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Extra, Extra: Toronto Hearts Japan, Survives First Year of Ford Ubiquity
Every weekday’s end, Extra, Extra collects just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.
- Toronto to Japan is an initiative by a collective of Canadian artists, musicians, writers, activists and business leaders to raise awareness of the recent disasters in Japan and to raise funds to help with relief efforts. The people involved are making great use of Twitter and YouTube to promote the cause. Among the project’s key supporters are Margaret Atwood and David Suzuki.
- A new term for architecture nerds to throw around: “podiumism,” care of well-known Toronto real estate dude Brad Lamb. Podiumism describes the tiered effect that marks many condo buildings in the city, where the residential part of the building is set back from the street-level retail/commercial “podium” on which it sits.
- Mood Media Corp., a Toronto company that specializes in “sensory branding,” has purchased Muzak Holdings Inc., purveyors of tunes to shop or wait on-hold to, for 345 million U.S. dollars. Among other services, Mood Media is on the leading edge of “scent marketing,” which we assume is the reason we leave the grocery store so often with cookies when we didn’t enter the store looking for them.
- The recently upgraded Toronto Bike Map App—say that three times fast—now gives directions, with some help from Google Maps’ Best Directions feature, along with its continued use of the City’s Open Data information. The new version is available for free through iTunes.
- If you sensed an extra little something in the air today, it could be because there is a very special anniversary happening in the city. It’s been one year, exactly, since Rob Ford began his mayoral campaign. And, oh, what a year it’s been.
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This post originally implied that Margaret Atwood and David Suzuki were involved in organizing the Toronto to Japan project, when in fact they are among its key supporters. We regret the error.