By Juliet O’Neill
When we picture the ByWard Market, the image that comes to mind is what we see on the ground floor of buildings as we walk around — a melange of food stalls, bars, restaurants, hair salons, clothing and coffee shops. But above many of those storefronts is another world populated by firms serving a clientele that spans the globe.
Shopify has moved out, but Lowertown remains a fashionable neighbourhood for over 20 small hi-tech companies.
A Bitcoin ATM stands at the entry to Atomic Motion, a company with the Twitter slogan “Design and Conquer.” The slogan reflects enthusiasm for website design and digital marketing in offices above a bar and coffee shop owned by CEO Dan Cummins.
Across the street at 126 York, 85 employees at Kivuto Solutions Inc. help deliver digital textbooks and software services in 14 languages to businesses and schools across the globe. Kivuto moved in three years ago when Shopify, a fast-rising e-commerce powerhouse, outgrew the trendy space in a heritage building and moved to Elgin Street.
Two blocks up at 61A York, Systemscope occupies an early legendary Shopify address, since renovated, upstairs from a buffet restaurant, Tucker’s Marketplace. Systemscope is a strategic consulting firm that specializes in helping the federal government’s digital transformation.
While Systemscope has been based in the Market for 18 years, close to government clients in Ottawa and Gatineau, there is a notable churn in the tech sector in the neighbourhood.Survey Monkey, for example, bought Fluidware at 12 York St. a few years ago but moved in August 2018 to Laurier Street as services and staff expanded and outgrew the premises. Fluidware produced an online system to manage grant and scholarship applications. Survey Monkey provides online survey tools around the world.
Kivuto, long known as e-academy, was founded in 1997 by Ram Raju, the CEO, who was bumped to advisor in the wake of the company’s purchase in March by Legado Capital and a group of investors led by Roynat Equity Partners. Kivuto’s services are expanding, too, raising the question of whether it will outgrow the space as Shopify did.
While growing from five guys in a coffee shop to 3,000 employees worldwide, Shopify retains its association with ByWard Market as the place where the company “was born” and where new recruits might want to live.
“Colourful street art, farmers’- market stalls, clothes by local designers, specialty food shops, Canadian cheese, and of course, maple-infused chocolate,” Shopify tells prospective employees on its website. Plus: “All the Beavertails you can handle.”
Some of the companies focus on fun at work for young people. One is U7 Solutions at 78 George St., (think exposed brick walls) which has designed, built and launched 113 websites in the last decade. Its 10-year portfolio ranges from the Tulip Festival to RVezy, Canada’s first sharing marketplace for renting and owning recreational vehicles.
Another is Magmic, a 15-year-old firm which develops mobile apps for playing cards and board games, and has partnered with such big-league companies as Disney, Hasbro and Mattel.
Magmic’s web site shows employees playing ping pong at its fourth-floor offices at 126 York St., known to some locals for Market Organics, the health food store on the ground floor.
“Working in the gaming industry tends to have the reputation for being pretty chill, lots of fun and extremely rewarding,” says Magmic’s recruitment page. “The rumors are true.”
Working in the Market is great, says Valerie Husky, Director of Growth and Monetization at Magmic. “You can shop at lunchtime, have a drink on a patio after work. There’s a lot of action, always something interesting happening.”
A quick tour reveals about half the office cubicles are empty; Magmic has outsourced work. While other companies are too big for their space, Magmic may be getting too small.
Samantha Larocque also says that working in the Market “is fantastic,” especially in the summer with patios and the fresh fruit kiosks.” She’s a project manager at Lionbridge, which took over Lexi-tech Ltd. so recently that the office name hasn’t changed in the entryway at 126 York St. The 45 or so employees at Lionbridge provide translation and translation technology.
Two blocks over at Pointer Creative, atop a Starbucks coffee shop, CEO Chris Pointer and his team design websites exclusively for Shopify’s online merchants, among them The New York Times Store and the Ottawa Redblacks.
SEO Twist, a digital marketing firm with such clients as Second Cup and Anytime Fitness, is expanding and renovating its space at 110 Clarence to bring production staff to the same floor as executives and to make room for new hires later this year. The company has 24 in-house staff and a handful who work from home.
Is there a tech community in Lowertown?
Spokespeople at several companies said no, that their community is more with clients than with other companies in their sector.
One exception was Eddy Abou-Nehme, owner of the IT firm Revolution Networks and co-founder of its sister company SEO Plus, inspired by reading SEO for Dummies while trying to figure out digital marketing. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Both companies are at 55 Murray St.
Abou-Nehme says there are groups with meetups that some of his 22 employees in the market attend. “Most of the staff are Millennials,” he said in an interview. “They live downtown and walk or bike to work and they have a bit of community here.”
Did you know? Computing Devices Canada started in Lowertown
In 1948, Computing Devices of Canada established its original workshop in a former grocery store at 36 Anglesea Square (corner of Augusta). A business dream of three men – George Glinski, Joseph Spychalski-Norton, and Peter Mahoney – the company is now recognized as the first significant electronic high-technology company in Canada.
While earnings the first years often did not leave enough to cover pay cheques, within 20 years it had become Canada’s first publicly traded export-oriented technology company. Later spinoffs included companies like Northern Electric (Nortel), Gandalf Technologies and Leigh Instruments.
Nancy Miller Chenier
The creators of the Kwilt “shoebox,” a personal mobile cloud for storing digital photos and videos, didn’t find such community when they worked in the Market, says chief technical officer Mostafa Hosseini. They moved recently from a Dalhousie Street office to the Innovation Hub at Bayview Yards, a tech centre that opened with great fanfare last year.
The founders chose the Market as a vibrant neighbourhood with many options to host clients, Hosseini said in an interview. But the Hub facilities are more economical “and interaction with other startups is a great advantage.”
Invest Ottawa, the non-profit agency which, among other things, runs a startup “acceleration program” at the Innovation Hub, describes the ByWard Market as one of Ottawa’s attractive neighbourhoods in its international “Work in Ottawa” campaign:
“The perfect blend of historic charm and modern living. Often called the heart of the city, the ByWard Market has a wide range of eclectic shops, boutiques, artisan markets, museums, art galleries, nightclubs and trendy restaurants with secluded courtyards. Your calendar will always be full while living in the ByWard Market.”
The campaign was launched in April 2017 to attract tech talent to Ottawa. Ryan Gibson, senior marketing strategist at Invest Ottawa, said that for years the agency campaigned to attract tech businesses to establish in or expand to Ottawa.
“Now we target job seekers,” he said in an interview. There is a talent shortage in all 40 to50 tech centres around the world. “We give them a snapshot of what their lives would look like here.”
An annual report on tech talent published in July by commercial real estate company, CBRE, said Ottawa’s tech job pool increased by 15.9 per cent from 2012 to 2017. Statistics Canada says there were 70,600 tech professionals in Ottawa in 2017, with an average income of $88,000 per year.
Lowertown`s share of workers in the sector is small but impressive, given the reach of these companies working in the virtual world.