The Madonna mannequin is the first sign that Canada Connect is not your typical company.
Wait. What’s that coming out of her mouth?
“That’s a snake. It’s attached to a motor,” explains Jonathan Levine, Canada Connect’s founder and president, during a photo shoot in his cluttered work station.
“It’s a long story. It was just something to turn on the porch lights. It kind of got away from us.”
Levine and Canada Connect co-owner Herb Peyerl fool around with Madonna in their spare time. Which they don’t have much of these days.
The private company, which Levine founded out of his home in 1994, will re-locate next month to a new 8,000-sq.-ft. office at 238 11th St. S.E.
There’ll be much more space for the 20 employees, disabled pinball machines, a slurpee machine, fridge, and ancient computers and electronic gadgets jammed into, uh, uniquely decorated offices on two floors of a building at 8th Avenue and 13th Street S.W.
Meanwhile, Levine is busy fine-tuning new hardware, known as the PC Weasel, which is manufactured and sold through an affiliate company known as Middle Digital. (If all goes according to plan, Middle Digital will go public some time next year.)
The Weasel enables systems managers to repair and complete routine maintenance on servers in remote locations. No specific software is required.
Levine won’t divulge revenue figures, but says approximately 1,000 units are being sold per month.
“We’re selling these things all over the world,” says Levine, who is negotiating a distribution deal with a Japanese company.
Customers include the British Broadcasting Corporation, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, WebTV, the University of Alberta, Sun Microsystems and a variety of network hosting organizations ranging from universities to government think-tanks.
“It’s a real dumb-ass way to solve a problem . . . but it works,” says Levine. Without getting too technical, the PC Weasel works with most personal computer-based servers.
The PC Weasel, which is small enough to hold in your hand, fits into a server’s video board slot and impersonates a keyboard and monitor. “The video board and the keyboard don’t even know what’s happening,” reveals Levine, 40.
That means a systems manager in Calgary can sit at his computer terminal (or laptop) and re-boot a server on the other side of the globe. Once, Peyerl reconfigured a server in Stockholm while riding in a car up Highway 2 to Edmonton.
“You can have complete remote control of any platform,” says Levine.
Currently, most PC-based servers have a keyboard and screen connected beside them. When the server breaks down, a systems manager usually has to go to the server location — even if that means flying thousands of miles — to peck away at the keyboard and nurse the faulty equipment back to health.
Systems managers can work remotely on expensive, brand-name “server-class” machinery, says Levine, but the technology is specific to that equipment whereas the PC Weasel is compatible with hundreds of different kinds of computers. “And that’s the whole trick,” says Levine.
But Canada Connect is more than just a one-trick operation. The company, in which Levine initially invested $100,000, bills itself as a hardware designer and network services provider.
Canada Connect does the technical work for Critical Mass, an award-winning Calgary Web site design company that creates sites for multi-national corporations and other big-name clients.
Canada Connect’s e-mail to fax system allows potential Mercedes Benz car buyers to book test-drives anywhere in North America via the internet. As part of its relationship with Critical Mass, Canada Connect also serves Denny’s Restaurants, European Football, Smirnoff’s Vodka and cosmetics giant Procter and Gamble — among others.
Canada Connect also offers network design and security, construction and connectivity, e-commerce and sells e-mail accounts under the brand name Canuck.com, but Levine prefers not to call it an Internet service provider.
If the technical jargon doesn’t appeal to you, Canada Connect’s people will. Levine, 40, sports a pony-tail and scruffy beard and goes to work in a T-shirt and jeans. The Pincher Creek native spent most of the past decade working for startup companies in California’s Silicon Valley and Calgary after dropping out of the University of Calgary’s engineering school because he found classes too boring. A former CJSW deejay, Levine says he’s turned down jobs that pay four times as much as he’s earning because he likes running his own show.
Peyerl, 33, dropped out of the University of Calgary after a counsellor advised him he didn’t have the aptitude required for a computer science degree, thanks to poor math grades. But he still managed to find work as a “network triage” specialist with the likes of the BBC, Nortel and Novatel before joining forces with Levine in 1994.
“I want to be in control of my own destiny . . . more in control of my own life,” says Peyerl, whose office features an overhanging parachute.
General manager Anne Gover had almost nothing in common with Levine and Peyerl when she joined Canada Connect two-and-a -half years ago. The native of Charlotte, N.C., holds a master’s degree in education and psychological consulting from Harvard.
Gover says she didn’t even know what the Internet was until she returned to Canada from Malaysia, where her husband was employed in the oil industry. “I approach this business from a completely different angle,” she says.
Gover has lived in such diverse cities as Paris, Boston and Kuala Lumpur, but she now calls an acreage in Pincher Creek home. She adds to Canada Connect’s futuristic image by telecommuting two days per week while venturing to Calgary the other three days.
Gover is a big believer in using the Internet to develop and strengthen relationships. As a result, Canada Connect participates in many charitable projects.
It donates old computers to the Free Hardware Foundation and offers services to several not-for-profit and cultural groups — including Afrikadey, the Alberta Association of Disabled Skiers, the Calgary Folk Festival and the Society Housing AIDS-restricted Persons.
“The world can be a smaller place,” says Gover. “The more people know about each other, the better.”
Patrick Curti, 32, admits he didn’t know much about computers before signing on as Canada Connect’s senior sales executive. “To me, it’s a school,” says Curti. “I’m learning a lot.”
Born and raised in Quebec’s picturesque Saguenay region, Curti studied public relations at Concordia University in Montreal. The former Calgary small business owner has also served as executive-director of a Calgary-based francophone lawyers’ association.
All this just goes to prove . . .
“We don’t take the traditional road that everybody else does,” says Peyerl.
The Madonna mannequin was a dead giveaway.
