…and would like to highlight some amazing Canadian startups as well as Canadian contributions to the Web world, in general. I’m hoping that my friends at the Globe and Mail will see this and understand the importance of the media in really highlighting and helping their homegrown companies. 
(if I’ve missed your company, please tell me in the comments below)
The Startups
[I've listed the ones here that I've used or am familiar with]
A way cool site where you can build your own online store…it’s clean, gorgeous and simple to use. I keep running across it everytime I find a store that I think well-designed. Ottawa, ON.
This totally sweet collaboration application was first shown to us when we attended Mesh Conference in Toronto (another one is one it’s way!). We met these two ‘ad guys’ from a Toronto suburb, Bernie and Scott, and they were talking about finding the money to quit their jobs and start this company that was akin to a BaseCamp for design projects. Complete with experts you can pull from for your own design projects, I find this tool indispensable now. Sudbury (thanks Matthew!), ON.
Michael McDerment, who you would think is living down in the valley from the amount we see him around these parts, is one of the founders of this dynamic company that supports small businesses by handling both your project/time tracking and invoicing all at once. Toronto, ON.
Tom Williams is one heckuva nice guy and has started a community to urge others to be the same. Well, kinda. Give Meaning is where you can tell the story of the work you are doing to change the world and find others doing the same. But, it doesn’t only do that. It also allows you to raise money (and donate money) for your fave charities. 100% of the proceeds go to the charities.
GiveMeaning provides unrivalled advantages for both charities and sponsors. For Charities, GiveMeaning offers a new vehicle for raising funds, with minimal resource expenditure and without any costs; for Sponsors, GiveMeaning is the ideal forum to reach highly-targeted audiences, with repeat exposure virtually guaranteed. Toronto, ON.
Need to kvetch, celebrate or just share your recent purchasing experiences with the world? Or perhaps you need to find out what kind of service a certain company provides. Well, Sutori is meant for just that. I’ve posted on JetBlue (good), u-Haul (nightmare) and some other experiences. Makes for an awesome soapbox. Vancouver, BC & Toronto, ON.
Okay, who doesn’t heart StumbleUpon? Helping you discover really cool, neato stuff on the web? They may live down here now and throw big parties, but they are still Canucks. 
Calgary, AB
So, the idea here is social command lines for the web…which is…awesome! If you are into that sort of thing and I know many people that are. YubNub has been around for a while and has built a rather large and loyal geek following. Basically, if you need to search for something, you can do it in one place instead of going to each engine and typing in each type of search. So, you want to see photos of 300 the movie from google images, just type “gim 300 movie”. Done. Victoria, BC
Alright, so full disclosure here. I have been suspicious of Cambrian House ever since they put ‘crowdsourcing’ in their bi-line and bought Google pizza. However, they are from my home city, and I’ve met Michael and he’s just mostly overzealous on the hype engine and generally a nice guy. Either way, I think they have a pretty cool concept: you put your ideas into a pool, then people vote on it, then others get behind it and make it happen. Kind of what happens in IRC, but more managed. Calgary, AB.
Dick Hardt is one of those personalities that is larger than life, which is rather ‘un’Canadian, but has been really awesome in pushing the idea of identity forward. Dick is now working with a wider group of people on helping get wider adoption of OpenID. Vancouver, BC.
The “Successes” So Far (meaning acquisition or totally household names)
Purchased by Getty Images in 2006, this group remains in Calgary, Alberta and runs (with Getty pretty much hands off) a really, really cool website filled with amazing amateur photographs for really amazing prices. I use them constantly. Calgary, AB.
Everyone knows this ‘darling of Web 2.0′, and they should. Founded by one Canadian and one American (but she’s nice enough to be a Canadian) in a Canadian City, and purchased by Yahoo! in 2005, it is one of the few online communities that I’ve seen weather such a move. I like to think it’s ’cause they’re Canadian. Vancouver, BC.
The first time I met Albert Lai, I thought, “What a hotshot!” and I believe everyone else who met him thought the same thing. So when his really cool and simple photosharing tool got acquired by Kaboose earlier this year, we weren’t surprised. Toronto, ON.
[sidenote: is it just me, or are Canadians kinda good at the photo online thing?]
Research in Motion
Okay, so not 2.0, but Blackberries are a staple of early adopters everywhere. Waterloo, ON.
The People Behind the Scenes
This Vancouver Drupal shop has been helping people build cool stuff for years and is run by some pretty awesome people. They are also behind the Vancouver BarCamp community and provide alot of encouragement for the web community in BC. Vancouver, BC.
Jay Goldman, who I met right before moving down to SF through my amazing friend, Carol, owns this dynamic company, who are responsible for the major skin re-designs at Mozilla. And they’ll only get better, I know, because they’ve recently hired the fabulous David Crow. This dynamic team also has been the driving force behind the Toronto BarCamp community. Toronto, ON.
Austin Hill seems to know EVERYONE who has ever had any connection with the web on any significant level. He is also one of the nicest guys around, and has a new startup to watch, Akoha.
The People Even More Behind the Scenes (Canucks in the Valley)
Kaliya Hamlin - who is rocking the identity space and is a big player down here (sorry Kaliya!)
Kim Cameron - at Microsoft who is doing very important identity work
and some other Canuck identity players of note: Paul Trevithick of Higgins, Pam Dingle Nulius Secundus and Laurie Rae.
Of course…there is such a large number of Canadians in the Valley that there is an entire organization formed here to celebrate SanFranada-ism: The Digital Moose.
More Notables (many from David Crow’s blog post):
- Wikitravel, Montreal, PQ (OMG! Cool!)
- Idee Inc How could I forget!? (with the incredible Leila Boujnane at the helm), Toronto, ON
- DabbleDB, Vancouver, BC
- Agoracom, Toronto, ON(?)
- Gabbr , Mississauga, ON
- Beer Hunter , Toronto, ON
- Otavo , St. Catherines, ON
- AJAXWhois , Montreal, PQ
- BlockRocker , Winnepeg, MB
- StreamDrive , Edmonton, AB
- NowPublic , Vancouver, BC
- 2ndSite , Toronto, ON
- Raincity Studios , Vancouver, BC
- Tucows, Toronto, ON
- Qumana , Vancouver, BC
- Yibuu , Vancouver, BC
- JadedPixel , Ottawa, ON
- StikiPad , Chatham, ON & Wichita, KS
- Devshop , Ottawa, ON
- Verbster , Vancouver, BC
- Favourville , Toronto, ON
- Rich Internet Group , Toronto, ON
- PixPO , Victoria, BC
- Kweschun , Toronto, ON
- ZigTag , Edmonton, AB
- Yakalike , Oshawa, ON
- eBusiness Applications , Vancouver, BC
- Tagsy , Montreal, PQ
- PeopleFeeds , Montreal, PQ
- Nuvvo , Toronto, ON
- rBloc , Calgary, AB
- JobLoft.com , Toronto, ON
- Collectik, Montreal, PQ
- DailyPixel , Montreal, QC
- Silver Orange, Charlottetown, PEI
- iLovetoPlay, Montreal, QC
- Elluminate, Calgary, AB
- Wild Apricot I use this…how could I forget?, Toronto, ON
- Whitehill Technologies, Inc.
Another great resource to check out is Mark Evans new-ish project, Maple Leaf 2.0, which intends to highlight Canadian tech startups as they emerge. Right on.
View Tara Hunt's profile
29 Comments
+ 1 on GiveMeaning, Sutori (though I’m pretty sure they’re here in Vancouver), Raincity and Bryght.
In the ‘behind the scenes’ category, you ought to add North Vancouver’s Nitobi (http://www.nitobi.com). They’re clients and friends of ours, and they’re definitely a start-up (their office is rather, uh, boyishly cluttered). They make off-the-shelf Ajax components.
Another local company would be Taglocity (http://www.taglocity.com/), who make a tagging extension for MS Outlook. I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch…
I’m also big fans of Workspace (http://www.abetterplacetowork.com), which is the ‘garage’ for a lot of Web 2.0 startups, and hosted BarCamp Vancouver last fall.
Also, I just read about Mixpo.com, who are based in Victoria.
Add: Silverorange (www.silverorange.com) to “Behind the Scenes”!
You can add a great new startup from Montreal: ilovetoplay.com, an online meetup for sports participants: players, teams, coaches, games, tournaments, leagues, and more. It’s social networking for sports, all sports, all skill levels, and around the world.
Marc
Wow what a nice list, thank you, I found a few things that are very interesting in there!
I hate to plug things but I really should mention the company I work for, Elluminate, which last year was named 10th fastest growing technology Canadian company by Deloitte. Elluminate Live! is our flagship product for distance learning and remote collaboration.
Steve
Tara,
Mon dieu: you forgot Idee Inc. (ideeinc.com)! How could you? Oh I am so so hurt now.
Mondieu! How could I forget!? Of course.
I put Elluminate in the list…collaboration sounds very web 2.0.
How could I forget? One of your ex-SO’ers is now at DIGG!
Nice showcase Tara — and well said! I think it’s so easy to assume all the innovation comes from the USA!
And I have strong sense of relatedness with you Canadians — inspired by a great interview sometime ago with Michael J Fox (also Canadian just in case readers didn’t know) when he came to New Zealand (where I’m from) to film Speilberg’s ‘The Frighteners’ and said that he could relate to NZers — both Canada and NZ have ‘loud sometimes bullying big brothers’ — USA and Australia and how the common plight of being mistaken for an American as a Canadian is as common as NZers being mistaken for Ozzies..
go Canada!
As for Web 2.0 innovation in NZ — the big one is popular WEb 2.0 blog Read/Write Web, which is run by Richard MacManus, back over in my home town of Wellington
Kudos to you for taking the time to highlight your homegrown start-ups. There’s so much innovation happening up here!
Tara,
Many thanks for the mention!
See you at Mesh this year?
–Tom
Tara -
Thanks for the mention! Don’t forget the other two Mikes from Mozilla: Mike Beltzner (http://www.beltzner.ca/ifeelafel), User Experience Lead, and Mike Connor (http://steelgryphon.com/blog/), who was the Lead on Firefox 2. Also, don’t forget Joey DeVilla (http://accordionguy.blogware.com/), from Tucows (http://www.tucows.com/). You might also add Stuart MacDonald (http://stuartmacdonald.ca/), one of the Mesh Conference organizers and former VP of Marketing for Expedia.com to your Behind the Scenes list.
- Jay
DabbleDB is in Vancouver and they are one of the most remarkable startups I have ever seen.
How about a representative from the east coast? Check out Whitehill Technologies, Inc.. We are somewhat past the startup phase, and not on the Web 2.0 wave, but we are definitely a technology and innovation success story - all started from Moncton, NB.
Fred
Thanks for the link, Tara.
Darren is right, Sutori is mostly Vancouver with a bit of Toronto in the mix.
Speaking of Vancouver, Dabble DB deserve mentio for doing some great things in the Enterprise 2.0 space.
Are Joey and Stuart living in the Valley now? If not, I set a criteria to listing individuals…it sounds dumb, but my post would be a mile long if I listed every individual Canadian in Canada making waves.
So, I wanted to mention Canadians working inside of US companies who people may have not known about.
I will list the Mikes, though, as well as Tucows…
Thanks Jay!
You’re right! How could I forget? They are making total waves….
Heather Champ who is flickr’s community manager is also Canadian.
Yep. So are many of the Flickr team (but I mentioned Flickr earlier).
I want to highlight Canadians at US Companies who are behind the scenes (and living in the US)…or the Canadian companies who are rockin’ the web 2.0 scenes.
Wikitravel was started in Montreal and the main development and community team (all two of us!) is still located there.
An amazing list it is, and great comments here. I point everyone Leonard Brody’s books “Innovation Nation: Canadian Leadership from Jurassic Park to Java” and “Everything I Needed to Know About Business…I Learned from a Canadian”. The story of how Canadians are front and centre at many of the major technology innovations of our time is at times surprising.
Thanks for sharing the story.
While it is good to highlight those in the identity community who set the market with their presentations…it is important not to forget those on the ground doing the hard work of space creating and building relationships between diverse communities. I have done a tone of work to support the emergence of the identity community in the last three years including producing and facilitating the Internet Identity Workshop that has been the source of so much innovation. One of the main feats of the past 18 months was the convergence around Yadis and the fortunate choosing of a better name - OpenID. I am looking forward to the coming year when things will continue to evolve with the Identity Layer.
I would also honor the other Canadians in the Identity world…. Kim Cameron from Microsoft, Paul Trevithick of Higgins, Pam Dingle Nulius Secundus, Laurie Rae. There are a few more we keep popping up like crazy this dinner we had at RSA was 10 out of 30 people Canadian.
I hope you guys are going to join us at the Internet Identity Workshop May 14-16th.
Oh gosh, totally Kaliya! Stupid me for forgetting.
You might want to add b5media to the list…:)
cheers, Mark
on the design tip, how about Teehan-Lax in T-dot and Re/Think in BC?
Add another wiki to the list - ProductWiki! I didn’t know Wikitravel was from Montreal, awesome.
Nice list…its always good to learn about Canadians who are doing their (web) thing.
It’s also really interesting to see the psychology behind lists…and how everyone wants to be included lol
Canada Eh!.
Great to see so many Canadians on the web world. We will try to promote canada from City to City shortly.
AL
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[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptGive Meaning is where you can tell the story of the work you are doing to change the world and find others doing the same. But, it doesn’t only do that. It also allows you to raise money (and donate money) for your fave charities. … [...]
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[...] I’m feeling patriotic — …and would like to highlight some amazing Canadian startups as well as Canadian contributions to the Web world, in general. I’m hoping that my friends at the Globe and Mail will see this and understand the importance of the media in really highlighting and helping their homegrown companies. Source: ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon Author: Miss Rogue Link: http://www.horsepigcow.com/2007/03/31/im-feeling… Techmeme permalink [...]
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[...] I’m feeling patriotic — …and would like to highlight some amazing Canadian startups as well as Canadian contributions to the Web world, in general. I’m hoping that my friends at the Globe and Mail will see this and understand the importance of the media in really highlighting and helping their homegrown companies. Source: ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon Author: Miss Rogue Link: http://www.horsepigcow.com/2007/03/31/im-feeling… Techmeme permalink [...]
Who says Canada is not Innovative?…
Reading through this list I’m feeling patriotic - always nice to see how much innovative energy there is in Canada. I am sure there are even more “flying under the radar”.
……
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