Eugene's Note: The following article in The Globe and Mail, Technology section, recently featured Zaphod Beeblebrox's web site. My thanks to John Foliot, of Bytown Internet, who started our web presence and maintains it to this day, winning awards along the way.

[Masthead - The Globe and Mail - Technology Section]

Wednesday, July 30, 2003.

Club hops on-line for Net advantage

[Photo - Eugene Haslam]
Zaphod Beeblebrox club founder Eugene Haslam

By ROB BLACKSTIEN
Special to Globe and Mail Update

CASE STUDY

Eugene Haslam, a 40-something affable nightclub owner with the world's most infectious and hearty laugh, is leading a seemingly idyllic life. He has found a job that not only helps keep him young, but has him surrounded with the loves of his life - music, real ales and all things Douglas Adams.

But it's the way in which he wound up where he is - some might call it fate, perhaps dumb luck with a twist of serendipity - that is most compelling.

Mr. Haslam's Ottawa nightclub is named after Zaphod Beeblebrox, the fun-loving and wacky, two-headed, three-armed president of the Galaxy from Adams' sci-fi classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Like his club's namesake - whose appearances throughout the universe were invariably accompanied by varying degrees of mayhem - so too has Mr. Haslam happened into his role as owner of one of the hippest music clubs in the nation's capital. And just as in later life the late Douglas Adams turned to technology as his medium of choice, so too has Mr. Haslam and Zaphod Beeblebrox (the club, not the dual-headed character) taken to high tech to drive business successes.

The club has recently added an RSS feed, which allows media outlets to automatically get club listings on an ongoing basis. This created a push rather than a pull scenario for information, where previously Web sites and media outlets such as Now Magazine that feature club listings had to manually go to the Zaphod site (www.zaphodbeeblebrox.com) to pull the latest news for publication.

This on-line innovation is just the latest in a list of firsts that Zaphod has pulled off. It was the first Ottawa club with a dedicated Web site (one which has garnered several local Internet awards), and it created the first databases for both Ottawa-based Indie bands and local media contacts.

So just how did Eugene Haslam awake one day to find himself piloting this "Club at the Edge of the Universe?"

His schooling took him from an unfinished psychology degree at York University to studying business at the University of Waterloo. While at Waterloo, Mr. Haslam met a guy at Oktoberfest who was part of his roommate's extended family. The family was of German decent and the gentleman in question was from Carp, Ont., just outside of Ottawa.

"He asked which part of Germany I was from," Mr. Haslam, who is black , recalls with his trademark laugh, "and I said 'The Black Forest,' and I keeled over laughing." (Eugene's Note: I'm actually brown, born in Calcutta, India)

And so it was that a friendship was struck up between the pair that would ultimately lead Mr. Haslam down a different road in life. The gentleman, a banker with the Bank of Nova Scotia, took a real shining to Mr. Haslam and told him if he ever needed a job to let him know. Somehow, that this alliance should have been sparked at Oktoberfest, where beer drinking and music go hand in hand, is only fitting.

And so it was that when Mr. Haslam's student loans ran out and he found himself destitute, he called the banker up and had an interview arranged for him in Ottawa. The friend put him up at his home, let Mr. Haslam borrow his car to find an apartment in Ottawa, and made good on his promise to get him into the management trainee program at the Bank of Nova Scotia.

The irony of Mr. Haslam getting his start in the stodgiest of stodgy industries only to wind up at the other end of the career spectrum is certainly not lost on him. "This is why I find Zaphod the character to be so in line with mine. One day he's on this planet, the next day he's on that planet."

So how in the universe did Mr. Haslam make the journey from Planet Banking to Planet Club Owner?

He's not really sure. Once he started with the bank, in 1977, he met Dave (Knowles), another student in the management training program. The two of them loved the music of the Clash and the Sex Pistols, they both dressed strangely, and in 1979, they celebrated their love of music and real ales by going to England together.

The following year, Mr. Haslam was transferred to conservative Calgary and "boy, that was a clash there," he laughs recalling his year in cowtown. Soon, he would receive a call from an old customer in Ottawa who owned a Chinese restaurant. The man thought Dave and Mr. Haslam would be the ideal pair to open a pub for him, so he convinced Mr. Haslam to return to the nation's capital and get to work on this pub. The man also had a banquet room downstairs under the restaurant that wasn't doing well, so he convinced Mr. Haslam and Dave to turn it into something. So Mr. Haslam quit the bank in 1982, and created a place underneath the restaurant called The Underground. "And that's where the music career started."

Finally, he could indulge in his love of music and book bands for the club; MTV was just in its infancy and they had a satellite dish on top of the roof to carry the channel. Of course, the technology was still rather crude: "Because we didn't have the satellite dish operated by remote, we'd have this chain of people going 'okay, left, left, right, right, right' all the way down. It was hilarious."

Unfortunately, the experience was short lived. The club, on a month-to-month lease, had to close after eight months once the landlord raised the rent and made the venue unviable to operate the club. Mr. Haslam didn't do much for about a year, until the same landlord that closed The Underground closed the Chinese restaurant upstairs and asked Mr. Haslam if he'd like to lease the place.

And that was where the first Zaphod Beeblebrox was born. And this is also when his new-found fascination with technology helped him drive the business forward. In the beginning, they were using posters on the streets to alert the public about upcoming gigs, creating all the posters on Letreset. However, they soon discovered that posters could be made on computers much faster.

Also around this time, FreeNet was gaining in popularity, especially with Ottawa's huge university population. It dawned on Mr. Haslam that he could create a subscriber list of all the people that frequented the club and once he had their e-mail addresses, he could send out alerts and promos of upcoming events.

"It was so foreign, they didn't even think I was spamming them," he guffaws.

But even from the beginning, he had an opt-out policy and would never sell his e-mail list. Early on, Mr. Haslam garnered a list of 400 subscribers and was constantly adding to it by getting walk-up traffic to sign up.

Soon afterwards he ran into John Foliot, the (then) EMI rep who would pitch his label's bands to play at Zaphod. The pair shared a love of music and an interest in technology, and before long, the idea for a Web site was hatched. Mr. Foliot was looking for an opportunity to cut his chops in designing a site and Mr. Haslam was picking up on all the marketing possibilities of the computer world. And for no up-front cost other than being used as a guinea pig, Mr. Haslam had Mr. Foliot create the club's Web site.

The key to making the site work, both men say, is in keeping things simple. You won't find any glitz or glam, no flash screens or exploding toasters. The goal of the site is to provide fast access to content, and a lot of it.

Mr. Haslam has also used the site to make business-related communications with bands a snap. It used to be that bands would call him up and he'd have to spend up to 15 minutes or more explaining the club's booking policies. Now, it's all on-line. Also, the club's music system's tech specs are there, as are media contacts for the entire Ottawa area - all tools to help bands have a seamless and successful show at Zaphod.

The latest innovation, the RSS feed, is an XML-based format that uses the Resource Description Framework, a language that allows list of hyperlinks and other metadata to be syndicated. A user's on-line system can automatically fetch and understand the data from the Zaphod site, and then that user can personalize the information they want to track.

As for building his brand, Mr. Haslam has used the site to garner a 2,200-strong subscriber list. It gets thousands of visits per month, and an estimated 70 per cent of customers visit each show because of the site.

Oh, and he does all this for a mere $200 a month - the entire budget for maintaining and updating the site. Not bad "when you consider we're just a little nightclub. It's not like we're the Bruce Springsteen site."

(Eugene's Note: In the article, although I did promote shows by Radiohead and The Tragically Hip, I presented them at another venue I owned at the time.)