A wide-angle shot of the MaRS Centre, where the event was held.
I caught last night’s ICT Toronto gathering at the MaRS Centre, where ICT Toronto announced the release of their “cluster development strategy” paper — a plan to boost the competitiveness and standing of Accordion City’s information and communications technology sector over the next five years.
A close-up shot of the MaRS Centre entrance.
It was easy to spot the DemoCamp gang — me, David, Jay, Sutha, Bryce, Mark — among the attendees, who numbered around 100. We were the only people there not in suits. It certainly looked as though we were there only people there who wrote code for a living. We made sure to mingle and found that most of the attendees seemed to be from the management side of various information and communications tech firms or from organizations that invested in them.
The riff-raff! From left to right: David Crow, Sutha Kamal, Jay Goldman.
While waiting for the presentations to begin, we talked about how we could get some of the “suits” in the room to attend some of the upcoming events like Mesh, DemoCamp or BarCamp. Would these events hold any interest for them? I suggested that we “sell” the idea of such events to them as some kind of “walk on the wild side” tour. “What Burning Man is to us, DemoCamp and BarCamp could be to them!”
David enjoys a drink; Jay prays that nobody mistakes him for a bike courier.
In addition to my notes below, Mark Kuznicki and Rob Hyndman have posted blog entries about the event as well. The Globe and Mail has an article on ICT canada titled Toronto Aims to be High-Tech Hub and we have yet to see if the National Post is going to take a break from their “Oil! Oil! Yeah, baby, we got the Prime Minister and the oil! Suck it, Eastern Canada!” binge long enough to notice.
The strategy proposed by ICT Toronto boils down to these four points:
They presented an executive summary of the strategy paper after the presentations, and the full paper is now available for download [600K PDF].
Here are my notes from the presentation. The first speaker was Accordion City mayor David Miller, followed by three speakers from the ICT Toronto working group, followed by a question-and-answer session.
and by extension information technology.
location, and a prime one at that. It’s across the street from
a world-class university across the street, some of the world’s best
research hospitals just down the street, a short walk from the most
respected financial institutions in the world, plus Toronto Hydro —
who are setting up the city with WiFi across University avenue.
cities like London! We need to think of ourselves in the ICT cluster
in the same way.
the virtues of Toronto to businesses there. Their responose at the
end: “We didn’t know that about Toronto.” Toronto needs to sell itself
better: “The only thing we haven’t done is tell our story.”
His presentation: “Toronto’s ICT Industry in a Global Context”
Some statistics:
Canada’s workforce, c. 2001 | 15.4 million |
Toronto’s workforce, c. 2001 | 2.4 million |
Canada’s ICT and related workforce, c. 2001 | 580,000 |
Toronto’s ICT and related workforce, c. 2001 | 133,000 |
Service occupations facing global competition | 80+ |
Affected workers in Canada | 2.4 million |
Affected workers in Toronto (guesstimate) | 550,000 |
Canada’s world rank as exporter of business services in 1995 | 6 |
Canada’s world rank as exporter of business services in 2002 | 13 |
be prohibitively expensive
traffic. The oxcart is delivering materials for the construction
of a superhighway. That’s their challenge — their infrastructure for
the infrastructure is a mix of modern and archaic.
5,000 Accenture employees in Canada. There are 18,000 in India right
now.” Accenture’s goal is to have 50,000 in India in 3 years.
Street firm, moved it to Toronto for about 6 months to make it
operational, and then transported it to India.
be as high as $70 to $80 billion
technology. India’s president is a rocket scientist…literally!
Haque
(Norwest Venture Partners) is working on a US/Indiajoint arrangement to create a “Bell Labs” in India”
the “R” and India doing the “D”.
together
competitive?
future? (It seems to favour well-rounded people over those with
someone with a narrow skill set.)
deal? This sort of thing isn’t on the radar of the federal
government with their “5 priorities”.
the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City
ICT sector
centres in the world by 2011
world
services for the entrepreneurial community
in the Toronto region (Toronto lacks federal/prov-funded
ICT research organizations
internationally — assess future bandwidth and wireless needs
and make sure that we have world-leading WiFi users to match
manfacturing, agricultural, forestry and fishing are going to
emerging economies
engineering students and profesisonal engineers put together
3rd in North America
companies:
by 2011?
grandkids
federal levels
“nearshoring” work
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