Kate MacLennan

Congratulations to Summify, #7 in 2012's Most Innovative Companies in B.C. Six years ago, Twitter was a zygote in the fertile minds of founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Today it has half a billion users and is arguably the best-known social media platform, after Facebook. So when Twitter absorbed Vancouver tech startup Context Media Technologies Inc. in January, snapping up Context’s aggregator software Summify in the deal, our panellist Brent Holliday saw it as a real coup –...

Congratulations to BroadbandTV Corp., 2012's most innovative company in B.C. With 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s easy to see how trying to maintain control over copyright material can be expensive and time-consuming. BroadbandTV CEO Shahrzad Rafati turned prevailing models upside down by finding a way to continue feeding consumers an endless supply of free video while making it profitable for the content owners.

Recon Instruments leverages hot technology for 
out-of-this-world partnerships. It seems odd, perhaps even foolish, that a young company would open its vault of trade secrets and invite the world inside for a look. Sharing proprietary computer codes with anyone who feels they can do something useful with them is part of the “freeware” app-developer ethos, but when a company making a durable consumer good follows suit, it begs the question: Why?