Forget San Francisco, you need to digg Toronto
San Francisco may have it’s Digg, it’s Scoblizers and Valley Wag, but Toronto is positioning itself to be the Web 2.0 capital of the North.
DemoCampToronto7 was held this week at the No Regrets bar in downtown Toronto. The deno camp presented a number of Web 2.0 startups including Portal Prophet Platform, Feelingbullish.com, Paruba.com and 3D info visualization from The Glove.
Toronto is also the home of Amber MacArthur, one of the new online divas of the Video blogging age. Her impressive list of productions include G4 Tech TV – Call for Help, commandN VideoCast, Gadgets and Gizmos, Inside the Net Podcast and Torrent also on G4 Tech TV.
In May was the Mesh Conference held at the MaRS Collaboration Centre in Downtown Toronto. It hosted some luminaries including Om Malik, Canadian ex Pat Tara Hunt, David Crow and Steve Rubel. This was highlighted as one of the seminal events in the Web 2.0 calendar. Another impressive effort is the Innovations Commons, an attempt to build a community of Web 2.0 people and allow them community space.
Toronto has a Global presence, has a unique brand and is one of the world’s most multicultural and ethnically diverse cities. It is Canada’s financial and economic engine, as well as one of the country’s most important cultural, artistic, and bio and health science centres. The eco system that is the creative community has the theatre and music. Toronto is home to Canada’s most active English language theatre scene, and is considered to be the third largest centre for English language theatre in the world, behind New York City and London. The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is widely considered to be one of the top film festivals in the world and is the premiere film festival. By attendance it is the world’s largest film festival.
Toronto is also known for it’s film industry. In 2005 $898.245 million worth of film and television productions were shot in the City of Toronto.
- Major productions: $773.103 million
- Commercials: $120.6 million
- Music Videos: $4.542 million
Source: Toronto Film and Television Office.
One of the key requirements, if you have not guessed by now, is not just good programming talent, but excellent creative talent of which Toronto has an abundant supply. Toronto has created great software companies such as ATI, Research in Motion, Hummingbird and Tucows.
San Francisco may have the most engineering talent per square mile, but they lack the creative pool that cities like Toronto and New York have. Where Toronto has the edge is in the creative and engineering talent pooling together. It is this confluence of talent that produces one of the most prolific Web 2.0 community on the planet.
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[...] Kiwi Bloke makes a great case for Toronto becoming the Web 2.0 capital of the North. The recent activity from Toronto startup and the tech community in general has been very positive.  In the last couple of weeks, several Toronto-based projects have received their short bits of fame — Bumptop on digg and other sites, FileMobile (local demo coming soon) on TechCrunch, and BubbleShare also on TechCrunch…that’s all great stuff. [...]
[...] I suspect some folks in Vancouver – home of Dabble DB, Qumana, Pixpo, Bryght, etc. – will disagree but at least one person, Kiwibloke, thinks Toronto is becoming the “Web 2.0 capital of the north”. “San Francisco may have the most engineering talent per square mile, but they lack the creative pool that cities like Toronto and New York have. Where Toronto has the edge is in the creative and engineering talent pooling together. It is this confluence of talent that produces one of the most prolific Web 2.0 community on the planet.” [...]
video blogging consumes more server bandwidth than traditional text blogging but video blogging is more exciting’`-