A small Maritime tech company has scored an unexpected success by creating a hugely popular computer application that gives fans near-constant updates of medal standings at the Olympics.
Brandon Kolybaba, co-founder of the Halifax company Norex, said the firm never planned for its creation to spread as far and wide as it did. It was developed essentially for personal use, to meet a need company staff found when they went looking for just such an application.
It was the day after the opening ceremonies, and several Norex staff members were chatting about the Olympics, Mr. Kolybaba remembered yesterday. Someone mentioned that it would be good to download to their Macs a “dashboard widget,” an application that would update regularly on the screen and show how countries were faring through the competition.
But they found nothing that suited their purposes and decided to create one. After a day and a half of work and testing it was rolled out. Within days, the application was being featured on the apple.com site, and by last Friday it was the most popular of the widgets available there.
The widget has sat in the top slot at the Apple site since and has been downloaded by approximately a quarter-million Mac users. With regular updates while those computers are on, the widgets are now being refreshed nearly six million times a day.
“I don't think anybody here expected we'd get this kind of response,” Mr. Kolybaba said. “When it got picked up by Apple, we were surprised. When it went to No. 1 we were really surprised.”
The application is free and hasn't brought any direct revenue to the company. But its logo is on it and it has seen a huge increase in traffic to its website. The small marketing and Web design company, which has only a dozen staff in its Halifax office, has also been revelling in the free publicity.
“Really, it's the exposure we're getting,” Mr. Kolybaba said. “We're getting a lot of interest in the last four days from international companies that might not already know about us.”
Maggie Fox, the CEO of Social Media Group, a consulting firm that helps companies develop Web strategies, noted that Norex's presence atop the list of widgets at the Apple site acts as a testament to the company's bona fides.
“If I was looking for someone to make a widget, that is probably the first place I'd go,” she said yesterday. “If you're in the widget business, having built a widget that is very successful is the best thing you can have done.”
In separate interviews, Ms. Fox and Carmi Levy, vice-president of AR Communications, agreed that this is the sort of success that is probably making the International Olympic Committee, not to mention traditional media outlets, gnash its teeth.
“There was a need,” Ms. Fox said. “If you create something that fits a need it'll take off.”
Mr. Levy noted that the tools needed to create the sort of online functions often described by the term Web 2.0 are becoming ever more sophisticated and available to small players such as Norex. And the best of them will be able to cut through the chatter.
“It's the kind of Cinderella story we're seeing with increasing frequency on the Internet,” said Mr. Levy, whose firm specializes in strategic communications.
“Once something goes viral, once it attracts enough attention that it becomes a force to be reckoned with, there's no telling how far it will go,” he went on. “Once the widget attracts millions of viewers, it has inherent value.”
