EDMONTON – Pennsylvania blogger Sally Witt knows her social media. And when asked about Empire Avenue, the Edmonton social media startup, she starts to gush.
“I love it. I’m on it many times a day,” she said. “It’s something that really enhances my online relationships, and I really enjoy it.”
Evidently, a significant chunk of the online world feels the same way. The influential tech blog Mashable announced nominees for the 2011 Mashable Awards earlier in the week, and Empire Avenue garnered one of seven nominations in the “best up-and-coming social media service” category.
“We’ve got users from 150 countries at this point, and they all read Mashable,” said Empire CEO Duleepa Wijayawardhana. “It would be one fantastic thing to happen to us if we could win.”
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Empire Avenue operates a social stock exchange. Users purchase “shares” in each other with a fictional currency called “Eaves.” Demand for these shares, combined with a measure of a user’s activity across other social media platforms like Twitter, create a social stock price for individuals.
Wijayawardhana says the idea for the company owes something to an anti-capitalist source.
“There’s a passage in Das Kapital from Karl Marx, I kid you not, which talks about societies and economies,” he said. “If you produce anything that is seen by another person as being of value – so, for example, you produce a Tweet and I see it as being of value – there is an inherent monetary value. It is a tradable good.”
Empire Avenue, he says, allows people to swap a previously untradeable good: their social media activity.
Wijayawardhana co-founded Empire Avenue with fellow Newfoundland natives Michael Mannion and Niall Brown in 2009. The company takes its name from a street in St. John’s, but Wijayawardhana takes pride in operating out of Edmonton.
“We love the technology people in Edmonton. They’ve been fantastic to us,” he said. “We couldn’t have picked a better city to have launched in, because the people in Edmonton are generally very connected on social media.”
Just getting nominated for the Mashable Awards is something of an achievement. Online voting determines both nominees and eventual winners, and getting on the list requires considerable clout. Mashable won’t divulge hard numbers, but product manager Tamar Weinberg says the competition draws millions of votes each year.
Wijayawardhana credits Empire Avenue’s users for the nomination. “We have a fantastically strong community who are super, super active on Twitter and on Facebook,” he said. “They spread the word and they managed to get us nominated.”
Vancouver-based Summify also won a nomination in the same category as Empire. XMG Studio, a game developer in Toronto, was nominated in the “best mobile game” category for their “Cows vs. Aliens” game for iPhones and Androids.
Mashable readers can vote once a day in each category of the awards. Voting closes on Dec. 16 and the winner will be announced Dec. 19.
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