Teams are being formed, challenges have been made and accepted. On May 22, 2008, The Inside Ride happens at Tucows Head Office in Toronto’s Liberty Village.

What is The Inside Ride?

It’s “Canada’s first indoor cycling challenge and fundraising event dedicated to raising monies in support of families and children with cancer.” The fundraising event works like this:

A whole bunch of state-of-the-art stationary racing bike trainers will be set up at Tucows. Then, teams of six riders will ride for 10 minutes, flat out, to see how much mileage they can cover. The individuals and teams with the highest distance, the most team spirit, and of course, the most money raised win rewards.

Get Involved

Are you in the Toronto area? We’d love to have you down to the Tucows offices to take part. Show us what your company is made of, and help us raise money for the Coast to Coast Against Cancer Foundation.

And if you’re not close by, any donations to the cause are more than welcome.

In either case, contact Sherry Azim for more information. More information is available from The Inside Ride website.

Sears National Kids Cancer Ride

This event in support of Coast to Coast Against Cancer meshes very nicely with another cycling-related charity ride for Coast to Coast Against Cancer of more epic proportions. Ross Rader, who heads up our retail division, will be climbing onto his bike in just 24 days for a 19-day, 7,600 km trans-Canada ride from Vancouver to Halifax. Ross has been training incredibly hard over the last while and he’ll join a select group of riders for the cross-country trip.

Some quick math tells you that with 7,600 km (4,700 miles) to cover in 19 days, the riders will have to average 400 km (250 miles) per day.

Show your support for Ross through a donation to the Sears National Kids Cancer Ride

The real winners are the various charities from coast to coast in Canada dedicated to providing emotional, physical and medical support to children and teenagers living with, and beyond, cancer.

Ross pointed me to this video featuring Andy Brooks, an 18-year-old, blind cancer survivor who is taking part in the full cross-country ride himself:

All the details, including a news release and financial statements can be found in our Investors area. We’ll be hosting a live conference call beginning at 5:00 P.M. ET today (Wednesday, May. 7th, 2008). As usual, we’ll record the call and post an archived MP3 within a few hours.

Update: the MP3 recording of the Q1 2008 conference call has been posted.

ISPCON Spring ‘08 kicks off next week. What’s billed as “The Internet Industry Event” runs Tuesday, May 13th, through Thursday, May 15th. We’re getting ready to make the trip and we hope to see you at Chicago’s Donald E. Stephen’s (Rosemont) Convention Centre.

Wednesday, May 14th, is “our day” with three Tucows-related events on the ISPCON schedule:

• The day starts early with a panel discussion, “Who Should Be Running Your Email,” scheduled for 8:45 AM in Room 9. Rohan Jayasekera, Director, Tucows Email Service, will participate as a panelist.
• Then, at 10 AM, Elliot Noss, our President and CEO, will present, “Why YOU and lowfat lattes are Google’s Worst Nightmare.”
• And be sure to join us between 1:45 PM and 2:45 PM in Room 11 for “In Conversation with Tucows.” You’ll be able to meet some of our key people, ask questions, and find out more about our products and services and where things are headed.

We’re gearing up for the show, and we’re looking forward to getting the chance to meet potential new, and current customers face-to-face. We’ll be in booth 114 as you can see on the map. See you there!

Drives incremental growth for Hostopia as Tucows focuses its retail operations on email and online identity

TORONTO — May 6, 2008 — Tucows Inc. (AMEX: TCX, TSX: TC) and Hostopia.com, Inc. (TSX: H) yesterday signed a definitive agreement for Hostopia to purchase certain of Tucows’ shared hosting customer assets including approximately 14,000 Domain Direct, NetIdentity and ItsYourDomain.com (IYD) customer accounts.

The full text of the news release is available at our media site.

Tucows plans to report its first quarter fiscal 2008 financial results via news release on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at approximately 4:00 p.m. (ET). Company management will host a conference call the same day at 5:00 p.m. (ET) to discuss the results and the outlook for the company.

More details and the full news release can be found at our media site.

The Tucows’ User Experience Design group is hiring!

User Experience Design Group?

What is the UED group all about? Our primary mandate is to ensure that all of our products and services work effectively, look great, and leave you with a fresh, minty taste that doesn’t fade for at least 12 hours.

Well, maybe not that last one, but we’re working on it. Here, have a breath mint in the meantime.

As a fairly new group within Tucows we’ve got a ton of work ahead of us. From a web perspective we’re working to improve every contact point between you and Tucows. This includes everything from broad improvements to the control panels you rely on every day to making our corporate web sites communicate more effectively.

In a nutshell, we’re here to make stuff (specifically Tucows stuff) look great, work great, and help you get stuff done.

Now Hiring: Web Developers! Visual Designer! Ponies!

I could start trotting out buzzwords and catchphrases here to describe all of the amazing, cool stuff we’re working on at Tucows, but I’d have to take myself out back and wash my mouth out with soap to atone afterwards. Needless to say, we’ve got a horn o’ plenty full of exciting work on the go here, and we need some smart, talented people to help us make it all happen.

We’re currently looking for a visual designer as well as one junior and one intermediate front end developer.

» Junior / Intermediate Front End Developer

You:

• are standards-driven with real-world experience
• are keenly aware of the benefits (and difficulties) of creating beautiful, usable, and accessible interfaces in the context of today’s technological realities
• keep up with current design and development best practices
• know that the term “progressive enhancement” is not a spam subject line
• can take mockups and turn them into fully functioning, hand-coded works of art.

The acronyms XHTML, CSS, DOM (scripting), and JS are like nerd comfort food for you and you’ve got the portfolio to prove it. Your PHP experience is a huge asset.

Does this sound like you? Apply for the junior front end developer position or the intermediate front end developer position now.

» Visual Designer

You:

• are a visual, creative person who understands that a huge part of effective design is solving problems
• have a portfolio of work you’ve done (web & rich media — print experience is a plus)
• can create a design vision from the conceptual to the fully-formed
• are highly user-centric and strive to make technology easier and fun to use
• can boss around Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash like nobody’s business.

Interested? Apply for this position now.

Wrapping up

This is the first of many posts on the UED group and what we’re up to, so keep your eyes peeled for more from my group as we kick it into high gear. Feel free to get in touch with us to ask questions, send us feedback, or even just drop us a line to let us know about a cool design-related link.

And, as promised, I leave you with: ponies!

With Easter sneaking up on us early this year, some of us here in Toronto will be off for the Good Friday holiday tomorrow.

The picture of the giant easter egg is courtesy of Kevin Saff. That would be the world’s largest Easter egg, by the way, and it’s located in Vegreville, Alberta, Canada.

But before we go off and enjoy way too many of the tasty chocolate variety eggs, here’s a list of departments along with any special holiday hours for Friday, March 21, 2008:

This morning Tucows released some information about our domain portfolio. The highlights are:

• 150,000 domains in the portfolio as of Feburary 14th, 2008
• Over 1,000 “Gems,” or domain names Tucows considers to have the highest potential value in the portfolio
• 39,000 Surnames that form the basis of our Personal Names Service
• 22,000 Brandable Names and 88,000 Direct Navigation Names

You’ll find much more detail in the news release, including a select listing of some of those “Gem” domain names.

Thanks to the Provincial Government in Ontario, Canada, we’re celebrating the first ever Family Day this year. It’s a new holiday that falls on the third Monday of February and we’re all encouraged to spend time relaxing with family.

Here’s a list of departments along with any special holiday hours for Monday, February 18th, 2008:

All the details, including a news release and financial statements can be found in our Investors area. We’ll be hosting a live conference call beginning at 5:00 P.M. ET today (Thursday, Feb. 7th, 2008). As usual, we’ll record the call and post an archived MP3 within a few hours.

Update: the MP3 recording has been posted.