Two local business earn major honours at 2012 Spirit of Innovation ceremony
By Nelson Daily Staff
Two Nelson companies came away winners at the 2012 Spirit of Innovation Awards held recently at the Prestige Inn Lakeside Resort in the Heritage City.
Fiona Richards from Cartolina Cards and Timely of Nelson came away with two of the awards on a night celebrating immensely creative and enterprising people we have here in the Kootenay – Boundary.
Winner of the Most Innovative Entrepreneur Award, Cartolina Cards (www.cartolina.com) has used innovative solutions, creative business management and a uniquely recognizable product to maneuver the Cartolina brand from start-up in 2007 to one of the stationery industry’s most respected and progressive independent brands.
Shopping the world for distinctive art, Richards and her team have developed one of Canada’s best-selling greeting card lines. Taking the product digital and mobile launched them globally.
Mashable rated Cartolina best e-card app in 2011, the New York Times has featured the app twice, and Cartolina has celebrated countless international TV and magazine appearances.
Consistently picked as an Apple staff favourite, Cartolina is about to release its fourth app.
Creative flair, a unique product, relentless tech savvy and a mobile & social media strategy have helped this creative company blossom into a truly innovative and international industry leader.
Meanwhile, Timely went home with the Most Promising Start-up Award.
The local based company has built the foundation of a global network that is revolutionizing how people discover, share and create events, demonstrating innovation through research, development and application of software technology.
Timely’s initial All-in-One Event Calendar grew out of an existing “inthekoots” regional network, and quickly gained traction.
Timely has solved the issue of isolated event calendars that don’t communicate with one another, eliminating the time lapse of webcrawler based systems, ending event posting duplication, and connecting all events with save, share and RSVP functions.
The success of Timely’s All-in-One Event Calendar is evident in its take-up: over 30,000 websites have adopted the plug-in in 12 languages, and the system features more than 750,000 upcoming monthly events while 250 WordPress developers have given it a five star rating, and it has shot to the most downloaded WordPress calendar plug-in.
The Most Innovative Organization award went to The Selkirk Geospatial Research Center in Castlegar while Rossland’s Thoughtstream / Fulcrum Management won Most Innovative Company.
The winners received half-page feature profile in BC Business Magazine, as well as a coveted Spirit of Innovation trophy and plenty o’ bragging rights.
To see all the nominations go to:
http://kast.com/kast-news/16-finalists-announced-2012-spirit-innovation-awards
