Name Robert Huggins | ||
Born June 4, 1958 ( 1958-06-04 ) North York, Ontario, Canada Occupation entrepreneur, filmmaker | ||
Robert J. (Bob) Huggins is the founder of PaperofRecord.com, a comprehensive database of newspapers published in their original page images as searchable files. The company was sold to Google of Mountain View, California in September 2006.
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Huggins has more than 25 years experience as a professional in the newspaper publishing, web/content publishing and high technology sectors, and is currently entrepreneur-in-residence for Ontario’s Regional Innovation Centre and for Invest Ottawa.
Personal life
He attended the University of Waterloo, receiving a degree in Canadian studies, economics and history in 1981.
Newspaper Digitization
In 2000, Huggins founded Cold North Wind, the first company to digitize the entire history of newspapers in their original published form. Canada's two largest newspapers, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star were the first to participate in this process, with their archives being fully digitized and available in 2001.
The PaperofRecord.com collection was acquired in 'secret' in 2006 by Google and announced publicly in 2008. Huggins was also a member of the founding team of The Globe and Mail's electronic information service Info Globe. He helped implement electronic “as of release” documents for Finance Canada and negotiated Soviet commercial electronic rights from Novosti Press Agency of the first commercial statistical trade information to the West for the New York Times Information Services.
In 2002, Huggins was nominated as Canadian Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young.
Orphan Boy Films
In 2006, Huggins was one of the founders of Orphan Boy Films. The name is an homage to Huggins' father, a Barnardo orphan who was sent to Canada as a twelve-year-old to work on a farm outside the village of Norwich, in Southwestern Ontario.
Their prime focus is on historically based documentaries. Their current project is The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth for Detroit Public Television.