Here’s our annual listing of Canada’s top news stories relating to the Internet in 2009. Note that we’ve included some non-Canadian items as well due to their global significance to the web. Let us know if we’ve missed anything.
Feb 2009:
March 2009:
- Canada’s first street view provided by joint effort between British Columbia-based Canpages.ca and San Francisco-based MapJack
- New version of Internet Explorer version 8 released
April 2009:
June 2009:
- Microsoft launches Bing, a rebranding of Microsoft’s search engine, Live
June 2009:
- Rogers launched Google’s new mobile operating system – Android – in two HTC phones
July 2009:
July 2009:
- 9th sphere launches REF:CODE Analytics, a new way to track phone calls that are referred to from a website
August 2009:
September 2009:
- Google launches Google Wave, their vision of next level of email communication
- Century 21 sues Rogers’s Zoocasa for “scraping” property data from the Century 21 website
- Skype available to Canadian iPhone users
October 2009:
- Yahoo shuts down GeoCities servers, the well known free website hosting service
- Windows 7 released
- Google’s Street View launched in Canada (Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, Toronto and Vancouver) – second available street view
- One Degree stops production of its Canadian focused Internet marketing blog
November 2009:
- Amazon’s Kindle, a platform for reading electronic books, comes to Canada
- The Canada Revenue Agency expands investigation of eBay power sellers and GST collection
December 2009:
- Canadians reported as top users of social networking sites in the world, according to a new survey
- Microsoft loses appeal on an August district court decision that awarded i4i Inc. (Toronto based software company) $200 million and an injunction on selling Word in its current form
Looking back, 2009 saw the expansion of numerous US based products and services into the Canadian market. On our front, we’ve seen fewer Canadian innovations and more legal battles spotlighting the social and ethical parameters of the web. The Internet continues to make more headways into our daily lives, both personally and professionally. Remember, the web is still very young, but growing at an accelerated rate. 2010 has the momentum to bring the web to its next level, as we foresee companies continuing to push the envelope. Or should I say the processor.
