A heart-rate-reading password authenticator, digital signage art on the TTC

Every Monday, CommerceLab brings you a roundup of all the gamification, user experience and interactive display news that’s fit to print. (Or the stuff we liked best, anyway.)

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, the Ontario Government was wrapping up its Green Button app challenge for Ontario Energy. Now a winner has been chosen: Wattson, a personal butler that let’s you gauge usage habits in close to real time. A full list of winners can be found here, including Wattermelon, which, in true game-like fashion, allows you to compare your energy usage to your neighbors’.

Password authentication was a hot topic at Mobile World Congress, and Toronto’s Bionym took home the top spot in its annual Bluetooth Breakthrough Award, winning both Breakthrough Prototype and Overall Winner for its Nymi device. Nymi reads the user’s heart rate and translates it into a signature for unlocking devices.

Waterloo’s Desire2Learn has a new Sao Paulo office. The company has seen significant growth, and is edging up offerings in Latin America with new tech support and sales teams. This comes on the heels of a recent office opening in St. John’s.

Elsewhere in education, Ontario’s CoreFour just closed its first round of funding for “multiple millions of dollars” for its Edsby program, which helps students track and trace their progress through an online social application. And Samsung is in the process of giving one million dollars in grants to select schools across Canada to provide tech for young learners.

And at the intersection of education, art and digital signage, is Toronto-bound Art in Transit—A new DOOH program by Pattison that will display Cybele Young’s award-winning children’s picture book Ten Birds, and its follow-up, Ten Birds Meet a Monster, on Toronto’s digital subway screens and above ground video boards.