Toronto, March 26, 2002 — The Canadian e-Content Award Winners were
announced at the e-Content industry’s prestigious Gala Dinner on the evening of March 25th.
Launched in 1996, the Canadian Online Product Awards, as
they were then known, were developed to recognize and honour e-content products and
services used by Canadian organizations and individuals.
A panel of industry experts and users of e-content products
for Canadians decided this year’s winners, after months of deliberation. “We had an
excellent array of products to evaluate, and the competition was fierce this year,”
said Juanita Richardson, Chairperson of the Judging Committee. “The winning products
are those that display especially high levels of innovation, vision, functionality, ease
of use, market fit and content.”
Again this year the Awards were open to publishers who
develop or market products to Canadians. Eligible products included those that were new,
redesigned or significantly enhanced, and were released between December 1, 2000 and November 30, 2001.
AND THE “BEST IN CATEGORY” WINNERS ARE
Best News Product: Infomart Ltd, a CANWEST Company — Infomart.ca
This service is a logically consistent and integrated product with many useful features.
Infomart continues to add content and value regularly and has the best collection of Canadian news.
Best Desktop Information Management Tool: Quicklaw Inc. — QuickFIND / JuriCITE
The Quickfind product is both simple and powerful – an admirable combination that should
help save time. The designers have clearly considered the users’ workflow in their approach, which helps
ensure a high degree of usability.
Best Business Information Product: Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company — Factiva.com
For it’s depth and range of content, its innovative features, content enhancement, fast
and powerful processing, ease of use and customization options, Factiva.com is clearly now the leader
to be followed for business information.
Best Education Product: Cold North Wind Inc. — Archive Publisher
This product represents a real breakthrough. As this technology allows access to archives and
stored knowledge, researchers, students and librarians will be able to provide new views and depths of understanding.
Best Legal Product: LexisNexis Butterworths — LexisNexis at lexis.com
The new lexis.com browser interface incorporates all the advanced functionality that has
been available on Lexis and further functionality and display enhancements have been added. Any Canadian
legal professional could make efficient and product use of this service.
Best Collaboration Tool: Ramius Corportation — CommunityZero
Transcending the hype about creating virtual communities, this product actually shows
organizations who to do this in a turnkey fashion. CommunityZero’s flexibility and applicability to many
different kinds of clients make it particularly impressive.
Best Content Management Product: Percussion Software Inc. – Rhythmyx Content Manager
Rhythmyx Content Manager provides a tool for business to manage web content that puts
control over the content where it belongs — which is of prime importance for medium and large organizations
with a web presence.
Best Enterprise Portal: Epicentric Inc. — Epicentric Foundation
Server. This product meets the expectations of both current consumer and business users.
Solid functionality with customization tools and links to other sites, Epicentric provides a good
integration of their client’s, Scotia Online, products.
Most Innovative Application: TV Ontario — Eureka! Ask a Teacher
This product provides support for Ontario students, offering a wide range of resources
to support educational goals – and success. Eureka is a well-designed service and includes valuable content.
Best Canadian Content Product: Micromedia ProQuest — The Toronto Star – Pages of the Past
A wonderful one-of-a-kind product which should be of great benefit to historians and
news “junkies”. Pages of the Past is the first such complete product for newspapers and
points to what will become the preferred method of archival searching.
AWARDS OF MERIT WINNERS ARE
Award of Merit – Essential Service: Statistics Canada — Business Data
Not too many years ago, small or medium-sized Canadian businesses were reliant upon a
range of print resources in public libraries for access to business data. The StatsCan Business Data
site provides quick access to authoritative, current and comprehensive business information.
Award of Merit – Functionality: Bridges.com — Career Advantage
This is a great set of information and learning tools for those interested in career
exploration. It has broad market appeal, great usability and the content is current, accurate and easy to find.
Award of Merit – Vision: Toronto District School Board — TDSB Class
The TDSB Class product presents a vision of using technology to provide a collaborative
online school. This is an ambitious and potentially great site that provides learning to students who
cannot attend regular classes but who have access to the Internet.
Award of Merit – Market Fit: St. Lawrence Cement, iSTARK Corporation — Cement-Online
It was great to see an old-economy-type company have the vision to develop a tool like
this to work with customers. Cement-Online should prove to be a tremendous utility for customers for
various purposes. A good information tool.
Award of Merit – Productivity Technology Tool: Whitehill Technologies — Whitehill Enterprise
This product recognizes the value to companies of their varied legacy systems and
allows them to continue to run these often incompatible platforms, converting the data to XML for
online publication.
Award of Merit – Content: divine, inc. — divine Knowledge Store (kStore)
Users will find a wide breadth and depth of sources supported by this application. With
quality sources and a global scope, divine’s kStore is a solid information aggregation tool.
Award of Merit – Market Fit: The Canadian Press — Command News / Nouvelles sur commande
CP’s vision with Command News is to be lauded and their dedication to making current
news immediately accessible and easy to distribute provides us with a valuable service.
Award Presentations were made at the annual Canadian
e-Content Awards Gala, held at the Eaton Centre Marriott Hotel in Toronto. Attendees
included members of the Internet content community. The entertaining evening was hosted by
Rob Schock. After dinner, guests were entertained by a charity auction to benefit the
Starlight Children’s Foundation. Items were donated by sponsors, exhibitors and delegates,
with all proceeds going to the Foundation in memory of Sally Rapoport. Auctioneers were
Barry Lubek and David Shinwell, publisher of Information Highways Magazine.
The Awards evening is part of the Information Highways 2002
Conference and Showcase, which features new industry reports, four program streams, an
interactive value forum, high-profile keynotes, showcase exhibitions, and a pre-conference
seminar for the e-content industry about academic research.
About Information Highways
INFORMATION HIGHWAYS assists Canadian e-Content professionals in developing and delivering
effective Web-based knowledge and e-business resources that improve service, increase
productivity and help individuals and organizations gain competitive advantage. Products
include Information Highways Magazine, published bi-monthly, Hot Bytes e-newsletter,
published bi-weekly and the Information Highways annual Conference. Please visit:
www.informationhighways.net.
For further news information or details on how to participate please contact:
Barry Gander
Media Relations
613-220-1368
[email protected]
