Over the weekend I attended NextMedia 2008 in Banff. It was my first NextMedia conference and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the sessions and the attendants. A few thoughts that I took away from the conference:

• Nexopia is still one of the best kept secrets in social networking: while the site is now the 4th largest social networking site in North-America in terms of total hours spent on the site, not a lot of people in the industry know about the company and are always amazed to hear that we have more than 1 billion page views / month. Participating in the panel on “Canada’s Hottest Digital Media Innovators” definitely helped to raise our profile but we still have a long way to go to spread the word.
• Canada has some serious talent in the consumer Internet space and we are seeing more and more sizeable start-ups in this area – B5Media, Plentyoffish, Nexopia, Suite101, Metroleap or NowPublic are just some examples in a very vibrant scene.

More coverage of the event on Techvibes, NextMedia photos on Flickr.