With the politicians have largely vacated Ottawa for the summer, I find myself this morning sitting in on a one-day high-tech summit convened by the federal government at the old train station on the Rideau Canal known as the Government Conference Centre.
The co-hosts for this event are Industry Minister Tony Clement and Research In Motion Ltd.'s co-founder Mike Lazaradis.
Many of the 150 folks in the room this morning (or their companies) used to be core to my work through most of the 1990s as a Toronto-based technology reporter. I was covering tech during the boom and I was there at the bust. Now I cover federal politics.
So, after nearly a decade away from tech, some quick first impressions as this event gets underay:
- First, the digital economy elite gathered here looks awfully white. In fact, I counted and, gathered here today, are 131 white guys, 1 man who is not a white guy, and 18 women. Industry gatherings 15 years ago looked white and male. Surely it's changed since then?
- Industry Canada convened this conference and organized the speakers and the lineup was predictable a decade ago: There's the obligatory rep from the Information Technology Association of Canada. There's our homegrown stars — RIM and Open Text. And there's the country managers of some branch plant tech outfits – Xerox and eBay subbing in today but it could have been Microsoft, HP, or Yahoo back in my day and they all have largely the same message delivered by the same in-country manager who's inevitably got a sales background,not an engineering or garage start-up background. What's missing from this conference from ones that were similar to those a decade ago is the young lions — the Hill brothers from Zero-Knowledge in Montreal; Dean Hopkins of Cyberplex; or Paul Mercia of Cybersurf. Where are the young under-30 enterpreneurs? Or how about a rebel like Calgary's Theo de Raadt and the legion of programmers he leads developing OpenBSD? I can remember Paul Martin, then the finance minister, preparing for his leadership run bringing those young lions to Ottawa to tell him what to do about tech. He wanted to hear the twentysomethings tell him what government could do (and get a little dot-com pixie dust to boost his campaign).
- The core complaints of the industry have not changed. Not enough angel investors. We don't support venture capitalists well enough. Government and other industry sectors don't buy enough tech stuff from Canadian companies. Canadian companies spend next to nothing (relatively speaking) on research and development.
Twitter users can follow along some of the discussion for this summit at #digecon