Marty Anstey - Business Ventures

What can I say, invention and innovation runs in my blood. On almost a daily basis, I come up with new business ideas and I take note of each and every one of them. To date I have amassed a collection of notes on these different ideas sorted by importance, and time permitting, I hope to complete all of them in the years to come.

The following are my currently completed (or nearly so) ventures, however, rest assured that there are many more projects which will be added to this list when their fundamentals have been completed.

	Added June, 2003 The Vancouver WeatherPage was the first major project I undertook, and still continues strong to this day. Designed to provide accurate and near-realtime weather conditions and forecasting to the Vancouver BC area, the Vancouver WeatherPage is visited each day by thousands of loyal visitors, businesses and visitors to Canada. In 1998, my colleague Darren Howard joined me on this project, and we began the process of developing a nation-wide alternative to government instated weather programmes and facilities. While much of this process is under development, the Vancouver WeatherPage is growing by leaps and bounds, attracting visitors from around the world and lending a helping hand to the local tourist trade.
	Added June, 2003 iaNett.com is a search engine content provider which operates as a business-to-business web data aggregator and distributor. Founded in 1999 by myself and my cousin Shone, we have devoted several years in the development of proprietary spidering and searching software which distinguishes iaNett as a leader among the search engine technology contenders. iaNett's primary focus is making searchable web data available to websites to integrate for their own purposes; in some cases to power their own search engine, and in others the data is used for marketing or research purposes. iaNett's position and strategy is closely related to the business of Fast Search and Transfer and Inktomi Corporation. iaNett traded on the TSX under the symbol INE for several years until it's recent sale to the Data Fortress Group (DFG). You can read more about the history of iaNett and it's progress over the past few years here.
	Added December, 2003 After iaNett, I refused to give up on my quest to build the ultimate search engine and I ultimately began this site as a demonstration of the search engine's capabilities. It began as a front for the search engine but is expanding rapidly to include a subscription based site searching service. (update) As of January 2005, I have managed to complete much of the WeatherCity project (see below) which has freed up my spare time substantially. With this influx of free time for development, I have begun the move into the next phase of this project. Currently several servers are being built to replace the slower and less capable machines currently powering the demonstration site, and new software (including the crawler and related components) are being substantially rewritten. Although I expect that the latest revisions to this project will take a great deal of time to fully complete, a new working replacement for the prototype website currently at this domain should be in place within a few months. Be sure to follow the developments in my journal!
	Added January 8th, 2005 I have been working on WeatherCity for several years with my friend Darren of Vancouver WeatherPage lore. After building the Vancouver WeatherPage in 1997, we wanted to expand to a global weather service. We began working on weather forecasting software in our spare time and after several years of effort we are pleased to finally offer the service (although currently in beta form) to the general public. We are offering this service in order to receive feedback so that we can improve the site and in time achieve our goals of offering this service to most cities worldwide.
	Added January 24th, 2006 AdvisorCentre is a search engine for financial advisors and the brainchild of my good friend Dan Schwartz. We teamed up in October 2005 to tackle this project and after many hours of hard work we completed the site in January 2006. Update (2010): This site has been shut down, and it appears that someone else took over the domain and put up a stolen copy of the site's original content and tons of ads.
	Added June 17, 2008 After getting tired of long URLs getting munged by my email client, I built this handy tool to make really long URLs really short. It's a free service, and URLs never expire!