10 ms·
Can'tada - Tracking the stuff you can't use in Canada
- paulgb 14y agoGoogle cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oLV7onduYB0J:cantada.ca/+cantada&hl=en&client=chrome-mobile&gl=ca&prmd=imvns&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oLV7ond... Looks like Stripe is missing.
- slantyyz 14y agoStripe is in beta in Canada now.
- indiecore 14y agoSelect beta testers only? Stripe would be pretty cool to have right now (super stealth double pivot mode project on the go).
- jarek 14y agoI got an invitation to beta test around two days after signing up on https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global. This was on August 8, YMMV of course.
- wildmXranat 14y agoI signed up a long time ago when there wasn't a list for Canadians to sign up for. Maybe I need to use a different email than Gmail. Who knows.
- cubix 14y agoHow has the experience been?
- jarek 14y agoI have not used it yet. (I hope there isn't a finite, small amount of spaces and I'm not hogging... but I signed up after this was mentioned on HN last time and got a spot pretty soon so I'm guessing it's not that limited.)
- indiecore 14y agohuh. I'll submit again in case something went wrong. Does anyone know of Stripe alternatives for the international market?
- Kluny 14y agoWe killed the hell out of this site. I'm getting their Index of / page now.
- cshekhar 14y agohttp://cantada.ca/index.php.save/ http://cantada.ca/index.php.save/
- OriginalSyn 14y agoApparently one of them is this website. "Error establishing a database connection"
- hullooo 14y agolol yea. I think their site was so flooded it crashed
- jewbacca 14y agoLove the idea, could be interesting to bitch about this kind of stuff in a more organized way for a few years and see what comes of it. Wish the site was up.
- srehnborg 14y agoIf these products are not available in Canada, sounds like a great opportunity to bring something similar to that market.
- paulgb 14y agoOr brand a US-based proxy server as a way to access geoblocked stuff :-) $5/month should be enough to proxy a chunk of multimedia through US-based servers, and I know people who would pay it. I'm only semi-joking. I can't convince myself that it would be ethical to do this, but I'd like to see it happen as a way to get people talking about geoblocking as something that incurs a cost to Canadians.
- tlb 14y agoCanada isn't a strategically important market for web services. A strategically important market is one where if global companies ignore it and a local competitor gets traction, it will be hard to unseat them. There are lots of examples: Mail.ru dominates in Russia, Seznam.cz dominates search in Czech despite Google's efforts. Global companies missed the boat by ignoring those markets until it was too late. However, I can't think of examples where a Canadian web service dominates the market in the face of global competition. I suspect most of the services listed here figure they can wait until the market develops, then swoop in and own it.
- jonny_eh 14y agokijiji.ca has the local classifieds pretty much locked down. Even though they're owned by eBay, the site doesn't work anywhere other than Canada.
- brandon272 14y agoMay I ask what you mean when you say "until the market develops"? Some of these services are unavailable due to content licensing concerns (i.e. other parties own the rights to distribute the content within Canada), but absent those types of restrictions I view not offering services to Canadians to be ignoring a significant market (34,000,000 Canadians, 8/10 households connected to the Internet[1]) of people who have similar tastes and preferences to the Americans you already offer services to, relatively speaking. I'd hope that any company not offering their services to Canadians would have a pretty good explanation as to why they aren't taking advantage of that market. [1] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/110525/dq110525b-eng.htm http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/110525/dq110525b-en...
- lambersley 14y agoCanada might have the second largest land mass in the world, but its population is just about the size of the California. From a Total Addressable Market, that's quite small. Foreign entities, IMHO, are reserved at the idea of investing large sums of money into a social engine of lesser significance. Simply put, Canada is too small to be relevant.
- surgeterrix 14y agoThis site isn't coming up for me, I'm in the U.S. Strange form of karmic justice I suppose.
- pokoleo 14y agoLooks like it's been accidentally ddos'd.
- SG- 14y agolooks like it's a wordpress site without caching enabled.
- peterwwillis 14y agoHey, they get free health care, we get a better Internet. I think it's a fair trade.
- ElliotH 14y agoI can't get a google cache but http://cantada.ca.nyud.net/ http://cantada.ca.nyud.net/ works :)
- kafkaesque 14y agoThis is pretty cool. I'll be going back home (Canada) from the States and have seen a lot of things available in this country that aren't in Canada (yet! hopefully!). I wonder if some can be done through the FOSS community in Canada.
- jfb 14y agoI'm moving to Toronto this month, and am planning on compiling a list of things that are different. Here's hoping that this site gets over their DDOS and comes back on line.
- lucian1900 14y agoInteresting how this website that complaints about myopia on the part of US vendors is itself myopic to the rest of the world.
- mcrider 14y agoThe domain doesn't really suit other countries as well ;) But point very well taken; I've gotten many suggestions for services unavailable in other countries -- I'd encourage others to start a similar web site for their own country or perhaps we can have a single international archive.
- drucken 14y agoI do not know if I am misunderstanding the OP, but I think they possibly meant non-US services not available in Canada, not services not available in other countries. The latter would not make much sense, or at least would not be expected, given the name of your site...
- omgsean 14y agoThis led me to do some investigating and the fourth season of Arrested Development will not be available in Canada. I don't use Netflix but I pay for an account because I think it's the future of content delivery and I want to vote with my dollars. As of five seconds ago I'm no longer a customer.
- MichaelGG 14y agoOne thing that Amazon does way better than Google is handling out-of-country experiences. With Amazon, I have a US-based account, and no matter where I am (I primarily do not live in the US), _everything works_. With Google, I'll install an app while in the USA. Then when travelling, I'll get a notification that there's an update available. But when I go to update it, I'm told the app doesn't exist. This is actually a security hole: If I have a buggy app, I can't update while outside the US. If I sign in with my Google account, nothing changes - I'm still given "local" content. This is why I don't bother with Google Music. I'm not interested in having my files disappear to "not available in your country", despite using a USA credit card and address on my account.
- ericdykstra 14y agoI had a similar experience while in Japan. Perfect time to use the Google Now currency card, right? Nope, as soon as I set foot in Japan, the currency card doesn't show up in Google Now. The world is only going to become more and more internationally linked; hopefully Google figures out a better way to manage this than they have so far.
- bergie 14y agoIt seems Google has never been able to figure out that people actually travel between countries, which is amazing given how much the Googlers I know move around. Great example is translations... often various Google properties speak the whatever local language to me, even though I'm logged in. While it has been a while since I've seen GMail in Turkish, this still happens frequently with search. Two issues here: 1. my Google account knows what language I want to use 2. language !== country. Many countries have multiple official languages, not to mention immigrants etc.
- bytefactory 14y agoInteresting - my experiences are quite different. I can order some stuff from Amazon.com (US) from Canada, but many things aren't available. I can't use Amazon Prime (they won't even let me sign up without a US address), and I can't order books for my Amazon Kindle purchased in Dubai (it needs a US address as well). With Google, however, nearly everything works. I've been using Google Music for some time now, although it isn't officially available in Canada. Same with Google Voice. All I had to do was sign up for both with a VPN for the first use, after which I can access it anywhere through the respective apps in any country with no hassles.
- jisaacstone 14y agoIt bugs me that the hyperlinks are black & w/o underline. I was only able to figure out they were links by thinking for a minute and deciding that they must be, because what else could they be? But they sure do look like body text. _________ edit: Everything is fantastic otherwise. Sorry to be so negative w/o posting any of my initial reaction(which was completely positive)
- mcrider 14y agoHi all, this is my site. Not sure why it went down, still working on that. Its hosted on Linode which has been remarkably stable even with traffic spikes (I actually posted this as a Show HN about a year and a half ago and it was on the top of HN for over a day -- which was completely unexpected). FYI, I haven't updated the site in a while (other than converting it to Wordpress) -- Believe it or not, I live in the states now :) I'd love to get some guest editors on it; if anyone is interested please contact me.
- xorbyte 14y agoI'm not sure what the current state of the WordPress world is, but I know that without caching you were bound to crumble under any kind of traffic spike not very long ago. Perhaps that's a good first step (I'm sorry I don't know which of the caching plugins is best, WP SuperCache used to be the one to use 'back in the day')
- mcrider 14y agoYeah; I converted the site to wordpress recently and just forgot to add caching. I've add W3 Total cache and things appear to be working better.
- mikle 14y agoI know it is a lot to ask but I would love to do the same for Israel and I'd like to steal some of your design. Would you mind? I'd encourage you to put the code on github, and I'll happily contribute an upvote button that only allows Canadians / Israelis (by geoip) to vote.
- mcrider 14y agoPlease feel free (maybe just give me some attribution with a link back to cantada.ca). Its just a basic Wordpress installation using the Blaskan theme, so I don't think its necessary to put it on Github.
- SCdF 14y agoI'd actually love this internationally in general. Actually, I'd really just like companies who deliver services to realise that people outside of the US may be linked to their site, care, and easily and obviously list the countries they work in. In many cases you have to hunt through their support tickets, and in some cases you aren't told until you get all the way to the payment screen.
- nucleardog 14y agoMhmm. It's really annoying when I register for something, activation e-mail, fifty other steps, get to the payment screen... No country dropdown. Only United States. It's bad enough that I can't use any ing services here, but quit wasting my time and getting my hopes up.
- engtech 14y agoWith content deals, I feel like Can-Con is to blame. Can-con is the law that a percentage of content must be Canadian in origin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content I personal hold Can-con responsible for the fact that Call Me Maybe is played so often on Canadian radio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_me_maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_me_maybe
- jmedefind 14y agoTo be fair, Call Me Maybe is played a lot in the US too.
- jonny_eh 14y agoCan-Con so far hasn't been applied to the internet, AFAIK. While Netflix in Canada has a bunch of Canadian content, it's only because it's relatively cheap and in demand, i.e. due to market forces. The real reason a lot of these services aren't in Canada (or other smaller markets) is due to regional content licensing.
- msbarnett 14y agoCanCon doesn't apply to the internet. At all. It is zero percent to blame for any content site being unavailable in Canada. Canadian rights holders have been notoriously reluctant to sign internet distribution deals. CTV and Global dragged their feet for years on iTunes TV distribution rights for a number of popular shows.
- guyzero 14y agoPlease. They play 'Call Me Maybe' on the radio every half-hour in the SF Bay Area.
- Splines 14y agoI won't lie - when I moved to the US for a job offer out of college part of me was excited that I'd finally be able to order from amazon.com.
- ffk 14y agoI misread your name as "Can, TADA!" :) Maybe it can be a website that tracks things you can do in Canada! (maybe even focusing on things that you can't do elsewhere)
- 47 14y agoIs not this is counter intuitive? Companies will look at this list and say oh so many other companies are not supporting Canada, why should be spend time on supporting Canada.
- MrFoof 14y agoRegarding Kickstarter, Sauropod Studio just successfully raised $702,000 for Castle Story despite being based in Montreal. It probably requires some significant extra work, but it's certainly possible. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/902505202/castle-story http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/902505202/castle-story
- uladzislau 14y agoIf you can't provide proof of US citizenship there's no way you can be approved for Amazon Payments and launch a Kickstarter project. The only way to do so is to find someone in US willing to participate in your project. I assume for a fee.
- ckevinc 14y agoHere's the interesting thing I find about all this (and one that seems not to have been mentioned): In Canada, we are more similar to America than anyone else (for the most part). Now, before you fellow hosers scream "Sacrilege", hear me out. Beyond all of the licensing issues and stupid protectionism rules and laws we have here in Canada, services wishing to be in this country are doing so in probably the most similar country to the US than anywhere in the world. The dollar is almost at par, our language is the same (for most of us), culturally we're incredibly similar, we like the same kinds of entertainment and laugh at most of the same kinds of jokes. We share the worlds longest unprotected border, with billions and billions of goods travelling across in an entirely over-tariffed manner. We have very few barriers to entry into each other's country, causing a hell of a lot of cross-border whatever-you-wanted-to-do. Heck, we even have border cities named the same (Niagara Falls anyone?). If fact, as a Canadian, if I were to simply just land in any US city and tell everyone I'm a US citizen they'd probably have no reason to disagree with me (at least until I ended a sentence in "Eh" or talked goofy). In Canada, we're called a branch-plant economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_plant_economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_plant_economy) and I'd hazard to say that many American operating companies could simply provide service with very little technical barriers. I'm just amazed at how we're so accessible to each other in many ways and yet so many services are off limits and stuff like iPads are released here a month later. Perhaps it keeps us from being flooded by Americanism, who knows.
- nateabele 14y agoHaving only limited experience in this department, the guess I would hazard (for non-huge companies, at least) is that the costs (marketing, distribution in some cases, infrastructure, customer support, legal, compliance) for operating a business that serves the Canadian market just aren't offset by the market size, which is only about a 10th of the United States. What I understand from my Canadian friends is that all things internet- and IP-related exist under a drastically different legal framework, so the legal and compliance cost issues are non-trivial. Also, I could see some of these differences having an impact on the actual business models of some companies listed.
- tsellon 14y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that Canada has different packaging requirements than the US, specifically around the inclusion of French language elements. This often requires a different SKU of a product to be shipped in the two countries, and for different marketing and documentation materials to be prepared.
- RKearney 14y agoAren't all of these companies based in the United States? I mean yeah it sucks Canada can't use some of these applications, but why doesn't Canada start their own similar services to run in their country?
- SCdF 14y agoBecause the Internet is supposed to 'flatten' the world, and it does in basically all cases except where money or media licences are involved. Which is annoying, because while I can happily read the New York Times while not living in New York I can't work with many of the internet businesses that reside there.
- mehulkar 14y agoAdd turntable.fm!
- ghshephard 14y agoGoogle Voice lost me the very first time I tried to make a VOIP call from Brazil and couldn't figure out how to make it work. Switched back to Skype (which worked trivially in Brazil) - never looked back. The irony is that whatever limitation Google had with Brazil, might have been fixed in the last few years, but because of that one international hiccup, and never once having any problem with skype in any country I travel to, they basically lost me forever. (Even though last time I was using it, Google Voice was free, and skype charges me by the minute)
- maguay 14y agoIt's not just Canada ... it's most of the world. I live in Thailand, and can't use most of these services. Only saving factor is that I'm American, and have a US bank and address, so I can use some US services that way (iTunes, Amazon Payments, etc.)
- hyh1048576 14y agoWe really need a Can'tchina... There are tons of stuff one cannot use in China for various reason, e.g. Google+, Dropbox...