StoryofaStartup.com

The 17th DemoCamp took place last night and it might have been the best one yet.  All of the demo and Ignite presenters were well prepared and had impressive projects to show off.  That’s the advantage of the prescreening system that is used now instead of the original first-come-first-serve method.  As a special side note, our very own Kaitlyn McLachlin won the award for the audience’s favourite demo for her AskItOnline online survey creation site that she is creating on the side!  Among her prizes was a RedFlagDeals.com t-shirt!

We’re currently in the process of reworking our Deals Newsletter on RedFlagDeals.com and as a part of that process, we have been evaluating various e-mail marketing products/services.  Among the ones we’ve considered are iContact, SonicMailer Pro, and Constant Contact.  They each have their pros and cons, but right now we’re leaning towards iContact.   What e-mail marketing software to do you use?  If you have experience with any of the above, it would be appreciated.

As a fun little side project, we created a version of PriceCanada.com for the iPhone/iTouch.  You can check it out at http://www.pricecanada.com/m/

Now you can compare prices while on the go.

Word came through yesterday that Edmonton-based teen forum, Nexopia, has been funded to the tune of a few million dollars.  Never heard of it?  If you’re not in Western Canada, that’s not too surprising, but even though they are only popular out West, they claim to get over 1 billion pageviews a month.  That seems plausible.  Here’s a link to their Google Trend with a comparison to Canada’s other hugely popular, but little talked about site, PlentyofFish.

Is Nexopia profitable?  Well as far as I know this is their first round of funding and they’ve been operating for 5+ years, so they must have been doing something right.  I imagine the money is being used to turn Nexopia into a “real business” (the 23yr old CEO was replaced as part of the funding) and the plan must be to expand beyond their Western Canada base.  It will be interesting to see how successful they are at that.  MySpace never fully took root in Canada and Facebook has definitely reached near saturation in Central and Eastern Canada, so they may face their first real competition as they expand.