Category: Technology

Montreal's Hammie Hill and his two sons Austin and Hamnett are heading off with another start-up.
The Hills first hit the spotlight during the dot-com boom in the late 1990s. After becoming millionaires when they sold off an Internet service provider business they started up while Austin and Hamnett were in high school, the Hills went on to found Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS) Inc. In its first incarnation, ZKS was going to build privacy software for consumers.
Because the Hills — and Austin, in particular — were media-savvy and media-friendly, ZKS got a lot of ink (including lots penned by yours truly). Austin even testified before the U.S. Congress on privacy issues. The mindshare they created from that press and political coverage, the line of business they were in, and the general market enthusiasm of the day helped ZKS win more than $50-million (U.S.) in venture capital financing — tops at the time for a Canadian software startup.
But consumers didn't seem to be much interested in buying privacy-protection software and, to the Hill's credit, they recognized that fact, and tried to re-tool the company into a business that would provide other businesses — banks, ISPs and the like — with privacy consulting and software tools. They hired an outsider – Tamas Hevizi — as CEO. This re-focusing helped ZKS weather the dot-com bust although not without scads of layoffs.
Now the Hills are doing something else.
What was the enterprise privacy unit of ZKS has been spun out into a new company called Synomos Inc. It will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of ZKS. Hammie is to be chairman; Austin is to be CEO and president. Hamnett, meanwhile, has replaced Hevizi as ZKS' president and CEO.

Canadian information technology companies hired almost no new employees during the industry bust of 2001, according to the first-ever Survey of Information Technology Occupations done by Statistics Canada.

Four of five IT firms in Canada did not hire any new employees in the six months prior to the period the survey was done in late 2002. Just 16 per cent of Canadian companies involved in computer systems design hired a single employee and only 4 per cent hired four or more new employees.

At the peak of the high-tech boom in the first quarter of 2001, there were 650,000 employees in Canada's computer and telecommunications industry. A year later, employment in the same sector had dropped to 586,000 and the unemployment rate among IT workers had jumped from 3.9 per cent to 6.6 per cent.