Mozilla is relatively new here. I remember a few years ago there were news around the internet about Mozilla booting Thunderbird. Not sure why or what is that all about.

Microsoft has a game studio in here, not sure how long before they absorb and move everyone down south of the border. So it's not the whole MS Entertainment division is here.

Some of the companies that got bought by bigger companies are either move to USA (Flickr, DabbleDB) or ended up in here with a possible more pressure to do more sales from the HQ; basically they have to prove that they worth and the goals being set by their big mothership is usually far more ambitious than their initial startup goals. By the way, gone is all the goodies that they offer to their employees; HQ wants some cost-cutting in-place pronto (I'm not making this up, go ask any companies that got bought, including those who got bought by Intel, Ericsson, Nokia, EA, BO/SAP, etc).

99Designs is based in Australia. Flippa, not sure. Yes, Matt is local in Vancouver, but what about the rest of his crews? Matt is also in the web design business, which, coincidentally, what Vancouver is more known of: lots of web-designers. It's hard to convince engineers to mingle with web-designers when the designers are leading the company.

Jostle: http://www.jostleme.com/?p=788 (after 6 years now they're out of Stealth mode?)

Sitemasher: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/sitemasher-sold-and-winding-do... (this was back in June 2010, no more info after that, website is down). I'm not sure how they fit with Salesforce.com if the rumors are true.

BookRiff is based in Quebec.

Grooster is in the same space with Groupon.

Fotki is somewhere out there on the edge of the map (Maple Ridge). Ditto with Club Penguin, like 4 hours outside Vancouver.

CounterPath has been around since 2002, current stock price: $1.35. We have lots of companies like this around Vancouver: been around for a while, stock price flat between tenth of cents to less than 2 dollars.

NowPublic, a drupal based website, lay-off 8 out of 11 after being sold: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/nowpublic-lays-off-staff-and-l...

Nitobi is in the JavaScript widget business (and consulting as well)

CarrotLines: go check their website and judge them yourself.

Apple in Vancouver: unsure what they do (mixed of iTunes Store, a bit of Apple iWork) , plus it's a very small branch, Apple can close it down very quickly and ask the engineers to move to Cupertino

DabbleDB really got lucky. I don't know if they're even profitable back then. They seem to just slowly eating the investor money with no clear business vision.

PlentyOfFish is Marcus baby with lots of ASP.NET hacked together quickly. He keeps all the money (like 10 millions of them?) and hire a Senior Software Engineer after a couple of profitable years (probably to fix the mess). I'm not suggesting that's a bad move, but by no means that make Vancouver a good thriving place for hiring talents when the owners are like that.

I don't mean to sound negative or trying to air the dirty laundry at Vancouver. This is the culture we have right now and it's driving the engineering talents out to the east or south of the border.

I've seen a lot of "social media" companies that were startups 2 years ago and died not too long ago. I've seen shady companies with no clear goal/business models. I've seen consulting companies betting their business in Drupal and Wordpress!. RainCity is going down hard.

I've seen plenty people jumping to the iPhone bandwaggon and suddenly they're a startup with good business models? in Silicon Valley they might, but not in Vancouver. You can't pull that thing up here.