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.
Category: Web Sites
If you’ve been to “canada.com”:http://www.canada.com in the last few days, you’ll notice that Canwest’s flagship site has been given a makeover.
Earlier this week Chris Powell at “Marketing Magazine”:http://www.marketingmag.ca posted a brief overview of the changes:
Since it’s that time of the year, and I loathe shopping in the real world, I’m spending more than my usual amount of time shopping online.
Last week I was on Henry’s Website in the middle of purchasing some camera gear when I stumbled across a touch of pure e-commerce genius. Right below the section of the shopping cart where I could enter my credit card information was a simple but powerful eight-word sentence that rocked my world.
Next to an optional checkbox was written…