Nothing says Happy Holidays like a good, old-fashioned year-in-review list.


And so, as 2012 draws to a close, we thought we should mark another phenomenal year for Waterloo Region’s tech community with a list of our own.

We’ll call it the Tech Top 15, in honour of the 15th birthday Communitech celebrated this year.

After much highly unscientific deliberation, here’s what we came up with:

15. Coreworx, a Kitchener-based enterprise software firm that helps companies execute major capital projects, is chosen by Sinopec, Asia’s largest oil refiner, for its $9-billion joint venture with the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation in China’s Guangdong province.

14. The team behind Pair, the mobile app for couples, raises $4.2 million from a star-studded slate of Silicon Valley investors. The Pair team formed at the University of Waterloo, attended Y Combinator’s accelerator program in California and returned to the Communitech Hub to continue developing the app after their big raise.

13. Magnet Forensics (formerly JADSoftware), based at the Accelerator Centre, lands on the PROFIT HOT 50 List and attracts significant media attention for its evidence-finding technology, in use by law enforcement agencies around the world. The company, led by former Waterloo Region police officer Jad Saliba and ex-RIM executive Adam Belsher, exemplifies the regenerative power of the local ecosystem.

12. Techtoberfest makes its debut as Communitech’s annual festival celebrating the region’s startup community. Guests include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who hosted a beer-and-pizza session and applauded the Communitech Hub’s ecosystem approach to building tech companies.

11. Carol Leaman, a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Axonify, wins Fortune’s annual Brainstorm Tech Startup Idol pitch-off in Aspen, Colo. The Waterloo-based company aims to revolutionize employee training by making it more engaging, thereby reducing workplace accidents and saving companies millions.

10. Christie Digital launches Hyphen, a rapid prototyping (3-D printing) facility, at its Kitchener headquarters. Hyphen allows clients to quickly build sample parts and fully test them before committing to full production.

9. Rebellion Media debuts with a fast-growing suite of digital media properties and an aggressive plan to become Waterloo Region’s next billion-dollar company. Helmed by serial entrepreneur Ted Hastings, Rebellion launched with a party in Kitchener featuring an array of celebs from the reality TV and pro-wrestling worlds, including Rowdy Roddy Piper.

8. Online media mogul Arianna Huffington delivers a keynote address at Communitech’s annual Tech Leadership Conference during which she holds aloft the four BlackBerry smartphones she uses to organize her life.

7. Amid a year of challenge and transition, Research In Motion ramps up for renewal by seeding its developer community with Dev Alpha devices running its BlackBerry 10 operating system, and then demonstrating the all-new platform to positive reviews.

6. Just a year and a half after opening its initial 30,000-square-foot facility in Kitchener’s former Lang Tannery, the Communitech Hub unveils an additional 14,000 square feet and promptly fills it with promising new companies. Ontario’s Premier opens the expanded space and declares Waterloo Region “Canada’s most important tech cluster.”

5. Communitech launches HYPERDRIVE, its $30-million-plus startup accelerator, and successfully puts its first cohort of seven early-stage tech companies through a three-month sprint leading to a demo day at Techtoberfest.

4. Pebble, a company with roots as a UW VeloCity startup called Allerta, set a new record on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter by raising nearly $10.3 million to fund development of its iPhone-and-Android compatible wristwatch, more than 100 times the $100,000 it had set out to raise.

3. Just two years after developing BufferBox as a fourth-year design project at the University of Waterloo, the parcel-delivery startup’s founders inked a deal to join Google. The acquisition, which will see BufferBox continue building under the banner of Google’s Kitchener-based engineering operation, is a shining example of the Communitech ecosystem model in action.

2. Desire2Learn, the eLearning company already on a rocket ride of rapid growth, turns on the boosters by raising $80 million in venture funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) Inc. and OMERS Ventures. The raise is the largest Series A round for a Canadian software company and the first outside investment for D2L, which bootstrapped for 13 years after John Baker founded it as a University of Waterloo student.

1. For the first time, Waterloo Region lands on the Startup Genome/Telefónica Digital list of the world’s top 20 startup ecosystems, debuting at 16th position, affirming our status as one of the best places on the planet to start a tech company.

It wasn’t easy pulling 15 highlights from a year filled with them. For those hungry for more, we offer a few bonus items:

- Communitech’s Venture Services Group welcomes its 1,000th startup client.

- Well.ca, a Guelph-based e-commerce firm with a development office in Kitchener, launches North America’s first virtual store in downtown Toronto’s underground PATH shopping concourse.

- CEO Kurtis McBride of Miovision, an early Accelerator Centre graduate, offers $3,000 to anyone in the community who refers a successful candidate to fill openings for software development positions at the fast-growing traffic management company.

- After taking five months to serve up one million plays on its video platform, Vidyard surpasses one million plays per day, and CEO Michael Litt suggests it’s only a matter of time before plays reach one million per minute. The news coincided with the company moving its operations out of the Communitech Hub and into a house, painted in Vidyard green, on nearby Oak Street.

- Maluuba, an Android-based answer to the Apple iPhone’s Siri personal assistant, steals the show at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. The company, founded in 2010 as a University of Waterloo project, has more than 20 employees based in the Tannery, upstairs from the Communitech Hub, where it was formerly a tenant.

- Marking 20 years since its launch as a University of Waterloo search engine project, OpenText expands its headquarters with the opening of its Innovation Centre. Revenue tops $1 billion annually at OpenText, Canada’s largest software company.

- MappedIn, an indoor-wayfinding startup based in the VeloCity Garage, disarmed and impressed the typically tough panel on CBC’s Dragons’ Den, and had all the Dragons fighting over a chance to invest. Things changed after the cameras stopped rolling, but the appearance gave MappedIn a huge publicity boost.

We can't wait to see what lands on this list a year from now. Until then, happy holidays!