TORONTO, February 15, 2007 - Tucows Inc. (TSX:TC, AMEX: TCX) today announced that the Toronto Stock Exchange (“TSX”) has accepted a notice of its intention to make a normal course issuer bid through the facilities of the TSX. The normal course issuer bid is intended to be part of the share buy-back program previously announced by the Company on January 9, 2007. Tucows will have the option to purchase its shares either through the facilities of the TSX or the Amex Stock Market.
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Last weekend, we had a job fair here at Tucows. We hold job fairs at our Toronto headquarters every three or four months.

I spoke to Crystal McPhee who leads our recruiting to get some insider tips about how to make sure you make the best of a Tucows Job Fair. Here's the scoop:

1. Keeners come early. Arriving early in the day shows you're interested in the job.

2. Dress for success. Once you land the job with us, you get to work in a casual environment. However, first impressions count. So consider wearing business casual clothes to the job fair and not your favourite torn AC/DC t-shirt.

3. Be prepared. Bring a copy of your resume, a pen and a notebook. Brainstorm a list of questions and take notes.

4. Do your homework. Spend some time on our website and blog to learn about what we do and how we do it.

5. Be ready to answer questions and tell us why you want to work at Tucows. We'd like to hear the story of your career so far. You need to be able to tell us who you are, what you've done at previous jobs, how you work and why you'd be an asset to our team.

And there you have five easy tips to help you get the most from our job fairs.

We're always on the look-out for talented folks to join the herd. Click here to see a list of current job openings.

One of our readers left us this comment last week:

“I’d be interested to know what (if any) measures you have in place to stop spammers registering their domains in the first place and/or detect spam registrations after the event.”

As your intrepid reporter, I spoke with Garrick Lau, who is driving forward several Abuse initiatives here at Tucows. Here is what I learned about how we’re stopping spammers:

Tucows has a dedicated Abuse team that monitors system logs, and abuse related activity across the our services. The Abuse team will actively disable offending spammers based on evidence found in system logs as well as complaints reported to our Customer Service team. At this time, this process is manual rather than automated.

We realize spamming and phishing are big problems. We’re in the early stages on projects to put more controls in place for automating our policy enforcement and monitoring across all our services.

Tucows is also involved in industry standards groups like MAAWG
(Messaging Anti- Abuse Working Group) to learn what others in the industry are doing to control spam and related abuse and so we can share our own experiences.

To report a spamming or phishing domain to us, please send complete evidence of the offending domain and the content of the spam message with full headers to abuse@abuse.tucows.com.

Here's another job opportunity at Tucows: Network Engineer!

About Tucows

For more about Tucows and its work environment, go check out the What Does Tucows Do, Anyway? and The Sort of Person We're Lookng For sections of this blog entry.

Main purpose

As a member of the Networking team, the Network Engineer is responsible for keeping all of Tucows' networks running smoothly so that their regularly scheduled operational, maintenance and support functions are carried out effectively and efficiently. It's a vital jobs — if our networks are out of business, so are we!

Position reports to: Operations Manager

Salary range: Commensurate with experience

Key responsibilities

• Support, update and troubleshoot network hardware and software
• Provide support on NOC and Service Desk issues
• Perform network administration services, day-to-day operations
• First line support of the network for Operations and Engineering implementations
• Perform daily maintenance of the internal and production network, by checking all logs and ensuring no new issues are occurring
• Monitor and resolve service desk tickets quickly
• Perform emergency and planned maintenances in order to fix or prevent network outages
• Work on infrastructure / network related projects such as:
  • Software and hardware upgrades
  • Network expansion
  • Deployment of network applications

  The products include, but are not limited to:

  • Core Switches
  • Distribution Switches
  • Firewalls
  • VPN Appliances
  • Content Switches
  • IPS / IDS's and Sniffers

Ideal Candidate Profile

Related experience / Unique skill set

• At least 2 years work experience as Network Administrator in a medium size network.
• Demonstrated abilities with, and a good working knowledge of:
  • General networking
  • Ethernet
  • TCP/IP
  • DNS
  • DHCP
  • Switching
  • Routing
  • IP Addressing / sub-netting
  • Windows networking
• Excellent communication (written and verbal) and interpersonal skills
• Experience configuring, upgrading and maintaining Cisco switches and routers; hands on required on Catalyst 6500
• Experience configuring, upgrading and maintaining:
  • Cisco PIX
  • Cisco VPN3000
  • Cisco CSS11500
  • Cisco FWSW
  • Cisco IDS/IPS
  • Netscreen firewalls
• Basic Unix administration skills, knowledge of open source network tools an asset
• Experience or exposure in configuring and troubleshooting routing protocols OSPF, BGP

Education

• Bachelor Degree in Computer Science
• CCNA / CCNP

Interpersonal skills

• Excellent organization and time management skills to meet demanding timelines
• Strong interpersonal and customer service skills
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Highly adaptable with ability to work independently and collaboratively in a fast paced, demanding environment
• Must be highly adaptable and able to learn new applications quickly
• Self-motivated, with strong sense of ownership and urgency to deliver projects / tasks in a timely fashion
• Attention to detail required, must be methodical and thorough in problem solving

Other

• Position requires to carry a pager on alternate basis
• Overtime may be required during project implementation

Interested in this job?

If this job sounds like the sort of thing you'd be interested in doing, send your resume and cover letter to hrdept@tucows.com, and make sure you put Network Engineer in the subject line!

Job Fair!

Tomorrow, Saturday, February 10th, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Tucows is having a job fair! We've got openings for the following positions:

• Customer Service Representatives
• Technical Support Analysts
• NOC Analysts

“Tucows? You Mean the Shareware Company?”

If you're thinking “Tucows? You mean the shareware company?”, make sure you read about the sort of business we're in. There's a good summary in this article; make a note of the What Does Tucows Do, Anyway? and the The Sort of Person We're Lookng For sections.

What Happens at the Job Fair

At tomorrow's job fair, you'll get to meet one-on-one with actual managers. The managers are people with hiring authority for the open positions; you'll have a brief interview with them where you can talk about your skills and experience and ask questions about Tucows. Successful candidates from tomorrow's interviews will be invited to come back for a more in-depth interview on the week of February 12th.

What to Bring and Where to Go

If you'd like to attend tomorrow's job fair, bring your resume and your “'A' game” to the Tucows offices, located at 96 Mowat Avenue, Toronto (Mowat is a block east of King and Dufferin — you can get here via the Dufferin 29 bus or the King 504 Streetcar; there's plenty of nearby parking too). Each interview is expected to last about 15 minutes, but you should be prepared to spend an hour here to allow for some administrivia and waiting for your interview to come up.

Are you a programmer looking for work? Here at Tucows, we've got another job opening: Senior Application Developer.

What Does Tucows Do, Anyway?

If you're interested in this sort of job, you might want to know the sort of business we're in. Simply put, Tucows is a wholesaler of these specific internet services:

• Domain names
• Hosted email
• Hosted anti-spam solutions
• Digital certificates
• Managed DNS
• Website Builder
• Blogware
• Billing software for ISPs and hosting services

As a wholesaler, we don't directly sell these services to end-users. Rather, we partner with people — many of whom are ISPs and hosting companies — who then resell these services on their own or as part of their own suite of services. Our partners can provision these services to their customers either via a web-based interface or by using our APIs.

By buying these services from us and reselling them instead of setting up and maintaining these services themselves, our partners can worry less about the tech and maintenance aspects of these services and concentrate on provisioning them to their customers and providing them with great service.

The Sort of Person We're Lookng For

Make sure you read this article over at the blog Creating Passionate Users in which Kathy Sierra writes about companies where people are really into their jobs:

People ask me, “How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company?” Wrong question. Passion for our employer, manager, current job? Irrelevant. Passion for our profession and the kind of work we do? Crucial. If I own company FOO, I don't need employees with a passion for FOO. I want those with a passion for the work they're doing. The company should behave just like a good user interface — support people in doing what they're trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way. Applying the employer-as-UI model, the best company is one in which the employees are so engaged in their work that the company fades into the background.

That's been my experience here at Tucows: the company does a pretty good job at supporting people in their tasks, but also staying the hell out of their way and not binding them down with too many diktats. Do you prefer to work using editor X running on operating system Y? Do it; we don't mandate what's on your desktop. Got ideas on how to do things more effectively and efficiently? The folks here are pretty good at listening to them. Developers here are empowered to be creative while doing their job.

All that freedom means that we're looking for a developer who's a self-starter, capable of working with minimal supervision — or none at all.You'll be part of a team that will be both building new services as well as enhancing, maintaining and supporting existing ones. You also have to be a good team player, leader and teacher, as you may be involved with mentoring and helping junior members of the team.

The systems you'll be working on are big — we're talking millions of transactions a day, for which our customers and customers' customer have paid. In such an environment, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, so we're looking for someone who can crank out high quality code.

You have to be the kind of person who lives to work on challenging problems. There'll be a lot of ground to cover, and the industry changes pretty quickly, so you've got to be the sort of person who wants to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, while solving those problems. We're looking for someone who takes pride in their work and wants to be proudly describe the type of problems they're working on.

And Now, the Checklists!

Here's what's on the “key responsibilities” checklist of the job posting:

• Design, development and maintenance of code
• Strong code testing and refactoring skills
• Review business and functional requirements
• Production support activities including troubleshooting and resolving the problems
• Assist in release management
• Additional responsibilities as required

Here's the “skills and experience” checklist:

• 5 Years development experience with:
  • Perl (Java and PHP are a bonus)
  • Client/server application development for a Unix/Linux platform
• You should also have experience with:
  • Large scale projects
  • Object-oriented design and development (bonus marks for knowing your design patterns!)
  • Working with RDBMS systems, Oracle in particular as well as PostgreSQL and MySQL
  • Working with web applications and services
  • Writing shell scripts
  • Version control systems

Finally, the “soft skills” checklist:

• Positive and constructive attitude
• Demonstrated team player
• Able to maintain a calm, professional approach when dealing with difficult customers
• Attention to detail required, must be methodical and thorough in problem solving
• Excellent planning and documentation skills
• Excellent time management skills to meet demanding timelines
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Highly adaptable with ability to work in a fast paced demanding environment
• Must be able to own issues from inception to completion
• Must be highly adaptable and able to learn new applications quickly
• Must be team-oriented with ability to work well with multiple teams in a cross-functional setup
• Self-motivated, with strong sense of ownership and urgency to deliver projects / tasks in a timely fashion
• Responsible and accountable

Do You Want This Job?

If you'd like this job and think you can fill a Tucows Senior Dveeloper's shoes, we want to hear from you! Email your resume and cover letter to hrdept@tucows.com and refer to [Dev-2007-02-07-248] Senior Application Developer in the subject line.

I'm going to simply quote the official-sounding release:

Tucows Inc. (TSX: TC, AMEX: TCX) plans to release its fourth quarter fiscal 2006 financial results on Thursday, February 8, 2007, following market close. Company management will host a conference call on Thursday, February 8, 2007 at 5:00 p.m. EST (GMT -5) to discuss the results and outlook.

If you'd like to listen to the conference call, go to our Conference Call page and click on the “Click here to listen to the webcast” link. The link will be active about an hour prior to the call.

Company Achieves Sixteenth Consecutive Quarter of Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth and Exceeds Annual Cash Flow From Operations Target
TORONTO – February 8, 2007 – Tucows Inc. (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC), a leading provider of Internet services to web hosting companies, ISPs and other service providers worldwide, today reported its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2006.

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If you're looking for work at a company with a good reputation, name recognition, great people and opportunities for you to shine, may I suggest working here at Tucows?

On Saturday, February 10th between 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., we're having an open house. We're looking for people to fill the following positions:

• Customer Service Representatives
• Technical Support Analysts
• NOC Analysts

You'll get the chance to meet our management team from Technical Support, Retail Services and our Network Operations Centre, and you can talk about youself and the opportunities that Tucows can offer you.

If you can make it, we'd love to see you here! We're located at 96 Mowat Avenue in Toronto, just a block east of the corner of King and Dufferin.

Can't make it? See your resume to hrdept@tucows.com and let us know which position you're interested in.