KITCHENER — Kurtis McBride walks through the sprawling warehouse and talks about creating the world's largest technology accelerator focused on the Internet of Things.

The building at 137 Glasgow St. is enormous, containing 475,000 square feet of space on 24 acres of land. McBride, chief executive officer of Kitchener technology company Miovision, is partnering with Voisin Capital of Kitchener and Osmington Inc. of Toronto in the $55-million redevelopment of the space into a campus they are calling Catalyst137.

The building was constructed by Dominion Tire as a warehouse for tires produced at the adjacent tire plant located off of Strange Street (now the home of AirBoss of America). After the tire plant closed, Kaufman Footwear used it as a distribution centre. After Kaufman went bankrupt in 2000, it was used as general warehouse space.

If all goes according plan, the former industrial storehouse will house several growing companies that develop and make software enabled devices used in the Internet of Things, which connects everyday objects to a vast network.

McBride hopes Catalyst137 will rival or even surpass the achievements of HAX, a well-known hardware accelerator in Shenzhen, China.

McBride brings a lot of credibility to the project as CEO and co-founder of Miovision, a thriving company that has developed a platform for traffic data collection and intersection controls now used in 50 countries.

Miovision plans to take about 130,000 square feet of space in the building with the remainder to be leased out to more than 20 companies working on software-enabled devices.

Catalyst137 will have units ranging in size from 2,600 square feet to more than 60,000 square-feet. Some of the larger spaces have their own loading docks. The smaller units share docks.

About a year ago, McBride started looking for a new home for Miovision, which currently employs 120 people and is becoming too large for its offices on Manitou Drive.

A workplace survey indicated employees want to be in or near the growing tech scene in downtown Kitchener. They also want to bike and walk to work. They want to live, work and play in the same neighbourhood, says McBride.

There aren't a lot of options in the downtown for a company that has 120 employees and is growing. But the building on Glasgow Street is too big for Miovision, so McBride wondered if other hardware companies also are looking for space closer to the downtown.

He held a meeting in January at the Tannery building in downtown Kitchener to see if anyone was interested. More than 200 people showed up.

"That kind of birthed the idea of Catalyst and we have been building it ever since," McBride says.

There was "tons of positive feed back both from companies that had to get out of the core and want to move back, and also from companies that are in the Velocity Garage," McBride says. The Velocity Garage is a University of Waterloo incubator for hardware startups located in the Tannery building.

Catalyst137 is located next to the Iron Horse Trail near Belmont Village.

"We are basically 500 metres from Google and the LRT that way," McBride says pointing in the direction of King Street West, where Google recently opened new offices. "You are 200 metres to Belmont Village that way," he says, pointing in the other direction.

The redevelopment of the building is expected to take about one year. The cost of buying the property and renovating it totals about $55 million, says Frank Voisin, president of Voisin Capital.

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Plans for the space include a brew pub, restaurant, coffee roaster and café, gymnasium, squash courts to indulge one of McBride's passions, indoor bicycle parking, an outdoor covered patio and a large common area inside where employees from different companies can gather for drinks, meals and socializing.

"The goal is to draw people out of their units when they are not working," says Voisin.

A wide, central corridor runs through the entire building. Just off that corridor, near a new main entrance, will be an area with lots of tables and chairs.

"When you enter the building, we want it to feel more like entering a mall food court where there are lots of people around," Voisin says.

Two pathways will be built to connect Catalyst137 to the Iron Horse Trail.

"The Iron Horse Trail runs the entire length of the building, which is going to be a prominent aspect of our site plan," Voisin says.

"This is happening in conjunction with the city trying to improve and expand the Iron Horse Trail, so we are going to concentrate our landscaping budget along the Iron Horse Trail," he says.

The Internet of Things is expanding rapidly. Objects from refrigerators to vehicles to locks to heating and cooling systems will be connected and monitored and controlled with software on smartphones, laptops and tablets.

McBride wants Catalyst137 to have an important place in the evolution of this next stage of the Internet that connects billions of machines around the world.

The talent is already here, he says, because BlackBerry assembled teams of top engineers who worked on embedded systems and radio frequency designs. Most of this talent no longer works at the smartphone maker.

"What we are hoping to do with this place is really give those people a home, and allow the community or maybe even the country and the world to see what kind of talent they can access here," McBride says.