Will Ez-robot Be The Next Canadian Billion Dollar Company?

Original Article: http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Nelson+Calgary+Business+helps+easily+build+your+robot/8776950/story.html

A house is not a home without its own robot.

Such is the vision of D.J. Sures, a Calgary entrepreneur and the man behind EZ-Robot - an outfit he believes will become Canada's first billion-dollar company and a northern prairie version of Apple.

Coming from a high school dropout from Thunder Bay, that sounds mighty ambitious but Sures believes his dreams are wedded to reality.

Certainly there are thousands of fans across the world who are so enamoured of his company in Inglewood they tune in each day to watch Sures and his handful of staffon live webcam.

Robots, it would seem, are a global love affair.

EZ-Robot isn't a hardware company - it doesn't manufacture robotic bodies. Instead it makes the circuit board, software and some gearing that is designed to simply slot into place in an existing shell, usually a toy.

In effect it gives an inanimate object a brain, which the user can control and pick from a host of options on a drop-down menu.

"For example, if you watch the show Doctor Who and you want to have your own Dalek, that is something we can do. You buy the toy and we provide the tools so it can happen - from tutorial videos up to the point where your robot has a personality and can do things," said Sures.

People can program their robots to do the most amazing things.

"You can have it understand what room of the house it is in, it can listen to voice commands, it can tell colours, you can teach it objects, you can control it remotely from your iPhone or computer and you can add a personality to it so when you speak it will listen to the words and actually recognize a database of phrases and respond to them. You can create an artificial intelligence. Anyone can do this.

"You get to pick the features you want. We do the complicated work in the background that would take a programmer months to work on, then we put a nice interface around it so people can customize it from a dropdown menu. You can decide that I want my robot to have a GPS so it knows where it is, that I want my robot to have a camera so it can see," said Sures.

Most people make their own robot simply for pleasure - a dream of childhood finally realized. But there are countless possible applications and Sures gets custom orders from companies looking for robots to do specialized work.

"We have two directions as a company. We have this consumer product, which will be good for education and that allows people to build something they imagined.

"But as well this product demonstrates our capabilities - how we can make robots do amazing stuffand from this we get a lot of companies coming to us and saying, 'Wow you make an exciting product how can we work with you?' So we are licensing the actual intellectual property that is inside these robots to these larger companies," added Sures.

It has been a remarkable journey for the 36-year-old Sures - the D.J. comes courtesy of his grandfathers' initials - since he left high school without any qualifications.

"My guidance counsellor at school told me I should be a hairstylist because I was creative. I dropped out of high school and never graduated. At the time I thought I was just dumb," added Sures.


With life in Thunder Bay looking bleak, Sures moved to Calgary. His formal education was lacking but he had picked up one skill early in life.

As a child he'd taken toys apart and then glued them back together.

He managed to turn the workings of a remote control car into a robot that could walk. That led to his keen interest in computers. In his adopted city, he soon harvested those abilities.

At 19 years old he got an entrylevel job with a company making robots for use in oil and gas.

"I came in as the lowest level entry in IT - the guy who makes sure the email works while they had another company hired to do all the programming. I would stay late at night and go through their code and make changes.

"They caught on and told the president who called me in," added Sures.

Fearing the sack, he was instead promoted and the contract programmers fired. He never looked back.

He and colleague Alan Campbell started EZ-Robot in November 2011.

The staffcount is now up to nine and since April they've worked out of a renovated former grocery store in Inglewood.

Sures is confident EZ-Robot will make it big without having to move to California.

"We see ourselves as the Microsoft or the Intel or Apple of the future. We can be that Canadian billion-dollar company. Some day there is going to be one and it is going to be this company right here. We are the company that has found customers without even needing to market to them.

"We have a parallel run to the way Apple first ran. What has happened to us is following the same pattern in the same time frame. We have sold more units of our product than Apple did when they launched their consumer product in the same amount of time," he said.

And Sures is enjoying the ride. "How could we not have fun? We build robots. The only difficulty I have today is explaining to people what I do. Because robots to people seem so complicated and what we are doing is making it not complicated.

"I wish I could get the whole world to sit down for a second so I could just say: 'it is not hard. Just do this and this and it works.'