Shiny and New
This morning was our first VICOCC meeting downtown at Serious Coffee (1280 Broad Street). Piers suggests that this location used to be a restaurant named “Eugene’s” and thusly might best be referred to as “Eugene’s on Broad Street” for some of the longer residents of Victoria rather than chance someone arriving at the old, and boarded up ex-location of Serious Coffee.
As you can see from the photos, we met in the very spacious and comfortable side room. It reminds me of the back room in The Cup, where Boulder OpenCoffee Club meets — only, this room has much more comfortable furniture (yes, that is a fireplace in the corner). 
With the Iran election drama happening, we talked about twitter — specifically, how support for causes is manifested, communications philosophies, IRC vs IM user approaches, learning curves and how community can be formed and expressed.
We discussed electronic publishing — Michael noted that Amazon.com has a rather impenetrable barrier preventing non-US authors from accessing the Kindle market. The lack of access to the Kindle marketplace appears to be entirely paperwork and financial services based, and may be related to the lack of any Kindle-related attention directed outside of the US. There does seem to be an opportunity for a US-based international Kindle publishing cooperative if there isn’t already one somewhere (is there?).
Janis is one of the champions behind the local Victoria Tweetup scene, and gave us a little information on the inspiration #yyj and #victoriatweetup have found from the Edmonton tweetup groups.
We also discussed the Start-up landscape in Victoria in comparison to cities like Boulder, CO or Vancouver, BC. Technology is the number one economic development source now in Victoria. Software and Internet-related start-ups are eventually drawn towards the larger urban start-up communities of Seattle and Vancouver. There were a number of successful technology exits in recent years, and there are a lot of well known start-ups in town, but it seems exceedingly difficult to identify a formal start-up “community.”
We had two new members today:
- Sean Kane (@MrSeanKane) – an artist and illustrator who designs for product licensing, publishing, advertising and corporate clients
- Janis La Couvée (@lacouvee) – a financial services professional, maven, catalyst, vision caster and capacity builder
See you at Serious Coffee at 1280 Broad Street in two weeks, Tuesday July 7th between 8:00 and 9:30 am.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:05 am
It's interesting to note that traditionally sources have cited tourism, government and the military as the key economic engines of the CRD (Greater Victoria area). It would be interesting to compare stats on dollars created annually by existing businesses within those sectors versus new economic development in technology.
And, is there new economic development within the big three traditional sectors?
June 24th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Hi Janis,
I read a number of websites and other information sources about Victoria prior to moving here. Almost all of them credited tourism as the number one economic driver for the city. And, with Victoria being the capital of BC and the HQ of Canada's Pacific Fleet, one could suspect government and military would be fairly omnipresent also.
I believe I first heard that the technology sector was number one during a VIATec gathering, so I don't have the exact source of that information. But I suspect the three engines you list have a more established lobbying presence with the local and regional government and economic bodies and a certain mindshare with the residents due to history.
I think there's a lot of money spent to attract tourism dollars, but because of the real physical infrastructure limitations of being an island city, growth is probably capped at the current levels and those dollars are really addressing maintenance. I'm not certain that government and military are "growth" oriented at this time, either.
I think return on economic investment could really be maximized by investing in growing a thriving tech industry.