By: Staff Reports Cold North Wind Inc. Joins MemorialsOnline.com
MemorialsOnline.com and Cold North Wind have partnered in a
business deal that involves an exchange of content for equity.
Based in St. John's, Newfoundland, MemorialsOnline will get
access to death, birth, and wedding announcements from North
American newspapers that are being digitized by Cold North Wind.
In return, Cold North Wind gets a 15% equity position in
MemorialsOnline.com.
Ottawa-based Cold North Wind specializes in converting microfilm
into digital, Web-served content. The company also offers to host
newspapers' digitized microfilm collections in one central
location and manage any affiliated e-commerce.
As for resale rights to newspaper content, Bob Huggins, CEO of
Cold North Wind said, "The papers that we concentrate on are in
the main, public domain defunct papers or collections that we
have either purchased outright or have negotiated rights."
MemorialsOnline is the first partner in Cold North Wind's "Paper
of Record" partnership program. "Through our partnership program
we are attempting to encourage other portals to take advantage of
what will be the largest Internet accessible database of
newspapers presented in their original published form," Huggins
said.
From this content, MemorialsOnline will harvest relevant data for
use on its portals such as ObitOnline.com, BirthsOnline.com, and
Wed-Online.com. "We're excited by the potential this provides us
in obtaining our ultimate goal of becoming the world's premier
genealogy resource," said Robert Hiscock, president of
MemorialsOnline.
"Our goal is to have 4,500 newspaper titles from the 1700s to the
present available on that site for access by our business-to-
business portal partners by Q4 2001," Huggins said.
Cold North Wind recently set up shop in Boston to lead the charge
in the United States. According to Huggins, the company will soon
be adding several big newspapers to its current list of clients,
which includes Torstar's Toronto Star. Torstar acquired a
10% equity stake in the company when the deal was struck.
Bell & Howell Information and Learning, another company that
archives content for resale purposes, is another partner of Cold
North Wind.
Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.
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