WATERLOO, Ontario (AP) -- You've likely seen their famous faces in American Express television commercials: Robert De Niro ruminating over his city; Ellen DeGeneres dancing to her own beat; and Mike Lazaridis scribbling on his blackboard.Mike Lazaridis?While the seemingly unpronounceable name and pudgy every-man mug are relatively unknown outside Canada, the co-creator of the BlackBerry wireless e-mail device is an icon back home. Canadians proudly claim him as their own Bill Gates."My life is about making ideas happen," Lazaridis says in the Amex ad, scrawling on one of the dozens of blackboards that pepper the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an idea he made happen through a personal donation of $85 million.Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the other man behind the pioneering BlackBerry, are among Canada's most revered sons in these dawning days of the Information Age."I stand up when I give speeches, hold up my BlackBerry, which everybody in the world has, and say: 'Canadian technology,"' says Pamela Wallin, Canada's consul general in New York.Well, not exactly everybody.But Lazaridis and Balsillie are indeed making their mark far beyond this university town at the center of Canada's so-called Technology Triangle, which employs 18,000 people at more than 400 high-tech companies.The two have earned hundreds of millions dollars with the six-year-old BlackBerry, which was originally developed by engineers at their Research in Motion Ltd., for internal use.Yet, in typically understated Canadian fashion, there is little boasting: no yachts, no trophy wives, no scandals.Like Gates -- who throws much of his money at AIDS research and Third World education -- the RIM executives are directing big chunks of their formidable fortunes toward projects in fostering innovation, improving education and seeking to make government more responsive."Always try to build something special," Lazaridis told the AP in a recent interview. "It's part of this decision to build important things and have an impact on society."Lazaridis and Balsillie, both 44 and fathers of two young children, still work out of modest offices at RIM headquarters in Waterloo, a bedroom community an hour's drive from Toronto.Balsillie typically jogs home from work and coaches his son's basketball team.He likes it when people unwittingly discover he's one of the billionaires behind BlackBerry: "I get a big kick out of that, 'I had no idea that you're the RIM guy."'Lazaridis says that when he's in town, he reads to his kids every night."They read a lot; no video games and no computers. We know it would absorb them. I didn't have a computer until I was in high school and I think I turned out pretty well."Lazaridis, meanwhile, is also chancellor of his alma mater, the University of Waterloo, which is known as the MIT of the north and where Lazaridis has also founded the Institute for Quantum Computing.For many, running a company like RIM would be chore enough, especially in these times of brutal industry competition.RIM employs more than 4,000 people in North America, Europe and Asia. The societal impact of its BlackBerry -- used by people trapped in the World Trade Center towers to send final messages to loved ones -- is so wide that RIM is now under full frontal assault by other tech heavyweights working on their own wireless e-mail products, including Microsoft, Nokia and Good Technologies.American Express says it chose Lazaridis to star in its commercials not just for his technology achievements, "but also because he has used his success to pursue philanthropic and educational interests in his community."Lazaridis' philanthropic baby is the Perimeter Institute, which he founded in 2000 and which is fast becoming a magnet for some of the sharpest minds in physics.Anton Zeilinger -- a leading physicist at the University of Vienna dubbed "Mr. Beam" for successful experiments in teleporting particles -- lectured at Perimeter earlier in the year and believes it has the potential for significant discoveries."Actually, considering the short time of its existence and the fact that it is still expanding, I would rank it already now among the world's top places in theoretical physics," he was quoted as saying by Maclean's, a weekly Canadian news magazine.Balsillie's philanthropic passion is housed just a stone's throw away in a renovated Seagram's barrel warehouse.A think tank at the intersection of politics and technology, it's called The Center for International Governance Innovation. Balsillie put $17 million of his own into the project, while Lazaridis added $8.5 million."You have to pay a lot of attention to what's important, what's permanent, what's real," said Balsillie, whose office sports an electric guitar autographed by the Barenaked Ladies, a popular Canadian rock band.The center hosted an international conference in April on United Nations reform, with Deputy U.N. Director Louise Frechette mounting a defense of the world body before ambassadors, scholars and international relations experts.It just launched an Internet portal called the International Governance Leadership Organizations Online with a goal of becoming the largest such Web site for public policy institutions, to share and disseminate research."You can't be global without leveraging technology and the Internet," says Dan Latendre, the center's chief information officer.Pretty tall talk coming from a seemingly insulated community of some 100,000 people in an area founded by First Nations, Scottish immigrants and Mennonites.Waterloo and neighboring Kitchener and Cambridge, a region once dependent on the rubber, meat and button industries, are today credited with spinning off 22 percent of Canada's technology inventions.Lazaridis's father was the son of Greek immigrants and worked the assembly line at the Waterloo Chrysler plant; his mother was a seamstress. Balsillie's roots, like many others in southern Ontario, were from Scotland, from where his grandparents fled the potato famine.Lazaridis started RIM in 1984 with his childhood friend Douglas Fregin, who's still a vice president of the company. Balsillie joined in 1992.The company's first product was a networked display system that scrolled words across LED signs in General Motors factories.Lazaridis never forgot a high school electronics shop teacher, who took him to ham-radio swap meets and once told him: The guy who puts wireless and computers together will truly create something special.He sat at his basement computer one night in 1997 and e-mailed his office a white paper, "Success Lies in Paradox." When is a tiny keyboard more efficient than a large one, he asked.When you use your thumbs.Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.