TORONTO, Nov 10 (Reuters) – Torstar , the publisher
of the Toronto Star, is offering immediate buyouts to editorial
staff and plans to outsource ad-building, layout and editing
duties, three Star journalists said on Thursday.

The Star, Canada’s biggest daily newspaper, wants to offer
immediate layoff packages, reporter Richard Brennan wrote on
his Twitter account.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The world doesn’t need another chocolate company, according to digital media pioneer Louis Rossetto, but that didn’t stop him from starting one anyway.

Rossetto, co-founder of Wired magazine, began his relationship with “chocolate garage startup” TCHO as its first investor and later became the company’s CEO.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Entrepreneur Caleb Elston is using an outdated form of communication — chatrooms — to try to make it “less socially awkward to meet people.”

“A lot of people have written off chat-style communication as a category failure, and we really want to challenge that assumption,” said Elston, the CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based startup Yobongo (yobongo.com), which relies on geo-location technology to randomly connect users in the same city or neighborhood through a mobile application.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Struggling to wean herself off soft drinks, Kara Goldin inadvertently discovered her own bottled water business.

“I was drinking a ton of Diet Coke, vitamin waters, a lot of things that I thought were actually hydrating me, but were not,” said Goldin, the 43-year-old founder and CEO of Hint (www.drinkhint.com), whose business started innocently with her adding fruits such as lemons, limes and raspberries to “boring” bottled water.

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – Bad weather can mean big losses for businesses impacted by hurricanes, snow storms, floods, tornadoes and all manner of natural disasters. But entrepreneur Stephen Bennett has developed software that can predict severe weather patterns as much as 40 days ahead of time.

San Diego, California-based EarthRisk Technologies (earthrisktech.com), which Bennett co-founded and launched last year, has built an online forecasting tool that alerts clients, mostly energy companies, to potentially severe weather systems.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Despite the viral nature of YouTube, entrepreneur Otavio Good was still shocked when a video of his mobile translation app, Word Lens, became a social media sensation.

“It was overwhelming; we were unable to control it,” said Good, who posted the video a week before Christmas and was forced to shut down his site due to traffic volume, as the link was shared rapidly across numerous social networks. It became the fourth-highest trending topic on Twitter hours later. “It’s hard to deal with, but good at the same time. Obviously it’s a great thing.”

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Dr. Garrison Bliss has found a way to decrease the role of insurance companies in day-to-day medical care that leaves both doctors and patients with more money.

As a co-founder of the Qliance Medical Group (www.qliance.com), Bliss operates three clinics in the Seattle, Washington area that treat both insured and uninsured patients who pay a monthly fee of between $49 and $89, depending on their age.

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Dr. Garrison Bliss has found a way to decrease the role of insurance companies in day-to-day medical care that leaves both doctors and patients with more money.

As a co-founder of the Qliance Medical Group (www.qliance.com), Bliss operates three clinics in the Seattle, Washington area that treat both insured and uninsured patients who pay a monthly fee of between $49 and $89, depending on their age.

BOULDER, Colorado (Reuters) – Trying to make some extra money during the recession, Michael Joseph decided to rent his South Lake Tahoe, California vacation property. After being frustrated by the online options available to him, Joseph designed his own rental booking website.

“If an owner wants to maximize their exposure by advertising on lots of different travel sites, they have to build a separate ad on each site which takes 30 to 45 minutes and costs between $100 and $700 a year,” said Joseph, who founded Boulder, Colorado-based Vacation Rental Partner (www.vacationrentalpartner.com) in 2009. “Most of these vacation rental owners don’t have the time to build these ads much less research which of the sites will actually give them a good return on their investment.”

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Despite never having read a romance novel, Melissa Heidrich had always thought about making video games based off the popular literary genre.

A chance encounter at a recent high school reunion with former classmate and bestselling romance writer, Marjorie M. Liu, and losing her job at a small Seattle software firm, gave Heidrich the impetus to launch PassionFruit Games.