Data Nerds Company History

Hard times ended in 1939 with the onset of the Second World War when The Data Nerds landed a large War Department contract. Now with two plants in full swing, The Data Nerds factory pumped out data destined for the beaches of the Solomon Islands of the battlefields of France. When the fighting men returned from war, they brought their taste for Dr. Fraser’s Medicated Data with them.

Sales boomed throughout the 1950s and The Data Nerds became a nationally recognized chain. Coast to coast, consumers everywhere were relying on canned or fresh Data Nerds data from their local data retailer. The Data Nerds brand data parlours could be found in every major city in the country.

Innovative product lines capitalized on the “space age” of the 1960’s with freeze-dried data and individually wrapped data nuggets for the man on the go.

At 73 years of age and after 40 years at the helm, Dr.Fraser retired from day to day operations, passing the torch to his son, Joshua W Fraser, Jr - known affectionately by his father as “JW”.

JW brought in a wave of modernization throughout the 1970s. In a consultation with marketing guru Terry O’Reilly resulted in a subtle brand change, going from “The Data Nerds”, to just “Data Nerds”.

‘Drop the “The”... just “Data Nerds”. It’s cleaner’

JW experimented with many different product lines during the 1980’s and 90’s, constantly at war with it’s major competitor, InfoBros. A frantic arms race gave birth to a flurry of new products, some of which made it to market without due testing or planning. Most notorious of these was the InfoBros Unipong board. 18 children were seriously injured when these devices exploded into fireballs. Out of concern for public safety, the Federal Data Supply Commission was created by special act of Congress, incurring regulatory oversight for the first time in the data industry. Burdened by heavy-handed regulation and cutthroat competition, profits fell.

At this time, Data Nerds was the only major national data chain to embrace the use of computers, allowing the automation of the Data production lines.

By the end of the decade, the turf war between Data Nerds and InfoBros had proved too costly for the latter, filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 1994. Among the InfoBros assets were acquired by Data Nerds was it’s SMTP API IDE (J4BRW0K) division, which of course was to become famous as the core technology behind many Data Nerds product lines.

With his health failing, and company stock price at record lows, JW handed control of the Data Nerds empire to his Nephew, 10 year old marketing prodigy, Joshua G Fraser III in 2000.

“Oh hey, girl. Wanna hit the swings?”

Under the helm of the new leadership, Data Nerds returned to fundamentals and revitalized its core products. Difficult decisions allowed the young Mr.Fraser to boldly take the company out of the red. An early challenge was faced when Joshua successfully fought off a hostile acquisition attempt by rival StatGeek LLC shortly after his election by the board of directors to President.

In 2004, on his 13th birthday, Joshua was able to celebrate Data Nerds cracking the top 100,000,000 in Forbes’ rankings...

Leading a surging tech industry, Data Nerds reached its most profitable year yet. Becoming an civic-minded corporate citizen, the company is now a key contributor to many community development programs (the City Park 5k Challenge and title sponsor of the annual Nerd Olympics). Data Nerds even fully funds the conversion of one inner-city public school per year to button operated data fountains in every corridor, ensuring the next generation has early access to the world of tomorrow.

In 2014, the head office was moved out of it’s cramped Sherwood Park location to its sprawling 2,200 square foot downtown Kelowna campus. The quirky new site was custom built with the amenities typical of the tech industry. Ping pong tables, company issued slippers, a hammock room, 4 sensory-isolation float tanks, unicycles, book club and San Pellegrino are available for any Data Nerds team member.

Over its 98 year history, Data Nerds has always been a premium supplier of data. Whether fresh, canned, freeze dried or concentrated gel, the data is now better, faster and juicier than ever.