There were no official announcements made, which is a shame, but last week Canada’s most influential online service celebrated its tenth anniversary.
On the morning of November 29, 1995, at simultaneous press conferences in Toronto and Montreal, the Sympatico Internet service was announced.
Although the Sympatico signup software kit was intended to go on sale the following day, some curious and keen Canadians showed up at Bell stores on the 29th asking for the software and were able to purchase it 24-hours ahead of time. (By the way, you can often tell who some of the very first Sympatico members are by their email addresses. Some of them were lucky enough to be able to create accounts using just their first names, such as john@ as opposed to john.smith2000@.)
Backed by a (somewhat unruly and definitely ungainly) consortium made up of most, but not all, of Canada’s 10+ regional telcos at the time, Sympatico would go on to become Canada’s largest and most well-known consumer Internet service provider with millions of subscribers. The Sympatico.ca Website, later to be christened a “portal,” grew and grew to become Canada’s number one Internet media property, with over 15 million unique visitors a month.
Month: December 2005
_This is Day Two of *5 Days To Optimize Your E-mail Messages*, here is “part one”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/12/05/5-days-to-optimize-your-email-messages._
People who receive email use a wide range of email clients ranging from “Outlook”:http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010857931033.aspx and “Outlook Express”:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/oe/ to “Eudora”:http://www.eudora.com and “Thunderbird”:http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/. They also use web-based mail solutions like “Hotmail”:http://www.hotmail.com, “Yahoo”:http://www.yahoo.com, “AOL”:http://www.aol.ca and now Google’s “Gmail”:http://www.gmail.com. Each of these handles incoming email a little differently. And if you send a lot of B2B email or sned to recipients who might be checking email from within large organizations, you will come across “Lotus Notes”:http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/noteshomepage?OpenDocument&cwesite=notes, an email client that is very tough on HTML and other formatted email. Lotus Notes will often chew up your HTML email and spit out some pretty awful stuff for the recipient.
_At “Phantom Fiber Corporation”:http://www.phantomfiber.com/, Alexander S Bosika is responsible for corporate branding and marketing communications, partner relations and business development in addition to investor communications. He has an Honours Degree from York University in Economics and Business and studied at the London School of Economics._
_Jim Brown is responsible for managing the growth of “VoCoMo”:http://www.vocomo.ca/html/main.html, including strategy, service development and tactical execution. Prior to this Jim worked with Rogers AT&T Wireless, Bell Canada and Bell Mobility. He has an MSc from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Jim is also a graduate of the University of Toronto Continuing Education Strategic Leadership program._
*One Degree: What is Mobile Monday?*
Mobile Monday Toronto (“MoMo-TO”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MoMo-TO/) is a group dedicated to cultivating and accelerating Toronto’s mobile and telecom sectors through leadership, technology, government relations, research, education, mentoring, investment, recruitment, networking and promotion. Through active collaboration, we aim to generate new ideas, concepts and business relationships with the end goal of developing a “strong mobile eco-system” for the Greater Toronto Area to further support mobile initiatives.
*One Degree: What inspired you to start a Toronto Chapter?*