Shiny, happy tech scene

posted by pete on September 4th, 2009

I admittedly lost interest in reading NOW and eye — Toronto’s two free weeklies — a long time ago. However, last week’s cover caught me eye.

The article essentially suggested that Toronto was a technology backwater, a series of failed promises and unrealized dreams — mostly because we don’t have Google Transit.

I have to take a particular umbrage at this notion, as most of my friends are the sort of people that work their asses off making sure the premise of this article isn’t true.

And so, I wrote a letter to the editor. Yesterday, they ran it:

What credentials does Joshua Errett have to write about technology in Toronto (NOW, August 27-September 2)?

Errett paints a dismal picture. Despite the efforts of some bureaucrats, Toronto is not “Silicon Valley North,” and hallelujah for that. Our vibrant and connected tech community actually gets results!

There have been more than 20 DemoCamp events, #hoHOTo has raised $35K for the food bank, and some of the hottest tech start-ups in the world are based in the GTA.

You can’t get coffee at Queen and Spadina without seeing a bona fide tech celeb, while geek socialites frequently have to make hard decisions about which event they’re going to hit up… on a Monday.

Errett goes on at length about Mozilla (yawn) but fails to mention that the open-source myttc.ca provides amazing transit trip planning today.

It’s significantly better than anything Google offers, and it was created by Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan right here in Toronto after they met at TransitCamp.

To describe Toronto’s tech scene as anything other than a shining example is just not reporting on the facts.

Pete Forde
Unspace Interactive
Toronto