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He jokes that taking on an industry titan still causes him to lose sleep, but he seems confident the company can wrestle some market share from Amazon with its approach. “We look at things like what Netflix did to Blockbuster. It’s possible, it’s happened in the past. There’s room for both Coke and Pepsi. We operate in a market where one business has 95% of the market share and that is not to the benefit of the customer.”

Also looking to cash in on the prevalence of both social media and digital commerce is Toronto-based startup Uniiverse Collaborative Lifestyle Inc., an online marketplace launched at the beginning of February.

Its website, which is part of the growing “sharing economy,” aims to muscle in on territory typically dominated by Craigslist Inc. and eBay Inc. subsidiary Kijiji by allowing users to connect on the Internet to make offline plans to share or sell their belongings, time, expertise or space.

The site has no ads but charges buyers a small fee at the time of booking.

While the sharing economy landscape is becoming crowded, just a few months in, Uniiverse co-founder Craig Follett says his company has 6,000 users in 300 cities who have posted 1,500 offline activities and services.

“Although Uniiverse is in a competitive space, we remain the most comprehensive platform out there for offline sharing. As a young company, we are more nimble and able to disrupt existing large players.”

Along the same lines and also in February, Research in Motion Ltd. employee and Kitchener, Ont., resident Asim Siddiqui launched WizeNation, a website he describes as “classifieds gone social.” He was inspired to create it after moving to the area in 2008 and realizing that although he had plenty of friends on Facebook, he knew no one in Kitchener. “What are these social networking sites good for if you can’t connect with your neighbours?” he says of the dominant social media sites.

Ultimately, WizeNation, which has about 500 users in the Kitchener area so far, is intended to compete with online classifieds by bringing a hyper-local, social element to the endeavour, he says.

For startups taking on established industry leaders, that differentiation from the dominant model could be all the difference.