The Canadian Tech Industry

The Link Dump Nov-21

This week I’d like to focus on the state of the industry in Canadian Tech. A small group of us from the Cube went to the Canadian Innovation Exchange this past week and it got me to thinking that I’d like to do a little who’s who and what’s what.

Canadian Companies Doing Very Well

• BlackBerry - Smartphones from Waterloo
• Shopify - E-commerce platform from Ottawa
• D-Wave Systems - Quantum computers from Vancouver
• Hootsuite - Social marketing from Vancouver
• VarageSale - Local classifieds sites from Toronto
• TinEye - Reverse image search from Toronto
• Desire2Learn - Educational tools from Waterloo
• Nymi - Biometric authentication from Toronto
• Thalmic Labs - Myo gesture control from Waterloo
• Frank & Oak - Men’s clothing startup from Montreal

Success Breeds Jobs

The biggest way to find success is to see who’s hiring. Check out the Hacker News Who’s Hiring Map by Gaganpreet to see some other hot tech companies that are smart enough to post on HN.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

Sometimes it’s really hard to keep track of Canadian tech news: it gets washed away in the flood of American/World tech news. There’s a few standby sources that I rely on for the meat of my information:

1. TechVibes - Tech news based in Canada
2. StartupNorth - Started as a Blog, now an FB Group
3. Dumb Luck - Every once in awhile a Canadian company will appear on reddit or HN