Results tagged “business”

Bright and early this past Monday morning, Mayor David Miller launched the third Toronto Forum for Global Cities conference, dedicated to harnessing the economic power of large urban centres. Put on by the International Economic Forum of the Americas, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (or OECD, whose scope encompasses thirty of the world's wealthiest nations), the two-day conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre welcomed some of the world’s leading economists, city planners, CEOs, politicians, and economic policy makers to discuss how to restore growth in the post-bailout era. The overarching message was clear: cities have a huge role to play in leading the economic recovery, and the best way to do so is through innovation.

According to a court filing made by CanWest Global Communications, the National Post is in immediate danger of being shut down. Creditors are running out of patience with the money-losing paper and will cease underwriting its operations after October 30. A potential stay of execution may come if CanWest can successfully transfer the Post to another holding corporation, which it is currently attempting to do.

It’s true that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is wicked. Yes, God of War III will rock. And, most likely, Heavy Rain is a strong GOTY contender. But if you’re the type who knows enough about games to know what the hell the previous three sentences mean, you also know that you can find all this out (and more) on the myriad Toronto-based gaming sites out there as they release their coverage of the Sony Playstation Preview Event over the next few days. Indeed, as much as some of us here love playing with our joysticks (quiet, you), it really all comes down to what Tuesday’s shindig had to do with Toronto. After all, this is Torontoist, not Today in Gameplay.

Remember The NeverEnding Story? That 1984 film about some kid who gets lost in a magic book and ends up having an excellent adventure involving a giant, flying, luckdragon?

In a move clearly meant to stem the bad PR continually building against the ludicrous $6.95 monthly System Access Fee, as well as the pending debut of increased competition in the marketplace, Rogers Communications has announced that the despised fake tax is about to disappear. But not really, because a new "government regulatory recovery fee" will be added, as well as a $5 monthly plan increase. That means your monthly bill won't really change, but Rogers hopes you'll be tricked into thinking it has. To divert the customer's attention from the fact that they're still paying through the nose, Rogers is now "throwing in" things like call display and the obnoxious WhoCalled "service." Plus, there are those things they quietly implement but hope you don't notice, like reducing your local calling area so that more calls are classified as long-distance. The reason for this, as usual, is to "align with common industry practices." In other words, they reserve the right to continue being loathsome and unethical.

What do you get when you put together three four-year-olds, a box of crayons, and a white sheet of paper? The new signage inside of Toronto Life Square.

       

After thirty years, one of Toronto's most legendary independent bookstores will close its doors for good in only a few more hours. At Pages Books and Magazines, customers are scouring the almost bare shelves looking for an excuse to make one more purchase.

The recession may be officially over for the moment, but it is still unclear what the residual effects will be on the everyday life of Canadians. That’s why for Dr. Mike Wood Daly, executive director of Ground Level Youth Ventures, there was much to celebrate as the Ground Level Café opened its doors to the public this Monday, after delays due in part to the recently ended strike.

Since its release in 1983, Microsoft Word has WYSIWYGed its way onto approximately a bazillion desktops worldwide, but a little Toronto tech company with a really ugly website could force Microsoft to stop selling current versions of their cash-cow word processor. Word uses custom XML tagging technology that i4i says they hold a patent on, and an injunction issued yesterday by a judge in patent haven Texas seems to support that claim. The details are all very nerdy and boring, but there's no way that Microsoft is going to bail on one of their most important flagship products, so dukes will be up and bank accounts will be looted. Et plus ça change…even more reason why it may be time to abolish obscure software patents.

Toronto Life Square—the massively unattractive ogre on the north-east corner of Yonge and Dundas, which houses not only a Future Shop, Google's local offices, and an AMC that uncomfortably doubles as Ryerson classrooms, but also a vast and ever-growing pool of all of our tears—is "broke," according to the Globe and Mail. What's more: Toronto Life, who scooped up the naming rights in 2007, "has been locked in a months-long legal dispute to remove its name from the project." (Perhaps the magazine finally realized the irony of suggesting that the building that loomed over Dundas Square added anything to Toronto life.) The Globe notes that, under the building's original owners, a subsidiary of PenEquity, it racked up some $280 million in debt, and has now been placed in receivership, meaning that it'll soon change ownership but not, unfortunately, disappear altogether. That fate will, for now, remain confined to the dreams of those who want to believe Toronto could have done so much better.

Canadians are an odd people when it comes to our cultural exports—we apologize to the world for Celine Dion, are ecstatic about the BlackBerry, and we're defensive about Tim Hortons. So it's with a sense of cautious pride that we watched Tim Hortons open nine of twelve new locations in New York City yesterday, including three in a co-branding test with Cold Stone Creamery, because we Canadians know our Maple Dip.

Mark Giesbrecht—better known as Mark the Litter Guy in the areas of the city that he patrols and cleans up in exchange for donations—has been tending to Queen Street West for long enough now that, when the West Queen West, Queen West, and Parkdale Business Improvement Areas (or BIAs) went looking to hire someone to help clean the area up, he was a natural choice.

The end of an era. It's a cliché, an easy writer's trick whose use far exceeds its real application. We stand by it in this case, however. After thirty years curating the indie set's reading list and nurturing Toronto's newest and freshest literary voices, Pages Books and Magazines will be shutting its doors for good in August. As reported in this week's issue of NOW, and confirmed privately to Torontoist, in the end there simply wasn't a choice. Rent is growing faster than sales, and for all that Pages is deeply loved (the Save Pages Books! Facebook group has upwards of 2,300 members), the cash crunch got to be too much.

For a Torontonian, walking through downtown Detroit on an ordinary Saturday afternoon is an eerie, Rod Serling–esque experience: where're all the people? Nobody’s around. From time to time a rolling vehicle will pass by, on the lookout for a safe lot. It is a desolate, almost post-nuclear dystopia, where every storefront and sidewalk is as deserted as a Chrysler dealership. Even ten or fifteen minutes out from the downtown core, there aren't many locals in sight. Perhaps the odd drifter hustling tourists in a near-empty McDonald’s or Burger King. The savvy eat in their parked cars, while roving police cruisers outnumber pedestrians and pleasant chatter by a wide margin. Portraits of yesteryear glories hang wherever you go, and you’d like to think this famous city has more heart than a Michaëlle Jean snack, but downtown NoMo-town is undeniably a lifeless, soulless scene.

Ever since the Art Gallery of Ontario reopened its doors in November, its free Wednesday nights have been a big hit. The cultural access initiative has been a popular smash (gallery users line up in droves for the evening and crowd the museum’s spaces with a palpable enthusiasm) and a media slam-dunk (Toronto’s other big renovated museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, did away with their free Fridays upon reopening and came off more elitist as a result).

When it comes to holding customers in seething contempt, few corporate entities do it with more blatancy than the Canadian telcos. And they know customers hate them—that's why Koodo (a brand owned by Telus, though you'd never know it) mocks the industry's despicable practices in their advertising. But when three biggies control an entire market, forcing users into long-term contracts and deliberately muddying their fee structures, the notion of customer service is merely an insignificant byproduct of offering a service to customers.

In tough economic times, people look to business leaders who have experienced—and, even better, thrived through—nasty bear markets and recessions. Veteran investor Warren Buffett has become even more influential and a guiding voice in newspapers, in magazines, and on television. And, on Monday, Buffett's name was brought up in the Michael Lee-Chin crystal by the namesake of the space.

Apparently, Canada's "best and brightest young people" are all between the ages of thirty-two and thirty-nine. Or so today's issue of the Globe and Mail would have you believe. In their annual quest to name the "Top 40 under 40," Caldwell Partners International Inc. (or, rather, their independent advisory committee), has selected forty almost-forty-year-olds, and the Globe and Mail has, once again, devoted an entire section of the newspaper to these findings (see section "E" in today's print edition).

Obama Cybernet is no more, in name at least. Owner Amveson Fitsumbrahn made good on his promise to change the name of his Internet café on the Danforth to avoid confusion with the Obama Café just a few steps away. The "O" and one stroke of the "M" have been scratched off the original sign with surgical precision, neatly morphing Obama Cybernet into Bana Cybernet.

According to Anand Agarawala, computer interfaces “don’t go as deep or [aren’t] as emotionally engaging as they possibly could be.” To some, this statement may seem far-fetched and unrealistic—but ask users of Apple products how they feel about their iPhones and MacBooks, and you won’t have difficulty finding some who profess a love for these gadgets.

Local latte mainstay i deal coffee is about to be sold. At least that's the plan, according to founder and resident bean-master James Fortier. But while you would be forgiven for assuming that the decision to unload the company is because of the topsy-turvy economy, Fortier says that that's not the case. As it turns out, it's all about making time for his family-to-be.

The University of Toronto—apparently anxious to catch up with York in how alienated, poor, and frustrated students have been made there—is weighing a proposal disastrous for the bulk of its future students, all in the name of a fast buck.

The battle of the Baracks on the Danforth is over.

There's trouble on a desolate stretch of the Danforth, and, like everything else that has ever gone wrong in the entire universe, it's all Barack Obama's fault.

Feel like everyone is getting a bailout except you? Brian Morin, chef and owner of beerbistro, is doing his part to change that with his "beerbistro bailout." For two weeks now, Chef Morin and his staff have been randomly selecting at least one table per day to be “bailed out” at his popular restaurant and bar at Yonge and King. When bill time comes, instead of a cheque the server brings a bright pink piggy bank topped with a lit sparkler and stuffed with cards saying that dinner and drinks are on the house.

Love padlocks are, if nothing else, the most secure way to symbolize keeping what you love safe. And while Posterchild's love locks can't stop cranes from knocking down each piece of our precious Sam's structure, they'll likely be outlasted by the sign: the chair of Ryerson's Experts Advisory Committee for the Master Plan, Linda Grayson, told us this week that the two oversized records won't be going too far. While they haven't decided on an exact location yet, she said that, after chatting with "the man" Sam Sniderman himself, the marquee will go either on the south or west side of the new Student Learning Centre being constructed in Sam's old spot, as to not block the east and west windows. And if it's not on the building itself, it will be nearby, says Grayson, noting that Sniderman is pleased with that idea, too.

People work hard for their money, but they don't make their money work hard for them. It's time to fix that. Economist whips your income into shape with smart, practical advice.

Well, we're pretty sure that members of the "No Big Box in Leslieville" advocacy group and the heroic East Toronto Community Coalition are gushing right now. Almost a year after their battle to prevent SmartCentres from developing a property—allegedly big box, allegedly Wal-Mart–anchored—on the former home of Toronto Film Studios started heating up, and long after an official decision was expected, the City issued a press release a little more than an hour ago (quickly picked up by the Post and Spacing) declaring that the Ontario Municipal Board has "upheld the City’s right to maintain the area South of Eastern Avenue as an Employment District without large format, stand alone retail outlets" and that the Board "found that the functioning of other economic activities within this district would have been undermined if the Smart Centres application had been approved."

If you want to gauge the disconnect between business "experts” and regular, everyday consumers, read online coverage of Bell Canada’s announced purchase of 750 The Source (formerly Radio Shack) stores last Monday. This apparently “gutsy” move will get noticed, said Kaan Yigit, president of telecommunications consultancy Solutions Research Group in the Globe and Mail, because "The Source is a respected leader in consumer electronics retailing right across Canada,” explained Bell and BCE CEO George Cope in the Star.

Most Canadians aren't really aware how President Barack Obama’s $789 billion (at last count) stimulus package might directly benefit this country, but there is at least one area of United States infrastructure improvement that, if approved, could have an enormous impact on the city of Toronto.