 

Bonfire clients like the University of Alberta and the Chicago public school board pay to use the web-based service. When a client issues a request for proposal, then bidders can submit their proposals electronically. The process for bidders takes eight minutes from account creation to getting the acceptance receipt, according to Bonfire CEO Corry Flatt.

The company was created in 2012, but 2015 is shaping up to be a banner year. Bonfire just completed three-month stint at California's Y Combinator, the top start-up accelerator in the world,  in March. It is now looking to expand from five employees to 15 over the next 12-18 months.

Flatt is a grad of Wilfrid Laurier University, as is Andrew Wilgar, the company's director of customer relations. The university is now among Bonfire's clients

"Before, in our old system, we had essentially a booklet that was handwritten, people had to get basically big binders full of requests for proposals that came in," said Tracey Ens, the manager of procurement services for Wilfrid Laurier University.

"Sometimes, depending on the number or responses that could easily be 10 or 15 binders and we had to send them out all over campus and people had to sometimes take them home," she said.

Other clients include universities across Canada, like University of British Columbia, Ryerson and the University of Manitoba, as well as the Peel District School Board, the City of Victoria, and even the government of Uzbekistan, which uses the program to manage construction programs.

'There just had to be a better way'.

"We thought that there just had to be better way, and being software guys we built a software tool that lets them do that a lot faster," said Flatt. 

"This kind of spending decision gets made on trillions of dollars of projects every single year all over the place," said Flatt. "[There] really is an international need for a tool like this."

Flatt estimates that the decision time savings is about 33 per cent faster per project, and that doesn't count the time it takes the bidder to prepare a bid. Overall, he says it's close to 2500 pages of paper saved per bid. 

And for big organizations like Laurier, there's another bonus to going electronic.

"The other nice benefit is not having to hand-write all of the responses," said Ens. 

[panamaniac]

Aerospace parts plant coming to Cambridge
Waterloo Region Record

By Jeff Hicks  

CAMBRIDGE — Forty new aerospace jobs are coming to Cambridge, by late this year or early 2016.

Markham-based Shimco, a precision parts supplier, has purchased 2.12 acres of industrial land in northern Cambridge where it plans to build a 20,000 square-foot facility in the Boxwood business campus.

City council approved the land sale for $604,200 on Tuesday night.

"Aerospace is one of the clusters that Cambridge has strength in and is looking to grow," said James Goodram, the city's economic development director, in an email.

"Shimco is also a great addition to the Boxwood Subdivision as an aerospace company as it dovetails nicely with Heroux-Devtek's recent plant opening."

In fact, it will be pretty close to Heroux-Devtek's 108,000-square-foot landing gear plant off Boxwood Drive.

"It's going right across the street from them," said Gary Dyke, Cambridge's chief administrative officer.

Shimco has future plans for a second phase that will add 15,000 square feet and 20 more jobs, Goodram said.

"This is exactly what we want to see out in that area," Coun. Pam Wolf said.

The city began selling industrial land in the Boxwood subdivision a year ago. So far, 30 of 110 shovel-ready acres have been sold.

Heroux-Devtek opened in February. FedEx will be opening their facility later this year. Cintas recently purchased more than seven acres.

"We hope to have additional land sales being presented for council consideration ‎in the coming months," Goodram said.

http://www.therecord.com/news-story/5657...cambridge/

[rangersfan]

Waterloo Region start up DraftingSpace has been bought.

Details here :
http://m.therecord.com/news-story/567583...cquisition

[panamaniac]

The Conference Board of Canada foresees economic growth of 3.4% in Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo in 2015, the highest among the 15 mid-sized CMAs that they surveyed.

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/press/news..._2015.aspx

[JoeKW]

That's amazing news!

[panamaniac]

Big federal/provincial funding announcement for Toyota (Cambridge and Woodstock) tomorrow, according to the Globe and Mail. The date has apparently been advanced by a week to beat the federal election call.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nati...e25776732/

[rangersfan]

Trustwave is opening an office locally.
http://globalnews.ca/news/2160691/trustw...-waterloo/

[mpd618]

Trustwave is opening an office locally.
http://globalnews.ca/news/2160691/trustw...-waterloo/

This is a weird article, since it talks about Kitchener-Waterloo but their office appears to be in Cambridge?

[rangersfan]

Some great news for Boehmer Box in Kitchener

http://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/mobile/boehm...-1.2538250