Cold North Wind agreement with Globe to kick-start company growth

The venerable The Globe and Mail will soon announce a significant deal to digitize its holdings for online consumption, Canadian NEW MEDIA has learned from a reliable source. The national newspaper will soon join the Toronto Star and New York Post in using the services of Cold North Wind Inc. to put its archives online, though Cold North Wind would not divulge details or confirm or deny the contract.The deal would mark another milestone in Cold North Wind's impressive string of contracts over the past year, and hopefully bolster two recent marketing agreements to sell the small Ottawa-based company's services worldwide.Cold North Wind, which came to international attention last March with its contract to electronically archive 200 years of New York Post issues (CNM, March 8/01), has put together a solid run of contract wins over the past year including with the Star (an equity partner) and the U.S.-based National Newspaper Association and its 500 million pages. The company has also struck a deal with microCreditCard Inc. to allow Cold North Wind's users to pay for archives over the Internet, and marketing deals both in Mexico and one recently announced with Atlantic Syndication, Florida. The Atlantic Syndication deal, with undisclosed terms, will see Atlantic promote Cold North Wind's archives worldwide, especially in Asia and Europe.Bob Huggins, Cold North Wind's CEO, explains that the company needs to exploit markets in Asia and Europe, but can't do so with its own resources. "If you look at the size of the company, we're 14 full-time people and the purpose of signing with Atlantic Syndication was really to get at the markets where we feel we're not represented at all…They have salespeople on the road that are all over and are well-known to papers, so it's a no-brainer for us to increase are coverage and get the message out there."Huggins also reveals that the company will soon sign a "very large" deal with the Autonomous University of Mexico, which represents all newspapers ever published in that country, along with another completed agreement with a newspaper in Australia.Despite the high-profile deals of the last year, a contract with The Globe and Mail would likely be welcome news for the company, which, Huggins concedes, was hit hard by last September's terrorist attacks in the U.S. While the business slowed dramatically last fall, he predicts a strong year ahead, with a recovery beginning late in the second quarter. In fact, he says, the company is looking forward to expanding its capacity for digitizing pages."We're completely full capacity," he tells Canadian NEW MEDIA. "We're going mental and trying to increase our capacity, in fact, to go from a million (pages) a month that we do now to two, three, four million a month. I can't find enough operators to keep the machines running 24/7, so we're running shifts too." He adds that he expects Cold North Wind to be "significantly profitable" by the end of this fiscal year.

Cold North Wind agreement with Globe to kick-start company growth

News | 02/22/2002 5:00 am EST

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