Living Locally - Learning Globally

By choice, I haven't been travelling much lately and have made a conscious effort to connect more with the local tech community. I've been doing so in a variety of ways the past few months, and it's a nice change from all the networking I do at industry events in the U.S. As big a city as Toronto is, there hasn't been much business here for me, and I'm trying harder to fix that.

One avenue I've recently explored is the York Technology Association. Just like the name says, it's a local networking group, and I attended my first luncheon event today. Some pretty interesting companies here, and as I get more involved with YTA, I'll get better connected.

Another reason for attending was their speaker, who was presenting about cloud computing. I've been writing about this in a few places recently, and I think it's one of the big trends to watch for in our space. The presenter was Phil Morris, CTO of Platform Computing. They've been around for a while and certainly know the space. His talk was too heavy on the technology, but it was a good primer for the audience. There were no new takeaways for me, but it was great to connect with a local player in this space.