Top Web Apps in Canada
By Heri Rakotomalala of Montreal Tech Watch
Canadians use the Internet more than anyone in the
world. According to
comScore, Canadians spend on average 39.6 hours per month on the Internet, followed
by Israel at 37.4 and South Korea at 34, while the USA is in 8th position with 29.4.
Canada also leads in online reach with 70% of households having Internet access. The
average pages viewed per visitor is 3800 in Canada, while the U.K. is second at 3300. And
at 67%, Canada has one of the highest broadband penetrations in the world, 21 points
higher than the US. Finally, while Canada still lags in online advertising, with $28.05
per Internet user and the US with $71.43, ad spending is expected to grow
32% this year (Ernst&Young LLP). So Canada is a sophisticated, and growing,
market for Web apps.
As in any other country, Canadians heavily use Google, Yahoo and other global services like ebay and craiglist; each of which has their own english and french canadian localized versions. In social networking, Facebook is the star app of the moment. For instance, Toronto has more than 650.000 facebook users, more than the combined facebook users in New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
Top Web Apps
Canada has a lot of startups that are reaching the global market...
Shopify is a simple, affordable and stylish service that lets you create your own online store. It is targeted at inviduals who want to sell online, without any programming.
Freshbooks handles time tracking and invoicing. The service is used by freelancers and consultants in over 100 countries. Mike McDerment, an active canadian web entrepreneur, runs the company.
Stikipad lets you create a personal or a group wiki for free, with an easy-to-use user interface.
Librivox publishes on the public domain audio books, as read by users. The digital library ranges from contemporary to classics, philosophy to novels. Last finished project: James Joyce's Ulysses, with 32 hours of audio.
DabbleDB lets you create and share a database, and then build an application on top of it, without requiring programming skills. The platform is innovative, with a simple point-and-click interface.
Nowpublic.com is the largest user-written news site in the world, according to the Globe and Mail, thanks to a thriving community. It is based in Vancouver, BC.
Sxipper manages your online identity via a firefox extension and OpenID. It tracks usernames and passwords; and fills in online forms. Sxipper comes from Sxip, which is working on new identity models for the digital world.
wikitravel, which this year won a Webby Award for Best Travel Website, is a free travellers guide. It also is aiming to produce print travel guides. This wiki project was started in Montreal, Quebec, and advises a "fair" (not "neutral") point of view from its contributors.
Cambrian House is an online community where users "crowdsource" an idea. Participants then share the profits if the software is successful. Robhinhood Fund, a "web2.0 charity" website, started at Cambrian House.
ClubPenguin is a virtual word for kids, where they can play and interact. The self-funded company is already profitable via monthly subscriptions, with $60 million projected revenues this year.
GiveMeaning is an online community about news and projects that change the world for good.
ConceptShare is an online collaboration tool for designers and creatives, where they can annotate and discuss current work.
AjaxWhois.com is a DNS lookup service.
ilovetoplay.com is a sports social network where you can find additional players for your team.
YubNub.org is an online command line.
Innovation and startup culture in Canada
Canada has a long history of innovation and success. The most well known is Flickr, which started in Vancouver, BC, and then became one of the key applications in the web 2.0 landscape. StumbleUpon, which was acquired by ebay for $75M in March, was started in Calgary, Alberta. iStockphoto was a pioneer in micropayments in stock photography, and was bought by GettyImages.
Conclusion
The future is promising for Canadian startups. In Montréal, for instance, barcamps, democamps, monthly Tech Entrepreneur breakfasts, and early investors like montrealstartup, have revived the local tech community. We now have promising startups like Standoutjobs which aims to reinvent the recruiting process, by using video and social networking to promote the company's brand; or Kakiloc, a location-based social network which integrates with mobile phones. These are just two examples of the promising web apps being built in Canada and being presented to the world. Let us know what other web apps you know of from Canada, that we may've missed.
This post is part of Read/WriteWeb's continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia, Ireland, Hong Kong and Romania.
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Eloqua probably makes more than all these companies combined. And they're 100% delivered over the web.
Huh. I was told we couldn't be on this list because we were a media / social media play... But NowPublic makes it? Don't get me wrong, I love NowPublic to bits, but they're clearly not a web "app" (which was the word that disqualified us) (ditto on Cambrian House, who I also love).
Anyways, to get past the grumbling, there are some fantastic things happening in Canada, and it's great that you're covering this Richard!
See my site http://sciencehack.com/ from Nova Scotia Canada. ScienceHack is a search engine for science videos, every science video on ScienceHack is screened by a scientist to verify its accuracy and quality.
The Internet is probably so popular in Canada because it is a large, sparsely-populated, relatively isolated country.
Certainly, email has taken over from the long-distance telephone for my retired parents and all their friends and family. Indeed, it seems that long-distance calls have reverted to their former only-on-special-occasions status, such as birthdays and Christmas.
What about Productwiki, one of the more innovative players in the social shopping space?
I think the quoted stats are nonsense (greater net usage in Canada than in South Korea? as if), and the cited ‚ÄúWeb apps‚Ä? are unused by me and everyone I know. You also cleverly fail to mention how many of those innovative startups were bought by Americans and had their Canadian staff move to Sunnyvale.
You could also mention UNYK.com, an online adress book app (that ressembles Plaxo, only simpler)... It is very practical and useful... very much recommend it!
One early stage startup is http://esyshopping.com, they are about to release a local shopping search engine for Canada later this summer.
Hi Richard,
You finally did a cdn web apps and you missed us.
We are still based in Ontario, Canada.
http://otavo.com
Cheers.
Robot Replay is a fully Canadian web two buzzword compliant application from the good folks at Nitobi --we also do ajax components, ux, ixd, RoR, Flex and of late Adobe Air. In fact, if you find yourself at the Air Bus Tour make sure you talk to Andre (our fearless leader) about some of other schemings we have going on.
Cheers!
Brian
ps,
Vancouver rawks!
We just launched Helperoo today. It's a simple to use, no frills or BS features helpdesk. We're based in Calgary. Thought I'd give a shout out.
www.helperoo.com
http://digg.com was largely developed (by me) in Canada. In addition our lead designer Daniel Burka was in Toronto when he first designed the site.
thanks for sharing it
Surely plentyoffish.com is the standout startup story from Canada. It is now in the top 50 web sites for traffic and is completely demolishing the old dating site business model. And it is all run by one guy from his apartment with a small number of servers without any VC.
Podcast Spot is a hosting service for podcasters built and operated in Canada!
PlentyOfFish, argh definitely should've included that! Sorry Marcus! We'll do an update of that and the others mentioned in the comments.
I'm not sure how "ajaxwhois.com", which is essentially a one-page affiliate front-end for GoDaddy and doesn't really let you do anything, is an example of the finest of web apps that our great nation can produce.
And as for RalphG who said: "The Internet is probably so popular in Canada because it is a large, sparsely-populated, relatively isolated country."
.. have you ever been to Canada? Seen Canada's cities on a map?
WOW! I'm just your average "alien" blogger from Canada, eh, and I found the post and comments insightful and exhilarating! As for Canada being sparsely and disparately populated over a large region...yes, we are...but we DO live in cities too! Where we drink red wine, eat our meatpies and sushi and watch Canadian Idol... :)
Let's start a poll. Which of these apps/companies do you think has the most potential of making it big?
Great resources. As a Canadian I found some of this info valuable.
Hi, I’m the blog editor for Octopz, a Toronto-based software startup.
We launched a browser-based online collaboration software service back in April at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It’ designed for creative and media pros who want to collaborate on documents and digital media including video, and it features integrated text, voice and video conferencing.
We’ve received good early feedback and reviews on the app, which you can find on our website and blog.
I just found one free domain name lookup service.http://www.ajaxlookup.com, Free and instantly checks domain name availability and see whois detail. Pretty cool stuff! ...
Canadian web startup scene is just taking off. Montreal and Vancouver are two most active cities. Many great resources are available on facebook, they cover all the stories that happening here.
Like the article. Keep up the good work.