photo credit: Ben Fredericson (xjrlokix)

The power and the glory

The next technology boom may well be based on alternative energy, says Geoffrey Carr. But which sort to back?

EVERYONE loves a booming market, and most booms happen on the back of technological change. The world’s venture capitalists, having fed on the computing boom of the 1980s, the internet boom of the 1990s and the biotech and nanotech boomlets of the early 2000s, are now looking around for the next one. They think they have found it: energy.

Many past booms have been energy-fed: coal-fired steam power, oil-fired internal-combustion engines, the rise of electricity, even the mass tourism of the jet era. But the past few decades have been quiet on that front. Coal has been cheap. Natural gas has been cheap. The 1970s aside, oil has been cheap. The one real novelty, nuclear power, went spectacularly off the rails. The pressure to innovate has been minimal.

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1. Starting next Wednesday, we will begin holding weekly informal brainstorming sessions exploring innovation, startups (both for profit and not-for-profit), alternative energy, problem solving (if you need help with a particular project) and whatever else the attendees decide is most interesting :-)If you like to get on the invitation list please email event[at] innovationtoronto.com. We will start at 5:30 p.m. and end somewhere around 7:30  

Wishing everyone a very Happy 2008!

We would like to thank everyone who participated in our first forays into the wonderful world of startups. It has been a fascinating time and a vertical learning curve

To those who don’t know some of the background, we were not scheduled to initiate any activities until well into the first quarter of 2008. Then along came the great opportunities offered by the first Toronto Startup Weekend and Facebook Weekend Beta to start to get to know the startup and IT community in the GTA. It has been a great way to make new friends and start to shape the next steps for our an important part of our new Innovation Toronto focus.

After much discussion, it has become quite clear that there are some very interesting and timely things we can do to be of help to the community in general and address specific needs of the youth, startup and alternative energy communities specifically.

We would now like to engage those of you who may be interested in learning about and working together on our general plans to also get specific about what we might be able to do together in this brand new year. Is it an event or series of events that you need flexible space for? Is it finding resources and talent for your new project? Are you looking for a new adventure? Is it finding a new way to engage the community and give back?

Whatever your motivation, we would like to invite you to join in evolving our ongoing discussions and projects. Over the next few days we will be posting the outlines of a number of projects that we are most interested in seeing come to fruition. We would also like to hear about what you are working on and where collaboration might be advantageous.

You are invited . . .

Happy 2008