Age and experience had little to do with the expertise shown at Tech Talk yesterday, part of the North Bay and District Chamber of Commerce’s Business Week.
The Business Centre Nipissing Parry Sound took the avenue of tech in the business industry when building their panel of speakers for Wednesday morning, but what was truly notable was the diversity of age and experience, pulling from as young as 17 and up.
“North Bay has a small presence in tech but if we talk and come together with the technology a little more we can figure out ways to go forward and bring more of the tech industry in this area,” David Moore, founder of Moore Development said. “There is so much potential and untapped businesses who can use apps and engage with their customer base—there is so much tech can bring to the table.”
Moore Development, an independent software development firm, draws its roots in 2010 when Moore began teaching himself how to write code. Now, 17-years-old, he has a strong background in coding under his belt and applied for a student scholarship to attend the Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2016—and got selected.
Other panellists were pulled from Tangr, VS Group, BuzzMasters.ca, The Game of Things, and Hard Hat Hunter.
Jennifer Nickerson, Manager at the Business Centre, said for a lot of their members, adapting to new technologies and social media can be a real challenge, so it was natural to host a panel of tech-savvy businesses—especially considering some of the area’s new and innovative companies.
“It started because we had been working with clients who are starting more tech-based businesses,” Nickerson said. “We wanted to focus on the newer entrepreneurs because I see at the Business Centre an influx of people coming in wanting to start businesses, so the value is getting information from somebody who has been there done that, but is still very recent. I would say a common theme is some of the basic tech-oriented skills related mainly to marketing, for example, new businesses coming in know their industry, but getting the word out there is something new to them.”
For the couple dozen entrepreneurs in the audience, it was a real learning experience, having the digital expertise of the seven panelists at hand. Richard Fortin, owner of RFP Media found the panel very informative, wanting to find out more about local tech companies.
“I’m really curious on what the people on the ground in North Bay are doing right now in terms of tech and its influence on our businesses,” he said. “I’m in the communications world so there is a lot of change in technologically in terms of how people communicate and I was interested in seeing what this great panel of entrepreneurs have to say about tech in our city right now.”
Fortin said the discussion was informative and beneficial for the business community and that he’d like to see more of these kinds of panels. However, one of the biggest things he noticed from the panel is a shift in business ideology.
“There seems to be a shift from this 'dog-eat-dog' competition to 'maybe we need to collaborate and how we help each other out' instead of not,” Fortin said. “That’s something that’s exciting.”
