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The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) announced the winners of the second annual .CA Impact Awards at the mesh conference in Toronto yesterday. The .CA Impact Awards celebrate the people and organizations in four categories that use their .CA website to make a difference.

“I was very impressed with the calibre of entries we received for the Impact Awards,” says Byron Holland, President and CEO of CIRA. “The four .CA Impact Awards winners are truly inspirational – they represent the very pinnacle of Canadian ingenuity and creativity with using .CA and the Internet to achieve their goals.”

This year, the winners include an initiative whose goal is to help Canadians experience the joys of eating together, an animation school, an innovative furniture seller that incorporate a charity into their daily work, and the developers of a mobile application that helps visually impaired people navigate their city.  The winners of the 2012 .CA Impact Awards are:

• Public Sector and Not-for-Profit: Better Together
• eLearning: Vancouver Animation School (vanas.ca)
• Small Business: Condobox (www.condobox.ca)
• Applications: In Situ Audio Services

Each winner will receive $5,000 as well as national recognition. A panel of judges reviewed more than 800 submissions from across Canada. Judges included:

• Iris Almeida-Côté, INNOVA CONNECT.
• David Popovich, SMART Technologies.
• Peter Evans, Riverdale Partners.
• Valerie Fox , the Digital Media Zone at Ryerson.

Additionally, one of the winners will be selected by the attendees at the mesh conference as the ‘mesh Peoples’ Choice’ winner.

The .CA Impact Awards are part of CIRA’s ongoing commitment to invest in Canada’s Internet community and are designed to recognize youth, educators, not-for-profit organizations, small businesses, technology developers and web designers.