Can'tada - Tracking the stuff you can't use in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Can'tada - Tracking the stuff you can't use in Canada

cantada.ca

143 pointsteamonkey98 comments

One thing that Amazon does way better than Google is handling out-of-country experiences. With Amazon, I have a US-based account, and no matter where I am (I primarily do not live in the US), _everything works_.

With Google, I'll install an app while in the USA. Then when travelling, I'll get a notification that there's an update available. But when I go to update it, I'm told the app doesn't exist. This is actually a security hole: If I have a buggy app, I can't update while outside the US.

If I sign in with my Google account, nothing changes - I'm still given "local" content. This is why I don't bother with Google Music. I'm not interested in having my files disappear to "not available in your country", despite using a USA credit card and address on my account.

Interesting - my experiences are quite different. I can order some stuff from Amazon.com (US) from Canada, but many things aren't available. I can't use Amazon Prime (they won't even let me sign up without a US address), and I can't order books for my Amazon Kindle purchased in Dubai (it needs a US address as well).

With Google, however, nearly everything works. I've been using Google Music for some time now, although it isn't officially available in Canada. Same with Google Voice. All I had to do was sign up for both with a VPN for the first use, after which I can access it anywhere through the respective apps in any country with no hassles.

I'm intrigued, I tried to get Google Voice in Canada but was unsuccessful. Did you get a US phone number or you managed to get a Canadian area code?

All you need is to have a US IP address to get it working. But, that requires a VPN (which is sometimes expensive) and you`ll always have to go through it to access the Voice service. That most likely means no access from an Android phone though I'm not sure.

As for the phone number, it's going to be local to whatever adress he put in in the US, there are no Canadian phone numbers for Voice.

What really makes me angry is that Google purchased GrandCentral to get their voice software, then they completely shut Canada off from service and haven`t opened it in years. It's not like GrandCentral didn't get the CRTC approvals required to give service, so what's holding up Google? I'm really mad at them for how all these services only work in the US. There are legal considerations, but you'd think it wouldn't take 3 years to go through these kinds of hurdles when you're freakin' Google!

I was Grandfathered in from GC and was lucky enough to have my Canadian cell number transfer too. I have a Seattle GV number going to BC.

For 403 (Calgary) I believe GV works great.

i suggest you try dell voice :) they are doing exactly the same thing

Huh. Well, in that case, maybe I'll just go to the source and use Fongo then, since that's what Dell Voice uses? No use having an extra layer on top! http://www.fongo.com/

I had a similar experience while in Japan. Perfect time to use the Google Now currency card, right?

Nope, as soon as I set foot in Japan, the currency card doesn't show up in Google Now. The world is only going to become more and more internationally linked; hopefully Google figures out a better way to manage this than they have so far.

It seems Google has never been able to figure out that people actually travel between countries, which is amazing given how much the Googlers I know move around.

Great example is translations... often various Google properties speak the whatever local language to me, even though I'm logged in. While it has been a while since I've seen GMail in Turkish, this still happens frequently with search.

Two issues here:

1. my Google account knows what language I want to use

2. language !== country. Many countries have multiple official languages, not to mention immigrants etc.

>This is why I don't bother with Google Music. I'm not interested in having my files disappear to "not available in your country"

i think you might be misunderstanding how google music's restrictions work. i have full access to google music without any restrictions just because i signed up while using an American VPN. i've never even accessed google music from outside of Canada, and it all works great.

I understand you cannot purchase music though, correct? It's just a locker service?

Yep, that's the case. You get a "Sorry! Music on Google Play is not available in your country yet." when you try to shop for music.

The rest of Google Music, however, appears to work well once the account is setup by US VPN. Even the Android app works without problems.

This has been the complete opposite for me in Europe. I have to get a new account on the national Amazon website if I want to avoid paying extra fees for out-of-country delivery. That also screws up Recommendations, doesn't transfer my Wishlists and so on. To make the experience even less enjoyable you cannot change the language of the page and have to translate grind the whole page.

Google perpetrated one of the worst offenses I've ever seen in regards to 'regional discrimination'.

Way back when Android was first launching I wanted to order an ADP1. $500 or so and free shipping in the US.

Shipping to anywhere in the world (Russia, China, South Africa, etc) was anywhere from $30-$60. Shipping to Canada was about $280. Half the price of the bloody phone in shipping just to get it across the border, plus duty and tax when I received it.

Needless to say I shipped it to a guy I knew in the states and had it re-shipped for ~$30.

A little looking suggests [1] that the high cost of shipping to Canada was from import fees:

                     Shipping + Import Fees
    Canada            $ 35.75   $ 162.63
    United Kingdom    $ 42.60   $ 85.65
    Hungary           $ 55.72   $ 98.13
    Austria           $ 47.61   $ 96.66
    Germany           $ 42.60   $ 91.71
    France            $ 42.60   $ 95.74
    Spain             $ 47.61   $ 80.32
    Poland            $ 55.72   $ 106.44
    Switzerland       $ 47.61   $ 47.66
    Netherlands       $ 42.59   $ 91.71
    Sweden            $ 47.61   $ 117.07
    Finland           $ 47.61   $ 104.82
    India             $ 47.50   $ 125.21
    Japan             $ 42.06   $ 35.16
    Taiwan            $ 42.06   $ 71.82
    Australia         $ 47.50   $ 55.82
    Singapore         $ 42.06   $ 43.23

No idea why import fees were so high.

[1] http://forum.openhandsetdevelopers.com/android-dev-phone-1-a...

I don't even understand, what are "import fees"? Tariffs?

I keep forgetting that we don't have even remotely free trade, so absurd and economically senseless, sigh.

Here's the interesting thing I find about all this (and one that seems not to have been mentioned):

In Canada, we are more similar to America than anyone else (for the most part). Now, before you fellow hosers scream "Sacrilege", hear me out.

Beyond all of the licensing issues and stupid protectionism rules and laws we have here in Canada, services wishing to be in this country are doing so in probably the most similar country to the US than anywhere in the world. The dollar is almost at par, our language is the same (for most of us), culturally we're incredibly similar, we like the same kinds of entertainment and laugh at most of the same kinds of jokes. We share the worlds longest unprotected border, with billions and billions of goods travelling across in an entirely over-tariffed manner. We have very few barriers to entry into each other's country, causing a hell of a lot of cross-border whatever-you-wanted-to-do. Heck, we even have border cities named the same (Niagara Falls anyone?).

If fact, as a Canadian, if I were to simply just land in any US city and tell everyone I'm a US citizen they'd probably have no reason to disagree with me (at least until I ended a sentence in "Eh" or talked goofy).

In Canada, we're called a branch-plant economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_plant_economy) and I'd hazard to say that many American operating companies could simply provide service with very little technical barriers.

I'm just amazed at how we're so accessible to each other in many ways and yet so many services are off limits and stuff like iPads are released here a month later. Perhaps it keeps us from being flooded by Americanism, who knows.

Having only limited experience in this department, the guess I would hazard (for non-huge companies, at least) is that the costs (marketing, distribution in some cases, infrastructure, customer support, legal, compliance) for operating a business that serves the Canadian market just aren't offset by the market size, which is only about a 10th of the United States.

What I understand from my Canadian friends is that all things internet- and IP-related exist under a drastically different legal framework, so the legal and compliance cost issues are non-trivial. Also, I could see some of these differences having an impact on the actual business models of some companies listed.

One thing to keep in mind is that Canada has different packaging requirements than the US, specifically around the inclusion of French language elements. This often requires a different SKU of a product to be shipped in the two countries, and for different marketing and documentation materials to be prepared.

Apparently one of them is this website. "Error establishing a database connection"

Canada isn't a strategically important market for web services. A strategically important market is one where if global companies ignore it and a local competitor gets traction, it will be hard to unseat them. There are lots of examples: Mail.ru dominates in Russia, Seznam.cz dominates search in Czech despite Google's efforts. Global companies missed the boat by ignoring those markets until it was too late. However, I can't think of examples where a Canadian web service dominates the market in the face of global competition. I suspect most of the services listed here figure they can wait until the market develops, then swoop in and own it.

kijiji.ca has the local classifieds pretty much locked down. Even though they're owned by eBay, the site doesn't work anywhere other than Canada.

May I ask what you mean when you say "until the market develops"?

Some of these services are unavailable due to content licensing concerns (i.e. other parties own the rights to distribute the content within Canada), but absent those types of restrictions I view not offering services to Canadians to be ignoring a significant market (34,000,000 Canadians, 8/10 households connected to the Internet[1]) of people who have similar tastes and preferences to the Americans you already offer services to, relatively speaking.

I'd hope that any company not offering their services to Canadians would have a pretty good explanation as to why they aren't taking advantage of that market.

[1] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/110525/dq110525b-en...

Canada might have the second largest land mass in the world, but its population is just about the size of the California. From a Total Addressable Market, that's quite small. Foreign entities, IMHO, are reserved at the idea of investing large sums of money into a social engine of lesser significance.

Simply put, Canada is too small to be relevant.

So you're saying that California is also too small to be relevant?

In and of itself, California is the 8th largest economy in the world. So I don't think having a population the size of California's is actually a downer. And Canada is one of the largest 10 economies in the world. That's not exactly insignificant.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16600877/ns/business-us_business...

If I operated a business and told the shareholders "Yeah, we've gotta spend some money on lawyers so we're not going to sell to California." I'd be out so fast you'd hear a sonic boom.

Canada is a developed market, with ready access to US internet resources. Russia a decade or so did not have a market that was appealing from a tactical point of view to Western companies (ie. lack of access, lack of customer $, lack of legal framework, etc).

Now Russia is a more relevant market, but the home-grown competitors are already embedded. Canadians may be miffed at Google.ca's lack of caring about Canada, but they still use Google.ca, and will use voice when Google lights the service up.

(I use Russia and Google here as illustrative examples)

> "May I ask what you mean when you say "until the market develops"?"

Without speaking for OP, naturally:

One of the biggest issues with web businesses is public acceptance of the new business model: think Netflix, Spotify, or even AirBnb, all are dramatically different ways of doing things that require a non-trivial amount of social change to gain traction. Changing society and the way people perceive/do things is really hard.

Doubly so if there are licensing issues in the way - a la Spotify or Netflix.

In other words, if you're going to have to go all-in and expend an enormous effort for adoption, you don't want to do it in Canada. It's easier for these services to proliferate first in other countries before importing it to Canada where consumers are already chomping at the bit.

See: Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, all of which built up enormous pent-up demand before they even showed up at Canada's doorstep.

> "I'd hope that any company not offering their services to Canadians would have a pretty good explanation as to why they aren't taking advantage of that market."

There's one very good, almost universal reason: Canadians don't spend as much. In fact, per capita, they can spend half of what the average American consumer spends.

The reasons are numerous and not at all negative - lack of access to stupid credit, general cultural aversion to debt-building, lower credit card usage amongst the entire population, high taxation resulting in comparatively low disposal income. These are all things Canadians in general take pride in, but it also makes the market less interesting to businesses.

Do you have a source on that last point? It's very interesting and I don't think I've heard it before despite living in Canada. I'd love to get a deeper look at this.

I had Pandora in Canada years ago.

Ah so I wasn't dreaming, I was sure I used it for about a week then it was blocked.

>" Canadians don't spend as much"

compared to who?

Canadians are even more in debt than Americans:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finan...

What I mean is: until you've won in your primary market. Until you've won, your effort is better spent on winning your primary market than expanding to new markets.

I can't speak for other cities, but in Vancouver, there is a large 'go local' movement, even within developers. This is purely anecdotal, but within my circle (all of us live in or close to the lower mainland), if given the option, we would probably choose a local entity as opposed to a foreign company. For example, I registered my domain name with and my site is hosted on a local company. I'm sure with larger sites it is different, because they require a more robust web hosting solutions. But for the regular Joe, I'd imagine they'd go for something similar, a 'word of mouth' type of thing.

My wife and I try to purchase Canadian things mostly and support our local economy.

If you've ever been to Vancouver, you'll know the lower mainland has an unusually high number of Starbucks. Yet in the last year and a half, a few closed down, and cafés such as Caffé Artigiano can still compete with them enough to still be in business in the same area. I don't have the exact numbers, but I know they stay competitive (my old housemate works at one).

As a recently-ex-Vancouverite, my impression is that there is a small go-local movement. Even among CityOfVancouver white young union(hippies,hipsters) who see themselves as educated, it's a minority position, and I strongly suspect that it's even less popular among all other demographies.

Unrelated to my opinion about that, I'm curious what local registrar and hosting provider(s) you trust, and how much of a premium you're happy to pay to get your local-ness.

Though why not? They speak english. It's a little smaller population wise than California. Why ignore it if there aren't any language or localization issues. One reason to be sure, already mentioned here, are arcane geographic licenses that lock content down on a per country basis. But for other SaaS web apps, go north!

As a Canadian in the US, I sometimes joke "Forget 6 degrees of separation, Canada only has 3 degrees of separation." I joined FB in 2007, but only because EVERYONE i knew back home was on it and asking me why I wasn't on. And I'm like, really? I hardly know anyone on it here (I was long past undergrad at this point).

Quebec, for instance, needs shipments ( of say electronics ) to be in bilingual packaging at least. I have seen that many new products are not released in Quebec alone but rest of the country gets it.

I think BufferBox in the most recent YC batch is a perfect example of this. They're making an Amazon Locker that works with everything, Amazon or no. They launched in Toronto, and already pretty much own the market with Canada Post addresses, a partnership with Walmart Canada, and integration with the local public transportation.

They're not an example of this because they don't "dominate the market in the face of global competition."

They're from Waterloo not Toronto.

Every time I've talked to them they describe themselves as Torontonians.

In the short term yes, but not in the long run. The original services are more innovative and takes over the market slowly but steadily.

I don't know if it's just bad, they drive competition and accelerate innovations in that space. Facebook wouldn't had to innovate at all if wasn't for all these local competitors.

>However, I can't think of examples where a Canadian web service dominates the market in the face of global competition

lespac > kijiji > craigslist in Quebec.

You can not post on CL and be fine. Kijiji will give you some results, but you pretty much have to post on lespac.

In some communities, the usedeverywhere.com network dominates. Here in Victoria, it's usedvictoria.com and craigslist is secondary. We also use a local bit torrent site.

Plentyoffish, Taleo, Club Penguin. All global leaders in their space from Canada.

With content deals, I feel like Can-Con is to blame.

Can-con is the law that a percentage of content must be Canadian in origin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

I personal hold Can-con responsible for the fact that Call Me Maybe is played so often on Canadian radio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_me_maybe

To be fair, Call Me Maybe is played a lot in the US too.

Can-Con so far hasn't been applied to the internet, AFAIK. While Netflix in Canada has a bunch of Canadian content, it's only because it's relatively cheap and in demand, i.e. due to market forces.

The real reason a lot of these services aren't in Canada (or other smaller markets) is due to regional content licensing.

CanCon doesn't apply to the internet. At all. It is zero percent to blame for any content site being unavailable in Canada.

Canadian rights holders have been notoriously reluctant to sign internet distribution deals. CTV and Global dragged their feet for years on iTunes TV distribution rights for a number of popular shows.

Please. They play 'Call Me Maybe' on the radio every half-hour in the SF Bay Area.

I'd actually love this internationally in general.

Actually, I'd really just like companies who deliver services to realise that people outside of the US may be linked to their site, care, and easily and obviously list the countries they work in. In many cases you have to hunt through their support tickets, and in some cases you aren't told until you get all the way to the payment screen.

Mhmm. It's really annoying when I register for something, activation e-mail, fifty other steps, get to the payment screen... No country dropdown. Only United States.

It's bad enough that I can't use any ing services here, but quit wasting my time and getting my hopes up.

This led me to do some investigating and the fourth season of Arrested Development will not be available in Canada. I don't use Netflix but I pay for an account because I think it's the future of content delivery and I want to vote with my dollars. As of five seconds ago I'm no longer a customer.

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oLV7ond...

Looks like Stripe is missing.

Stripe is in beta in Canada now.

Select beta testers only? Stripe would be pretty cool to have right now (super stealth double pivot mode project on the go).

I got an invitation to beta test around two days after signing up on https://stripe.com/global. This was on August 8, YMMV of course.

I signed up a long time ago when there wasn't a list for Canadians to sign up for. Maybe I need to use a different email than Gmail. Who knows.

How has the experience been?

I have not used it yet. (I hope there isn't a finite, small amount of spaces and I'm not hogging... but I signed up after this was mentioned on HN last time and got a spot pretty soon so I'm guessing it's not that limited.)

huh. I'll submit again in case something went wrong. Does anyone know of Stripe alternatives for the international market?

Braintree will very soon be in Canada. I believe they're running beta as well.

We actually just launched in Canada and today. https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international

We killed the hell out of this site. I'm getting their Index of / page now.

Hi all, this is my site. Not sure why it went down, still working on that. Its hosted on Linode which has been remarkably stable even with traffic spikes (I actually posted this as a Show HN about a year and a half ago and it was on the top of HN for over a day -- which was completely unexpected).

FYI, I haven't updated the site in a while (other than converting it to Wordpress) -- Believe it or not, I live in the states now :) I'd love to get some guest editors on it; if anyone is interested please contact me.

I'm not sure what the current state of the WordPress world is, but I know that without caching you were bound to crumble under any kind of traffic spike not very long ago.

Perhaps that's a good first step (I'm sorry I don't know which of the caching plugins is best, WP SuperCache used to be the one to use 'back in the day')

Yeah; I converted the site to wordpress recently and just forgot to add caching. I've add W3 Total cache and things appear to be working better.

I know it is a lot to ask but I would love to do the same for Israel and I'd like to steal some of your design. Would you mind? I'd encourage you to put the code on github, and I'll happily contribute an upvote button that only allows Canadians / Israelis (by geoip) to vote.

Please feel free (maybe just give me some attribution with a link back to cantada.ca). Its just a basic Wordpress installation using the Blaskan theme, so I don't think its necessary to put it on Github.

It bugs me that the hyperlinks are black & w/o underline. I was only able to figure out they were links by thinking for a minute and deciding that they must be, because what else could they be?

But they sure do look like body text.

_________

edit: Everything is fantastic otherwise. Sorry to be so negative w/o posting any of my initial reaction(which was completely positive)

It's not just Canada ... it's most of the world. I live in Thailand, and can't use most of these services. Only saving factor is that I'm American, and have a US bank and address, so I can use some US services that way (iTunes, Amazon Payments, etc.)

Google Voice lost me the very first time I tried to make a VOIP call from Brazil and couldn't figure out how to make it work.

Switched back to Skype (which worked trivially in Brazil) - never looked back.

The irony is that whatever limitation Google had with Brazil, might have been fixed in the last few years, but because of that one international hiccup, and never once having any problem with skype in any country I travel to, they basically lost me forever. (Even though last time I was using it, Google Voice was free, and skype charges me by the minute)

I won't lie - when I moved to the US for a job offer out of college part of me was excited that I'd finally be able to order from amazon.com.

Regarding Kickstarter, Sauropod Studio just successfully raised $702,000 for Castle Story despite being based in Montreal. It probably requires some significant extra work, but it's certainly possible.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/902505202/castle-story

If you can't provide proof of US citizenship there's no way you can be approved for Amazon Payments and launch a Kickstarter project. The only way to do so is to find someone in US willing to participate in your project. I assume for a fee.

If these products are not available in Canada, sounds like a great opportunity to bring something similar to that market.

Or brand a US-based proxy server as a way to access geoblocked stuff :-) $5/month should be enough to proxy a chunk of multimedia through US-based servers, and I know people who would pay it.

I'm only semi-joking. I can't convince myself that it would be ethical to do this, but I'd like to see it happen as a way to get people talking about geoblocking as something that incurs a cost to Canadians.

http://unblock-us.com/

alternatively, http://playmo.tv/

Aren't all of these companies based in the United States? I mean yeah it sucks Canada can't use some of these applications, but why doesn't Canada start their own similar services to run in their country?

Because the Internet is supposed to 'flatten' the world, and it does in basically all cases except where money or media licences are involved. Which is annoying, because while I can happily read the New York Times while not living in New York I can't work with many of the internet businesses that reside there.

This is pretty cool.

I'll be going back home (Canada) from the States and have seen a lot of things available in this country that aren't in Canada (yet! hopefully!).

I wonder if some can be done through the FOSS community in Canada.

I'm moving to Toronto this month, and am planning on compiling a list of things that are different. Here's hoping that this site gets over their DDOS and comes back on line.

Is not this is counter intuitive? Companies will look at this list and say oh so many other companies are not supporting Canada, why should be spend time on supporting Canada.

Love the idea, could be interesting to bitch about this kind of stuff in a more organized way for a few years and see what comes of it. Wish the site was up.

I misread your name as "Can, TADA!" :)

Maybe it can be a website that tracks things you can do in Canada! (maybe even focusing on things that you can't do elsewhere)

Interesting how this website that complaints about myopia on the part of US vendors is itself myopic to the rest of the world.

The domain doesn't really suit other countries as well ;) But point very well taken; I've gotten many suggestions for services unavailable in other countries -- I'd encourage others to start a similar web site for their own country or perhaps we can have a single international archive.

I do not know if I am misunderstanding the OP, but I think they possibly meant non-US services not available in Canada, not services not available in other countries.

The latter would not make much sense, or at least would not be expected, given the name of your site...

We really need a Can'tchina... There are tons of stuff one cannot use in China for various reason, e.g. Google+, Dropbox...

This site isn't coming up for me, I'm in the U.S.

Strange form of karmic justice I suppose.

Looks like it's been accidentally ddos'd.

looks like it's a wordpress site without caching enabled.

Hey, they get free health care, we get a better Internet. I think it's a fair trade.

I can't get a google cache but http://cantada.ca.nyud.net/ works :)

Add turntable.fm!

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