Plugged in
Beneath Saint John’s streets is a highway of glass. Fibre optic cables, laid by NBTel in the 1990s, provides a level of high speed access unmatched in any other city in Canada to this day. NBTel’s strategy was simple: the traditional phone business was changing and the days of selling hardware were over. The next generation would belong to companies that could provide solutions. Initially, that drive...
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Urban life, digital culture
There’s an old tourism slogan that states “Saint John: Where it All Begins”. I’ve always thought that’s a great description of Saint John’s place in geography, history and technological innovation. First, Saint John is where the river meets the sea, built around a natural harbour created by the mouth of the St. John River as it flows into the Bay of Fundy, home to, as anyone knows, the highest...
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The power of one
Saint John residents have never been ones to follow the pack. It is a city that prides itself on going its own way, which is why, in 2003 a group of ICT leaders decided that if Saint John was going to have a vibrant start-up culture, they were going to have to build it themselves. By this time Gerry Pond, the former NBTel CEO, and a group of his former colleagues had reinvented themselves as Mariner...
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Plugged in
Beneath Saint John’s streets is a highway of glass.
Fibre optic cables, laid by NBTel in the 1990s, provides a level of high speed access unmatched in any other city in Canada to this day. NBTel’s strategy was simple: the traditional phone business was changing and the days of selling hardware were over. The next generation would belong to companies that could provide solutions. Initially, that drive to lay cable was born from the need to provide ICT solutions for customer contact firms such as Xerox, Air Canada and IBM. However by the mid-1990s three other factors were driving growth in broadband research and development in Saint John.
The first was economic. The region’s major employers needed to increase productivity and provide improved services to customers – through ICT solutions. The second factor was public policy. All three levels of government (federal, provincial and municipal) were early supporters of NBTel’s drive to innovate, first as advocates, then as clients and, in the case of the federal government, an early – and important – investor in start-up technology.
The third factor in broadband innovation was competition. The local market was simply too small to drive business growth, so NBTel’s sales force looked outside New Brunswick to market its broadband technology, specifically to other telecommunications companies in Canada and the United States. Locally, Fundy Communications, owned by Saint John entrepreneur Bill Stanley, was the first cable company in Canada to push into phone services. By 1999 Saint John was the battleground between two former monopoly utilities determined to evolve into nimble ICT innovators. To achieve this, Fundy Communications invested in a province-wide hybrid fibre cable system, making New Brunswick the only jurisdiction in North America to have two fibre optic systems. By 2000 Saint John was the most technologically advanced broadband community in North America.
If the 1990s was about laying down the fibre, the first decade of the 21st century has been about harnessing the content. Bell Aliant’s new generation of broadband services, FibreOp, is Canada’s first 100 per cent fibre-optic network and its fastest. It led the City of Saint John and Bell Aliant to work together to develop solutions for municipal services that are born in Saint John and and which can be marketed globally. Saint John is home to the world’s first hosted telephony system that integrates digital phone services with Microsoft’s OCS (Office Communications Server). This system allows municipal workers to phone, text, instant message, email and share data across phones and computers at all municipal sites. This small city is able to integrate significant digital systems because it doesn’t have to pay to develop the fibre infrastructure – NBTel and Aliant already did it.
That network enabled the Saint John Police Force to be one of the first in Canada to adopt an intelligent policing strategy, which uses ICT to identify, analyze and then manage high-risk neighbourhoods and crimes. It was one of the first municipal forces to install mobile devices in squad cars and in 2012, the force will move into a fully networked police headquarters, the most advanced in the region. Intelligent policing helped the police force determine where to locate community policing centres, how to staff patrols and how to work with the community to reduce crime and improve quality of life in the city’s high-crime neighbourhoods.
Back down on Saint John streets, citizens and small businesses interact online, particularly with social media sites Facebook and Twitter, and today a strong concentration of retail shops, restaurants and bars are managing relationships online.
Proof that when private sector innovation meets informed public policy, it is possible to change a culture.
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Urban life, digital culture
There’s an old tourism slogan that states “Saint John: Where it All Begins”. I’ve always thought that’s a great description of Saint John’s place in geography, history and technological innovation.
First, Saint John is where the river meets the sea, built around a natural harbour created by the mouth of the St. John River as it flows into the Bay of Fundy, home to, as anyone knows, the highest tides in the world. So we’ve got a cool address.
Second, Saint John is home to a surprising number of Canadian firsts. There are the ones Saint John residents proudly recite such as the first fire insurance company (1801), first charter bank (1820), first municipal police force (1826), first public water system (1840), first public library (1883) and first public playground (1906). But the list of national firsts doesn’t stop at the turn of the last century, even if Saint John residents’ memories do.
That brings us to our third point – Saint John is a leader in creating an urban digital culture. Don’t click away – stick with me and let me explain.
It starts with the technology, courtesy of the old NBTel and more recently, its successor Bell Aliant. NBTel was the first company in Canada to install a fully digital network, in 1993. With that technology, NBTel became the first company in North America to offer voice mail (1993), the screenphone (1993), caller ID (1993), Internet service (1994), high-speed Internet on home computers (1996) and streaming video services over phone wires (1998).
Meanwhile, while NBTel’s engineers were working away in the Living Lab, small business owners along with members of the arts, culture and heritage community were looking around the city’s dilapidated Uptown and entertaining some dreams of their own. They realized that the city’s 19th century successes had left an architectural legacy. Saint John has the most intact collection of 19th century commercial and residential architecture in Canada. In 2000, the City of Saint John developed a Heritage Action Plan to encourage the redevelopment of the Uptown core, home to the majority of Saint John’s architectural heritage. Since then, over $50 million has been invested in heritage properties.
For instance, there’s the Red Rose Tea Building, rejuvenated by local developer Mike McGraw. The red brick structure, built in 1903 at the entrance to the Uptown, is now home to Mariner Partners, a number of ICT start-ups and increasingly, law and accounting offices wanting to be close to their developing client base.
The second major development was the multi-million dollar restoration by John Irving of a block of heritage buildings (1878-1880) located at the corner of Prince William and King. Its anchor tenant is CenterBeam, Inc. and other tenants include ICT firms Ambir Technology Group and CSO Customer Solutions Online, claim management company Cunningham Lindsey and Irving Oil Limited. Down at street level there’s Birks Jewellers, Handworks Gallery, Opera Bistro, Salon Circa, Wellington West Financial, Freak Lunchbox and inprint, a UNB Saint John Bookstore.
A short block away, the restored John Law Building is home to a cluster of design firms and artists’ studios. The historic old Post Office building has morphed into The Prince William, a trendy address for some of the city’s latest batch of start-up companies and the Saint John Theatre Company has a new home in the BMO Rehearsal Hall on Princess. These renovations coincided with the rise of the post-NBTel start-ups and these young, innovative entrepreneurs were attracted to the city’s heritage commercial spaces.
Today Saint John’s Uptown is the most densely populated mixed-use neighbourhood in the Maritimes. The area contains close to 1,300 businesses – the largest percentage from the ICT sector – and 18,000 residents. All these people have created a truly urban campus along Saint John’s waterfront – housing, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, design firms, lawyers, accountants and knowledge workers all within walking distance of each other.
That’s a great story – anchored by Saint John’s rich history and propelled forward by the imagination of the people who live here now. Saint John is where it all begins – the really cool part will be to see where we take it.
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The power of one
Saint John residents have never been ones to follow the pack. It is a city that prides itself on going its own way, which is why, in 2003 a group of ICT leaders decided that if Saint John was going to have a vibrant start-up culture, they were going to have to build it themselves.
By this time Gerry Pond, the former NBTel CEO, and a group of his former colleagues had reinvented themselves as Mariner Partners, a consultancy firm specializing in Internet Protocol TV – the technology developed by iMagicTV in the 1990s. Clients included Morgan Stanley, Lucent, Alcatel and here at home, Aliant. However the executive team at Mariner Partners had another goal: to mentor Saint John’s emerging ICT sector. In 2004 they and other ICT professionals created PropelICT, a different sort of industry association and tech incubator.
This group didn’t believe the traditional tech incubator model, which provides a combination of financing, office space and mentorship, would work in Saint John. At the time, venture capital investments in Atlantic Canada were almost non-existent and the big venture cap firms in Toronto and New York, rarely looked east of Montreal for ideas. Propel’s founders knew financing would come through the development of strong relationships with would-be angel investors in Saint John and the Maritimes. Office space in the city was ample and relatively cheap compared to other urban centres, so it was unlikely these start-ups would need help with the rent – if they needed an office at all. Home-based businesses were beginning to appear and Saint John’s long-standing relationship with fibre to the home, meant entrepreneurs could do business with the world from their living rooms. That left mentorship. They immediately tapped into Saint John’s collaborative business community, pairing senior business executives with entrepreneurs, a one-to-one match-up. This idea would be replicated in other areas of development in Saint John over the next decade, including poverty reduction and immigration.
In 2006 PropelICT hosted Atlantic Canada’s first Angel Investor Summit to promote a start-up culture in the region, anchored in Saint John. Out of this was born a classic angel investor network to help finance start-ups. It also launched a Canadian first, a group of in-kind angel investors. These were Saint John lawyers, accountants and other business service providers who accepted a small stipend from PropelICT in exchange for advice and services to guide entrepreneurs through business development, growth strategy and the regulatory and licensing process for their intellectual property.
In its first 36 months, PropelICT nurtured 21 Saint John start-ups and continues to work with early stage companies. Some of its early successes were: Bravada, which is a market leader with its business software for the insurance industry; ShiftEnergy, which develops real-time energy use analysis; and Radian6. There are gazelles…and then there is Radian6. In 2007 its original quartet – Chris Newton, Chris Ramsey, Marcel Brun and David Alston joined Propel’s Accelerator Program to develop a new technology to monitor social media engagement across all platforms. In March 2011 San Francisco-based Salesforce.com purchased Radian6, with its 400+ employees and offices in Saint John, Fredericton and Halifax for $316 million.
Saint John can lay claim to another type of gazelle, this one in the realm of social entrepreneurship. The Saint John Community Loan Fund, led by Seth Asimakos, is Canada’s first micro-credit community investment group. Created in 1996, the fund provides credit to low-income applicants who want to start a business. Its first loan, of $5,000, went to a guy who wanted to salvage sunken logs from the bottom of the river. It was a success, the entrepreneur earned a living wage, paid back the loan and went on to start a second business in the city. In 2004, the Fund was a founding member of the Canadian Community Investment Network. To date the Fund has disbursed over $200,000 in loans, generating over $3 million in new income. The average loan is $1,250.
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