General Tech News

[kevinbottawa]

I didn't see a general thread for Ottawa tech news so I created one. Apologies if there's one already and I missed it.

Here's the Ottawa Citizen's series on how Ottawa can brand itself as a nation tech hub.

The IT Factor: What Ottawa must do to brand itself as a true national tech hub

The IT Factor, Part 2: Will Ottawa have more tech jobs than it can fill?

The IT factor, Part 3: As a tech town, Ottawa still has a long way to go

The IT Factor, Part 4: Will autonomous cars drive Ottawa's tech future?

The IT Factor, Part 5: How this city needs to find the 'Ottawa advantage' in tech

[kevinbottawa]

Might as well post the first article in the series.

The IT Factor: What Ottawa must do to brand itself as a true national tech hub

TRACEY LINDEMAN
Published on: October 14, 2017 | Last Updated: October 15, 2017 4:31 PM EDT

For most of the past 15 years — ever since Nortel began hemorrhaging jobs — the morning rush hour traffic in Kanata has largely been outbound, heading into downtown Ottawa or other parts of the region. Office buildings had floors of unused space.

That’s changed in the past few years. Both office space and talent are scarce in the Kanata tech park and, if there’s still traffic heading east, there’s an equal amount of it heading into Kanata, says Jenna Sudds, the outgoing executive director of the Kanata North Business Association.

There are now more than 500 companies in Kanata — the highest concentration of tech companies operating within Ottawa’s 2,778 square kilometres.

“It’s the full parking lots, it’s the full restaurants, it’s the traffic on our roads, it’s the congested buses,” Sudds says. “All of those may sound like a negative, but they’re actually the biggest positive indicator of the health of what’s happening here.”

Kanata has started rebounding from the decline of Nortel, thanks in large part to the telecom multinationals that eventually moved in to scoop up the pieces of that company.

Those companies — Ericsson, Nokia, Cisco — have name-brand recognition, but most of Kanata’s other tenants do not. In fact, the average person has likely never heard of many of Ottawa’s most successful companies. That’s because they’re mostly B2B (business to business) companies that make components of other, more famous technology, such as the sensors, software and networks that make autonomous vehicles and space travel possible. They’re unsexy stories to tell in a consumer-driven news market, and media real estate is assigned accordingly.

As we’ve seen from other tech-heavy cities, though, narrating your own story — and doing it well — is essential to attracting investors, entrepreneurs and tech workers. Toronto has positioned itself as the nation’s tech capital. The University of Waterloo is the MIT of Canada. Montreal has a young, edgy energy with European flair that attracts risk-takers.

So what is Ottawa?

It’s a beautiful city surrounded by greenspace with a pretty good housing market, decent entertainment options and a nice quality of life — a perfect mix to attract out-of-province and international talent.

But if you ask other Canadians, it’s The City That Fun Forgot; a government town where things are mostly predictable and boring. This general lack of awareness of and appreciation for what’s really happening in Ottawa’s tech scene is one of the biggest barriers the city faces when trying to compete against other Canadian ecosystems to get onto the world stage.

Over the next four weeks, the Citizen will take a deep and honest look at the city’s tech scene, its strengths, weaknesses and ambitions in a special series dubbed The IT Factor.

In many ways, Ottawa’s tech scene is its own best-kept secret: You need to know what you’re looking for in order to find it.

Mayor Jim Watson, in an interview for this series, pulled out a map showing that Ottawa is geographically larger than Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver combined. But that size doesn’t always work to Ottawa’s advantage; in fact, it makes it harder for investors and entrepreneurs to locate the heart of Ottawa’s tech sector.

Certainly, Kanata has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to tech talent, but it’s also out in suburbs, mostly hidden away in office towers inside of a tech park. Then there are small gatherings of startups in the ByWard Market and in downtown Ottawa.

Meanwhile, other tech communities around Canada tend to have a reasonably concentrated presence of startups, accelerators, universities and investors in their respective downtown cores.

Invest Ottawa, at the recently opened Bayview Yards Innovation Centre, is trying to become that hub for this city. It has a startup incubator, a makerspace for product prototyping and an airy and flexible event space. But even that’s in a semi-industrial dead zone outside the downtown core.

So while there may be a lot going on behind closed doors and throughout the city, Ottawa’s tech community has very little drive-by appeal — and that makes it tough to get pinned to an investor’s map.

The innovation centre is part of an attempt to reform Ottawa’s reputation as a government town, but it has its work cut out for it. “I think the one challenge Ottawa has, is that Ottawa will always have a duality for the city’s brand,” Klipfolio CEO Allan Wille says. “Ottawa’s got tech and it’s government, and it’s more difficult to build a singular brand.”

Part of the difficulty in building a singular brand may be because Ottawa has seen what happens when you put all of your tech eggs in one industry basket. In turn, it’s almost over-diversified to compensate. There’s a sprawling information and communications technology (ICT) industry here, but there’s also autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, video gaming, cleantech and software as a service (SaaS).

This diversity is great for the economy, but from an image perspective it makes Ottawa look a little confused. Let’s use an analogy: If government is a solid and recognizable half of the pie, and a quarter of the pie is Shopify, the remaining quarter is sliced into a hundred little pieces, turning it into an unidentifiable mishmash. In short, Ottawa would need more unity in its tech sector to compete with just how large and all-encompassing its government identity is.

To be fair, Shopify has attracted some interest from outside of Ottawa, and it’s frequently upheld as the city’s proudest startup success story. But it’s also become a point of fixation that has been hard for Ottawa to look past. The truth is, Shopify likely would have succeeded no matter where it was founded; that its founders decided to stay in Ottawa should be viewed as a lucky break.

There is some progress being made, however, in getting Ottawa’s tech scene its own unique identity.

But there are broader issues that make starting a business here challenging in a way that it just isn’t in other cities. There are many government funding programs and angel investors to get a young firm on its feet, but a lack of mid-range investment — particularly of the venture-capital persuasion — makes it incredibly tough for young companies to scale to profitability and beyond. Some founders are beckoned to bigger cities, where they may have an easier time finding the right collaborators, mentors and investors.

And, when it comes to Ottawa’s talent pool, most people interviewed for this series agreed that while there’s a lot of junior talent coming out of the schools as well as a lot of senior tech-sector veterans, the middle ground of talent — e.g. those with between five and 15 years of experience — is a little sparse. That kind of talent is essential to scaling startups and turning them into profitable and mature businesses.

Over the next four weeks, The IT Factor will explore what the city does well, what it could do better and what it will take for people across Canada — and around the world — to think of Ottawa when talking about tech and innovation. We hope you’ll follow along.

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-...ional-tech-hub

[ars]

Just ran into this, I totally missed those articles. Going through them now

Thanks for posting this!

[kevinbottawa]

Originally Posted by ars

Just ran into this, I totally missed those articles. Going through them now

Thanks for posting this!

No problem! Just added part 5.

[kevinbottawa]

The new Invest Ottawa head seems pretty forward thinking. He has some good ideas. Love that they're already planning a Bayview Yards expansion.

‘Ottawa 4.0’: Where Invest Ottawa’s CEO wants to take the capital in five years

BY: Peter Kovessy
PUBLISHED: Jan 17, 2018 11:09am EST

An expansion of Bayview Yards, a digital business-to-business marketplace and a narrower focus on supporting specific industries are part of a new five-year plan unveiled this week by Invest Ottawa.

CEO Michael Tremblay outlined his vision Tuesday to create more “sustainable,” high-value jobs in Canada’s capital and build greater global awareness that Ottawa is “the best place to live and work.”

Speaking before an audience of some 250 local business leaders, Tremblay said he wants to increase the number of globally competitive companies that graduate from Invest Ottawa’s startup incubator. He also wants to physically expand Invest Ottawa’s home at Bayview Yards as well as help local entrepreneurs tap into the R&D capabilities of the city’s post-secondary institutions and multinational companies.

One of the initiatives that Tremblay wants Invest Ottawa to tackle in the short term is building a “digital marketplace” that connects buyers and sellers. Specifically, it would allow a large company that’s looking to outsource the development of a product or fill some other gap to crowdsource solutions from a defined pool of smaller firms.

At the same time, Tremblay said Invest Ottawa needs to increase its efforts to address the perceived shortage of skilled workers felt by many local firms.

“If we don’t scale our talent pool in Ottawa, we can’t realize our full potential for the simple reason that we won’t have the talent to fulfil our dreams,” Tremblay said at Tuesday’s Mayor’s Breakfast speaker series, co-hosted by OBJ and the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.

Moving forward, Invest Ottawa will also concentrate its resources on specific industries. Tremblay said the organization hasn’t selected those sectors yet, but said autonomous vehicles and ICT are obvious areas of local strength.

“We have to define (our) areas of focus are and not let the market pull us along,” he said.

Fourth Industrial Revolution

The release of Invest Ottawa’s strategic plan comes nearly a year after Tremblay – a former Microsoft executive who also spent time at JDSU – was named Invest Ottawa’s chief executive. He officially started work in March 2017 and then spent several months gathering input and presenting drafts of his plan to some 1,100 people.

Tremblay said his thinking is heavily influenced by the theory that the world is entering a “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” an economic era broadly characterized by new technologies that combine physical, digital and biological elements.

Drawing on the writings of German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab, Tremblay said companies are operating in a time of “great promise and great peril” with virtually every business sector susceptible to rapid change and disruption.

Several Ottawa firms are already changing entire industries. Tremblay often argues that e-commerce firm Shopify is disrupting Amazon’s business model by empowering individual merchants at the expense of the Silicon Valley giant, which itself began to significantly erode the market share of traditional bricks-and-mortar retail barely a decade ago.

Elsewhere, MindBridge AI is developing tools to alert auditors to suspicious or anomalous activity in financial records – a move that’s virtually drawn directly from Schwab’s playbook, which, among other predictions, forecasts that 30 per cent of all corporate audits will be performed by artificial intelligence by 2025.

Show of support

MindBridge AI CEO Eli Fathi was one of more than a dozen local entrepreneurs and executives at local firms showcased in a short video played during Tremblay’s presentation containing testimonials of Invest Ottawa’s value as well as endorsements of the organization’s new strategy.

“What excites me about the strategic plan Invest Ottawa put together is the desire to make Ottawa big in technology and to create an ecosystem that will put us on the map,” Fathi said.

Others praised the organization’s efforts at fostering early stage companies.

“(Invest Ottawa) is the best place to start a business in Ottawa today,” said Fluidware co-founder Aydin Mirzaee, who now leads AI and machine learning startup Fellow Insights.

Expansion plans

As Invest Ottawa looks at new programming and areas of focus, it’s also preparing plans for a physical expansion of its headquarters at Bayview Yards.

Completed in late 2016, the 46,000-square-foot former public works garage was conceived as a hub for researchers, entrepreneurs and investors to collaborate through “happy collisions,” or impromptu conversations and networking that wouldn’t happen if all those people were located in separate facilities across the city.

Tremblay called Bayview Yards “a place where we come together and as a collective compete in the world, as opposed to acting as islands.”

He added that Invest Ottawa is already working with local developers to come up with concept plans for an expansion. Early ideas include creating multi-use space to support Ottawa’s cultural industries and connect the 14-acre property to the adjacent light-rail station.

“For a city of our size, I’d love to see us get to a half-million square feet,” Tremblay said. “Bayview (Yards) is fantastic, but Bayview (Yards) isn’t big enough to facilitate the kind of growth and expansion plans I have in mind.”

http://obj.ca/index.php/article/otta...tal-five-years

[kevinbottawa]

Big win for Mitel.

MLB taps Ottawa’s Mitel for on-field communication systems

BY: Techopia Staff

The Toronto Blue Jays’ next call to the bullpen will be powered by an Ottawa telecom firm.

In the midst of celebrating its 45th year in business and ringing the bell at the NASDAQ stock exchange on Monday, the firm announced its technology will power communications systems on the field for all 30 teams in Major League Baseball.

The deal unifies communications between the press box, dugout, bullpen and video review rooms at every MLB ballpark from the Rogers Centre to Wrigley Field, where teams have until now relied on independent systems.

There’s a practical reason to adopt Mitel’s solution: the new system can monitor and record every call teams make during play, ensuring compliance with MLB rules and regulations.

There’s a brand benefit for Mitel with this deal as well. The firm will become the official presenting sponsor for instant-replay reviews across the league, making Mitel synonymous with baseball’s most exciting plays.

At the stock exchange, Mitel CEO Rich McBee rang the bell to close trading on Monday, which the firm says also kicks off celebrations for its 45th birthday coming up on June 8.

Mitel’s tech will be in place for baseball’s opening day on March 29.

http://obj.ca/article/techopia-mlb-t...cation-systems

[ars]

That's a pretty significant contract for Mitel, both money-wise and PR-wise.

[Jayday23]

U.K. maker of driverless pods selects Ottawa for North American HQ

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa...pods-1.4604638

[J.OT13]

I hate the idea of driveless cars but hey, if it's going to happen, might as well be in Ottawa.

[rocketphish]

OMERS-backed Toronto startup accelerator OneEleven expanding to Ottawa

By: David Sali, OBJ
Published: Apr 9, 2018 1:34pm EDT

A Toronto-based startup accelerator that has spawned success stories such as online investment management service Wealthsimple is expanding to Ottawa later this year.

OneEleven – a partnership between OMERS Ventures, the venture-capital arm of the Ontario municipal employees’ pension fund, the provincial government’s Ontario Centres of Excellence and Ryerson University – was launched in 2013. It currently hosts 34 companies at its main office on Front Street in downtown Toronto.

OneEleven provides mentorship, office space and other services to fledgling firms that have already received one or two rounds of VC funding, generally have between 10 and 30 employees and are poised for major growth.

Now, OneEleven itself is set to expand, with plans to add more locations in Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia in an ambitious bid to go global.

It’s starting in Ottawa, where it’s slated to open an office in early July at 66 Slater St., just west of Elgin Street. It will start with one floor and has an option to take more space. OneEleven also plans to open an office in Vancouver later this year.

Tech industry veteran Dean Hopkins, who is leading the expansion drive, said Ottawa was a natural choice when OneEleven was deciding where to go first.

“Ottawa has a history, a long legacy of entrepreneurship dating back to the very early days in tech,” said Hopkins, who was born and raised in the nation’s capital. “When we looked at the markets, we said this was a great market for us to first expand into.”

Rather than referring to OneEleven as an accelerator, Hopkins prefers to call it an “innovation hub.”

Firms under its roof don’t have to leave after a set period of time, but typically tend to stick around for 18-24 months. By that point, Hopkins said, most of them have raised enough capital to stand on their own feet.

“By the time they reach 30, 40 (employees), they’re really at a point we call reaching escape velocity,” he explained. “They’ve now got the structure, the support and everything to carry on. That’s our job – to get them from startup to more or less self-sustaining.”

Hopkins, who is also a tech adviser for Thomson Reuters, said OneEleven is trying to fill what it is sees as a gaping void in the Canadian tech ecosystem.

He said while there are plenty of tools to help new companies get off the ground in Canada, including incubators and accelerators such as L-Spark and Invest Ottawa that provide mentorship and services, startups are too often left to fend for themselves after a year or two.

“At a certain point in a startup, you reach some traction with customers and you start to really grow,” Hopkins said. “Usually, the startup community at that point sends you off. That’s a very fragile time for an enterprise. There’s a lot that they don’t have yet, especially if you’re not an experienced founder.”

Hopkins was in Ottawa last Thursday and met with L-Spark managing director Leo Lax and Invest Ottawa CEO Michael Tremblay. He credited both organizations with helping “build the base” of tech startups in the capital, and he believes OneEleven can be the next stage of a “feeder system” for L-Spark and Invest Ottawa grads looking to scale up.

“There’s plenty of room for all of us to succeed in our own way,” he said. “We’re new, so we’ve got to come in and earn our keep, but we hope to really collaborate … and really collectively keep our eye on all the entrepreneurs and startups and help them grow.”

Tremblay said he’s eager to sit down with Hopkins and his team to find opportunities for the institutions to work together.

“We’re very active in global markets, so I suspect that there will be a lot of collaboration in terms of helping (OneEleven) companies in markets where we have a presence,” he said.

With investment partners that include RBC, Rogers and Aviva insurance, OneEleven already boasts an impressive list of alumni, including Toronto-based mobile software maker Tulip Retail – which raised US$40 million in venture financing last year – and Wealthsimple, which now manages nearly $2 billion in assets.

Tremblay said OneEleven’s arrival sends a strong signal that Ottawa’s tech ecosystem is on the right track.

“We’re in a position in the city where we’ve got way more opportunity than we have resources to support all of it,” he said. “I certainly welcome having more investment come in, and I think it bodes well to see this come in the form of private-sector investment because they see the business potential.

“The city is buzzing. We’re really doing well, and I think it’s becoming obvious to investors now that this is the city to spend time in.”

http://www.obj.ca/article/omers-back...panding-ottawa

[phil235]

Nice to see this go downtown. There really seems to be some momentum building in that direction.

[1overcosc]

The emerging SaaS cluster in Ottawa is very much centered in downtown.

[Vixx]

^Agree. Seems as though the tech scene downtown is gaining momentum, which is great to see.

On another note, sure would be nice for 66 Slater to get a reclad. The building is stuck in the 80's.

[Harley613]

Originally Posted by Vixx

^Agree. Seems as though the tech scene downtown is gaining momentum, which is great to see.

On another note, sure would be nice for 66 Slater to get a reclad. The building is stuck in the 80's.

Maybe they could just move it out to Tunney's Pasture with it's siblings.

[kevinbottawa]

The chambers of commerce are looking at amalgamating. That's good news. When I first moved to Ottawa I was puzzled at the fact every part of Ottawa had its own chamber of commerce, but I understood that because municipal amalgamation was still pretty recent every part of the city was still looking out for its own interests. The fact that this is a serious consideration says to me there's more of a unified city identity now.

http://obj.ca/article/ottawas-chambe...e-amalgamation

[kevinbottawa]

Ottawa ranked top in North America for rapid tech employment growth

BY: OBJ staff
PUBLISHED: Jul 25, 2018 9:00am EDT

A new report says the tech sector in Canada’s capital has more momentum than in any other city across the continent.

Real estate services firm CBRE released a tech talent scorecard this week that ranked major North American markets across 13 metrics including tech job growth, education levels, office rents, population trends, and housing costs.

Overall, Ottawa ranked 13th among 50 markets surveyed based on its depth of talent, vitality and attractiveness to employers. That’s second-highest position for a Canadian city and puts Ottawa behind Toronto, which ranked fourth overall. The San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and New York led CBRE’s list.

But if the last two years are any indication, Ottawa may be be poised to climb the rankings.

Canada’s capital ranked No. 1 among North American tech hubs with the most “momentum.” CBRE calculates that score by taking the percentage of tech employment growth from the two most recent years and subtracting tech employment growth from the previous two years.

According to Statistics Canada data cited by CBRE, Ottawa’s tech employment jumped 15.2 per cent in 2016-17, a dramatic turnaround from the 10 per cent contraction in 2014-15. That produced a score of 25.2 – more than double that of the second-place city, Los Angeles.

CBRE says tech has been the top driver of U.S. office leasing activity in the last five years. Large tech markets are also typically where rental rates are appreciated the fastest.

In Ottawa, the sector is reshaping the downtown office market, where tech firms – led by the likes of Shopify, Klipfolio, Telesat and SurveyMonkey – now occupy more space than legal and accounting firms combined, according to CBRE.

In absolute terms, Toronto added the most technology jobs in the past five years among all Canadian and U.S. cities, gaining 82,100 technology-related positions between 2012 and 2017.

The lower loonie helped Canadian cities in the study rank by making this country’s wages comparatively lower to those in the U.S.

http://obj.ca/article/ottawa-ranked-...loyment-growth

[ars]

Some disappointing news today:


Amazon is closing their Ottawa software R&D office and relocating employees to Toronto or Seattle

The office was open for only about 2 years and it was a very low key office. I personally don't know anyone who works or worked at that office.

They were also painfully slow at responding to applicants. My wife got an interview request almost half a year after applying when she had already accepted a position somewhere else and started working there.

[YOWflier]

A blip on the tech radar ... not nice to see but certainly not indicative of the overall tech situation.

[1overcosc]

Not surprising. That office seemed like a mess from the day it opened.

Wouldn't be surprised to see Amazon return to Ottawa tech in a few years, perhaps in Lebreton.

[Vixx]

Definitely sucks to see some high paying tech jobs leaving. Despite what anyones thoughts on Amazon are, its good to say a company as large and influential as Amazon has/had a presence in your city.

Like 1overcosc said though, rumour is that the office was a complete mess. A lot of the comments on reddit had people in the tech scene confirm that the general dynamics in the Ottawa Amazon office were quite poor and didnt operate like it was intended to.

Hope they learn from their mistakes and maybe they'll come back one day (in the corporate/white collar tech sense) with a larger office and clearcut vision.