Good afternoon. My name is Paul Temple and I'm the senior vice-president of regulatory and strategic affairs at Pelmorex Media Inc.
When I was first asked to appear here, it was more along the lines of a case study, so I'm going to just basically tell you our story.
Pelmorex is a multiplatform, multimedia leader in weather and weather-related products, best known to Canadians through our Weather Network and MétéoMédia brands. We're a privately owned Canadian company with offices and broadcast facilities in Montreal and Oakville. We currently employ just under 500 employees in Canada.
In addition to a creative and talented on-air broadcasting team, Pelmorex employs a variety of skilled professionals, including meteorologists, software developers, and geographic information systems and location-based specialists. All these jobs are focused on serving Canadians.
Within the last year we have expanded domestically and internationally. In Canada, we launched the Travelers Network, an Internet-based service dedicated to helping users get from point A to point B quickly and efficiently. Internationally, we purchased El Tiempo, Spain's leading multi-platform weather-related information service. In the U.S. we purchased Beat the Traffic, a service which provides local traffic and commuter information.
While our roots have been in the conventional medium of analog television, Pelmorex was very quick to adopt digital technology and our company's growth in the past few years reflects that.
In 1995, during the very early days of the Internet, we launched our websites, theweathernetwork.com and meteomedia.com, one of the first few Canadian companies to do so. Within 10 years, we had launched additional websites specifically designed to be accessed by mobile devices as well as desktop applications to allow for instant access to weather information on PCs and Apple computers.
We were one of the first to launch a smart phone application specifically for BlackBerry in 2006. After that a rapid succession of applications was developed and launched for iPhone, Android, and Microsoft smart phones. In the space of seven years, we have designed and launched over 40 different smart phone and tablet applications and upgrades.
Today we're working on multiple applications designed for Internet-connected TVs. Almost all of this work is done internally within Pelmorex. Every one of our products was designed to provide Canadian consumers our services in their choice of English or French.
In 2010, we built and launched the national alert aggregation and dissemination system, which acts as Canada's backbone system to collect and distribute public safety and threat to life messages from Environment Canada as well as provincial and territorial emergency management officials. In the past 10 months, we have received, authenticated, and distributed Canada-wide almost 31,000 public safety messages.
Because we were an early adapter and embraced digital technology, today we are a leader in Canada in expanding beyond our borders. We will serve 2.4 billion webpages to Canadians this year.
In 2012, our popular iPhone and iPad weather applications were consistently ranked among the top three applications, beating companies like Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Shazam, and Pinterest.
In the digital world there are no borders. Today, foreign-based weather companies in Atlanta or Stockholm can just as easily serve Canadians from their websites, smart phones, and tablets. For this reason, we need to be the best at what we do, attract skilled employees, and invest to take advantage of digital technology.
An example might help. On our website, we were able to leverage our meteorological and forecasting models, geographical information systems, and web development skills to generate and provide weather forecasts for over 20,000 Canadian communities, with an additional 50,000 locations outside of Canada, a tenfold increase from where we were 10 years ago. Then we went one step further and today we provide Canadians with customized weather forecasts, on demand, for any postal code in Canada. We plan to take these same skills to our new acquisitions in Spain and the United States.
Apart from the obvious challenge of competing with every other weather information company in the world, we face the ongoing challenges of heavy demands for continual re-investment in technology. We need to be on every platform with the latest and greatest features.
To do that, we also need to attract skilled professionals: meteorologists, web and application developers, IT and GIS specialists. Strengthening government programs, such as the scientific research and experimental development tax incentive, as well as targeted programs to assist small and medium-sized companies to attract skilled workers would be beneficial.
I hope these comments are helpful, and I'm happy to answer your questions.