If you’re going to be in the Toronto area on October 13th, make sure to check out Lavin’s David Chilton and Diane Francis as they discuss personal finance at an event hosted by The Young Wealth Academy (tickets can be found here.) Chilton is the newest host on CBC’s popular business show Dragons’ Den and the bestselling author of The Wealthy Barber series. Diane Francis, meanwhile, has spent many years dissecting business headlines and providing valuable advice in an accessible manner through her writing at The National Post.

Last night, Lavin Agency staffers Cian Cruise and Charles Yao gave readings at June Records in Toronto. They were there to celebrate the launch of Little Brother Magazine, a feisty new literary journal they’re both a part of. Charles designed the magazine, and Cian contributed an essay called “The Masterpiece and the Mouthbreather,” on how visionary artists and filmmakers often follow-up seminal works by making really weird art.

One of the many perks of The Lavin Agency’s move to a bigger, brighter office is the spectacular view. From our twelfth floor perch atop the Art Deco era Balfour Building, we get an incredible viewing angle of the many layers of Toronto—from our lush green canopy to historic factories in the Fashion District to skyscrapers of Bay St., the sight is certainly breathtaking.

“The new economy is all about collaboration,” says Tonya Surman, the co-founder of The Centre for Social Innovation, and Lavin’s newest exclusive speaker. In this video, shot at Lavin’s Toronto office, she talks about what makes for a successful social enterprise, as well as why she’s “not interested in working with non-profits that are simply going to beg for money.”

Rick Mercer rants against the war on fun! 

In December’s Toronto Life, #1 international bestselling author  Neil Pasricha talks about positive thinking during the holidays. His third book, The Book of (Holiday) Awesome, is out this month. Here’s a quote from Neil, on the importance of the workplace:

If I wasn’t going to an office every day, I’d be massively unproductive. I would quickly devolve into a caveman who didn’t shave, ate Chicken McNuggets, and wore track pants. I need a reason to get up in the morning and put on a shirt.

For Toronto’s all-night public art party next month, Lavin speaker Natalie Jeremijenko will help citizens reclaim public space—and public airspace!—by lifting hundreds of citizens into the air to provide them with a pigeon’s-eye view of our city hall. A radical lesson in urban infrastructure! From Nuit Blanche:

Inspired by the birds of Nathan Phillips Square, Flightpath Toronto is a participatory spectacle inviting the public to rediscover the possibilities and wonder of urban flight. For Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011, the square hosts an urban flightschool, an interactive visual airscape, and fly-lines that enable hundreds of people, enwinged, to re-imagine the city and the way we move through it.

By exploring the square through the eyes of its primary inhabitants, urban birds, can we reinvent our relationship to the city we build together? By reclaiming airspace as public space, can we consider other forms of transit, rediscover the ‘sport’ in ‘transport’, and excite imaginative possibilities for our urban infrastructure? Are we game to experience, through flight, a city that is fluid and three-dimensional?

Flightpath Toronto’s swarms of flying people experiment with an urban-scale participatory proposition: one that demonstrates the pleasures of emissionless urban mobility and creates a shared memory of a possible future.

Flightpath Toronto is a collaboration between Usman Haque, architect/artist and Natalie Jeremijenko, engineer/artist, uniting his expertise in participatory urban spectacle with her expertise in bird flight and urban natural systems.

A new civic design project from Bruce Mau Design, called The Bureau of Doing Something About It, launches tonight in Toronto.

From BMD:

Last year, the Toronto Complaints Choir, produced as part of the 2010-2011 World Stage season at Harbourfront Centre, collected over 1000 grievances, gripes, and annoyances from people across the city. The choir transformed these troubles into a siren song for the disenchanted. Across twelve days in July, Bruce Mau Design (BMD) will work to do some-thing about it. Our pop-up studio, working in real-time in the Propeller Centre, will design solutions in response to the complaints. A book of these ideas will be simultaneously designed, and then given away throughout this city we love. This interactive, cross-disciplinary design event invites Toronto to turn our problems into possibilities. A mix of ingenuity, creativity, (many) mistakes, exploration, and optimism will get us there. The Toronto Complaints Choir will join us in the gallery on July 28 for a special performance. We invite you to visit the pop-up studio, Wednesday July 20-Sunday July 31, 2011, to see our work in progress and contribute ideas to the project.

Douglas Stephens is one of the few retail futurists working today, so it’s no surprise that he was chosen to lead the Location Based Marketing Association’s panel on the future of location-based marketing for retailers. The panel discussion, titled “The Retailer’s Dilemma”, deals with the challenges retailers face in choosing the best location-based marketing tools for their company in an ever-shifting marketplace. Some of the questions Stephens and his panel will discuss are:

1. Why Facebook Deals vs. Foursquare or other platforms?
2. What were the key criteria for determining success?
3. What did you learn from the experience you would change the next time?
4. How do you see the role of other media (non-mobile) such as billboard, print, etc in promoting location-based deals?

Stephens will act as the moderator of a panel filled with retail leaders from the likes of Sears and Chapters/Indigo. The panel will take place on July 26th, 2011 in downtown Toronto and solidifies Stephens’ reputation as one of North America’s leading retail experts.

A hilarious clip of Rick Mercer talking about—and debunking—various Canadian stereotypes, including off-the-cuff riffs on hockey, Tim Hortons coffee, and why the rest of the country hates Toronto.