The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

Octopz CEO Ron McKenzie accepts the Canadian Innovation Leader award at CIX.

Octopz was honored with the Canadian Innovation Leader award at the inaugural Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) conference, which concluded yesterday.

Chosen from among 20 of Canada’s most innovative companies that took park in CIX, Octopz was singled out by attending delegates for the platform’s ability to accelerate decision making and speed-to-market for companies in the advertising, design and media sectors.

Octopz CEO Ron McKenzie, who impressed the audience with a focused and polished presentation, had this to say about the CIX prize:

We are thrilled to win this award, which ideally positions us for the next phase of growth.

Inky, the Octopz mascot, was equally thrilled to show off the CIX award back at the office.

Inky with our latest Octopz award.

Octopz has been selected as one of Top 25 Up and Comers in the Branham300, an annual roundup of Canada’s top-performing tech companies. The Top 25 Up and Comers are all companies established within the past three years, and which show tremendous promise within Canada’s information and communication technology industry. The Branham300, published annually by the Branham Group and Backbone magazine, is the most comprehensive listing of publicly traded and privately held IT companies in Canada.

In creating this year’s list, a number of significant trends were noted and are expected to have an ongoing impact, including resource virtualization to allow cost savings through simulation, and on-demand Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) — hosted software solutions that help reduce software maintenance costs while ensuring the most up-to-date products. In addition, the Internet has seen noteworthy developments related to collaboration, which is becoming increasingly important for both business and social interaction.

Our CEO Ron McKenzie has this to say about this latest acclaim in our news release:

We are delighted with this recognition from the Branham Group and Backbone magazine. Since its inception, the Branham300 has represented a truly insightful view on the Canadian information technology market. To be named to this year’s list of up-and-coming companies is a tremendous vote of confidence in the power and innovation of the Octopz collaboration platform.

The full news release is on our website.

We’re thrilled that CNET’s Webware.com has picked Octopz as one of the 300 finalists for the 2008 edition of the Webware 100 awards. Webware.com’s editors sorted though more than 4600 entries to select the finalists, and now they’re turning the voting over to you to choose the top 100.

For the second year in a row, we’re nominated in the Productivity category, in the company of both industry heavyweights such as Google, Microsof and Yahoo, as well as other startups including Basecamp, Dabble DB and Zoho.

Voting begins today, February 25, and runs until March 31, 2008. The Webware 100 finalists will be announced on April 21, a day before the Web 2.0 Expo opens in San Francisco (we’ll be exhibiting there again this year).

If you haven’t had a chance to try our online collaboration service yet and want to know why it’s a Webware.com favorite, check out the Octopz video tour, sign up for your own free trial account and if you like what you see, please vote for us in the Webware 100 Productivity category. Did I mention that we’re nominated in the Webware 100 Productivity category?