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Combining his
show business background, and his expertise in
the marketing and selling of new homes, the late 1990s saw
Mitch Markowitz involved with Intercom Canada. A consortium consisting
of Bell Canada, Nortel, IBM and Apple Canada with the lofty goal
of creating, marketing and selling a completely interactive new home community, Stonehaven
West in Newmarket Ontario. Stonehaven West was to
be the first completely interactive new home community in the world
offering such a vast array of services and partners not to mention this
degree of broadband connectivity. This 'experimental wired
community' was initially conceived by a group from York University's
Cul Tech Research Centre and headed up by Paul Hoffert (one of the founding
members of Canada's 70s superstar rock group
Lighthouse). The concept was, every one of the 129 new
homes in this 'wired' community would eventually be completely
interactive with each other as well as numerous other schools,
libraries, government agencies and services. The only other
experimental wired community of this type in North America at
the time was in a gated community adjacent to the Disney Corporation's Disney
World restricted to residents aged 55 and over called
Celebration. This trial community did not compare in size or broadband
technology to Canada's Stonehaven
West project. In order to ensure Intercom Ontario's success, Cultech was able to convince many competing corporations and organizations to work together with Cultech providing services and technologies. Says Hoffert, "We have over seventy organizations involved in our not-for-profit consortium. They range from broadcasters like the CBC, CITY-TV, TVOntario to advertising agencies to Canada Trust [and] Bayshore Trust financial institutions; Canada Post, OntarioHydro; all the copyright collectives, the actor's association, ACTRA, the Canadian Record Industries Association; SOCAN, the musical rights association. Bell Canada is a key member as well as is Apple Computer and Silicon Graphics and IBM. In Ontario, we are doing the most comprehensive trial of delivering true broadband products similar to those happening anywhere in the world. We've really got a lot of competitors working together to try to find away, on a very small scale, to figure out a way to get this whole thing to work." These participants planed to spend a total of $111 million between the two interactive community experiments at York University and Stonehaven West. |