Past CNMA up-and-comers: where are they now?

With nominations now open for the 2007 Canadian New Media Awards, it seems fitting to revisit the six companies recognized as having particular potential at past installments of the awards. But since their respective wins, experiences among the winners of the Most Promising New Company of the Year award run the gamut from growth that would be the envy of any startup to, well, not much difference at all."We haven’t changed a great deal – it’s not like we became huge," says Jen Crisanti, VP of new business development at Toronto’s Splashworks.com Inc., which won the award in 2000, the first year it was handed out. "I would love to say the award did a ton, but it was kind of…I don’t think we really even got any calls from it."Unfortunately for it, Splashworks.com’s win largely coincided with the dot-com bubble and subsequent loss of interest in nearly everything with an "e" prefix. Eight years later, however, its market niche – advergaming – is heating up. Since winning the award, the company has doubled its sales, Crisanti says: "As well as that, the number of customers have grown, and we’ve noticed we’re working on larger projects."That’s largely thanks to the growing buzz around casual games, especially their purported appeal across demographics, which has piqued advertisers’ interests for using advergaming to deliver their marketing messages. With a library of approximately 110 proprietary games based on Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash and Shockwave animation suites, Splashworks.com has the ability to quickly set up a custom advergame in any number of genres – sports, retro arcade games, et cetera – as well as create custom offerings for a premium. Generic versions of the games can also be played for free on the Splashworks.com website.Splashworks.com has garnered some big name clients both here – Alliance Atlantis Communication Inc., a recent Superbowl promo for broadcast partner CanWest Global Communications LLC and frozen foods maker McCain Foods Ltd. – and south of the border, such as the Game Show Network and American Girl LLC. All of the advergames created for such clients are hosted at locations other than the Splashworks.com website – and all were created with the company’s six-person staff, more or less the same size as when it garnered the Most Promising New Company label in 2000.Since the debut award was handed to Splashworks.com, other notable winners have included career classifieds site Workopolis.com of Toronto, fellow Torontonian firm J!ve Media Technologies Inc., and Ludicorp Research and Development Ltd., the Vancouver-based high-tech holding company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake of Flickr fame. There were no awards held in 2004. While some of those companies are now defunct (J!ve Media) and others firmly in the hands of US media companies (Ludicorp, after Flickr’s sale to Yahoo Inc. in March 2005), Workopolis.com has soldiered on to become a household name.But not even Workopolis can match the feat accomplished by Toronto mobile video service provider Quickplay Media Inc.: after winning the Most Promising New Company award in 2005 – just a year after it was founded – the company took home honours for Company of the Year in its sophomore appearance at the awards."Just having Most Promising New Company I think definitely perks up peoples’ ears and makes them keep an eye on you," says Raja Khanna, Quickplay’s chief creative officer and co-founder. "But moving up to Company of the Year in one year was the big win for us."Today, Quickplay partners with media entities such as the CBC, CHUM Ltd., MTV and ESPN Mobile Publishing to provide video clips and other content to all three national carriers – Bell Mobility, Rogers Wireless, and Telus Mobility. The company has also grown to employ more than 80 people, and has attracted investment from a variety of Canadian and American venture capitalists, including a $12-million Series B financing round last year.The most recently named promising company is Calgary’s Rocketfuel Productions Inc., a collaboration between two of the city’s leading new media firms, Hotrocket Studios Inc. and Redengine. The former entity handles all of the creative production, while the latter is the technical clout behind the partnership.Rocketfuel’s post-win experiences fall between those of Quickplay and Splashworks.com: despite adding a producer last year, you can still enumerate the company’s staff on one hand – they look to partner with other interactive shops when additional expertise is required.But Hotrocket CEO and executive producer Ken Bautista says the CNMA win "added a lot of credibility to our project," namely its marquee franchise Technosaurs, which has received financial support from the Banff New Media Institute’s Accelerator program, Telefilm Canada, the Virtual Museum of Canada Investment Program, and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller AB.In addition to recently landing work from the Alberta government, which was looking for a novel interactive tool – beyond websites and CD-ROMs – to help attract young people to skilled trades and apprenticeships, Bautista and Hotrocket president and COO Jason Suriano have watched Rocketfuel go from strength to strength in the past year. The paleontology-themed Technosaurs, especially, has grown to the point where they’re now pitching it during a session at this week’s Kidscreen Summit in New York, just one of four international companies picked as finalists."I think just added a lot more eyes to the whole thing," Bautista reflects. "We’ve had a lot of people asking about the project, or asking us to come and speak to them about what we’re doing...and a lot of that came from the New Media Awards, because it gave us national exposure for our project."

Past CNMA up-and-comers: where are they now?

News | 02/07/2007 5:00 am EST

Unlock all the Canadian telecom, broadcasting and digital media news you need.

FREE TRIAL

SUBSCRIBE

Reuse & Permissions

Inside The Wire Report

Information

Hill Times Publishing

Get in Touch With Us