Unless you’re one of those 20- or 30-somethings toiling away in one of those cool spaces with exposed brick and steel beams, you may not know downtown London is home to dozens of tech firms, including the fastest growing website on the Internet. (Thank you, diply.com.) Kate Dubinski explores the downtown digital playground and why its growth matters to London.

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Hilarious viral videos.

Top 20 lists.

Those links you can’t help clicking, sharing, talking about.

Chances are, some of that content was put together by a growing crew of writers and editors at diply.com, working away on the fastest-growing website on the Internet.

Their headquarters? An office building at King and Richmond streets in London.

“We want to crack the top 100 websites in the world in the next six months,” says Taylor Ablitt, chief executive of diply.com.

But most people haven’t heard of it, let alone that it’s a local success story.

In a way, the company and its hiring of local talent, commitment to London, move downtown and even lack of exposure makes diply.com the poster-child for what’s going on in the city’s core: It’s quickly becoming a digital playground rivalling other more well-known tech centres such as Ottawa and Kitchener-Waterloo.

For those living and working in it, downtown London’s digital corridor is thriving.

Joel Adams, director of Mainstreet London and co-owner of Hacker Studios, a co-working space on Dundas St. across from the central branch of the London Public Library, can name two dozen downtown tech companies off the top of his head.

The list includes some of London’s largest and fastest-growing employers, including voices.com, that just received a $900,000 boost from FedDev Ontario, and Digital Extremes, the city’s largest gaming company, sold last month to a Chinese holding company.

Some companies are one- or two-person startups. Many started in locations far from the core, lured there because of cool spaces — exposed brick and steel beams in heritage properties — and the appeal of working with and close to like-minded digital innovators.

Others have made national lists of fastest-growing companies or best places to work.

“There’s a lack of awareness with the general public that we have such a concentration here,” Adams says. “People know that London is known for gaming, but there’s a community within all these digital sectors. There is a critical mass, but people don’t know it.”

Today, diply.com is hovering in the top 200 websites in the world, based on the number of page views and visitors.

Not bad for the brainchild of two guys, one a business grad, the other about to become a dentist, who thought they might want to be entrepreneurs and launched their social entertainment project just a year ago.

Fast forward almost 12 months and their main competitors are Buzzfeed and HuffingtonPost, the two top social sites out there.

The two Western grads, Ablitt and buddy Dean Elkholy, the company’s chief operating officer, are part of a four-member management team.

They’ve hired a dozen writers, mainly from Western University and Fanshawe College, and recently moved their offices downtown. They hope to hire 40 more people in the next few months.

Their website has more visitors than any other Canadian-owned site on the web — more than 50 million unique visitors a month. More than half their traffic comes from the United States.

kate.dubinski@sunmedia.ca

twitter.com/KateatLFPress

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So what’s the big deal?

Who cares if a bunch of small startups and digital and tech companies locate downtown?

What the London Economic Development Corp. calls the “digital creative” labour force employs about 8,000 people, about 3% of the city’s labour force.

Compare that with 30,000 Londoners who work in manufacturing and it’s a drop in the economic bucket.

“In terms of number of employees (in the tech sector), it’s small, but it can grow,” says Mike Moffatt, a London-based economist who studies job trends in Southwestern Ontario. “Manufacturing employment isn’t going to grow. With tech, there is potential.”

The ingredients for growth are there. Downtown has a good mix of traditional IT employees, such as TD Canada Trust, small- to medium-sized companies such as rtraction and Digital Extremes, and startups no one has even heard of.

Co-working spaces are springing up, and Adams, who co-owns Hacker Studios, plans to expand to a second location downtown intended to house startups further along in their business plan.

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Why downtown?

Other cities are good at promoting themselves, but London is quietly expanding into the tech sector.

“We’re gaining traction as a tech city,” says Ablitt, chief executive of diply.com. “We’ve been overlooked because of Waterloo, but we have one of the best universities in Canada here.From a creative content perspective, Western and Fanshawe can’t be beat.”

Having employees with different, but similar, skills, working close to each other, is important.

“The play is, you have a lot of little companies, and you assist them and they assist each other,” Moffatt says. “You hope that one of them becomes a RIM or OpenText and have a ton of spinoff. The more little companies there are, the better your odds of creating a RIM.”

In other words, the simple act of getting similarly minded and skilled people in an area can have a huge impact.

“There’s a bit of a snowball effect that occurs in the development of a cluster,” city planner John Fleming says. “The more tech businesses that accumulate together, the more there seems to be of those.”

That’s already happening in London, but the city needs to toot its horn more, most in the tech industry agree.

“One of the things that we’re not doing is telling the story enough,” says Marilyn Sinclair, who heads TechAlliance, a resource agency to tech companies in London and Southwestern Ontario.

“We have small, medium and large companies here and a lot of diversity. Waterloo brags a lot, and we don’t. We need to brag more.”

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What we’re doing

The London Plan — the vision for the city with downtown development playing a major role — is written and is likely to be adapted by the new city council.

Now, city planners are turning their minds to a smart city master plan. That process starts in the new year.

“We’re the first city in the province to have a smart city section in its master plan,” says Sean Galloway, the city’s urban designer.

Components of the smart city master plan could include public Wi-Fi access points at transit villages and downtown and a fibre-optic infrastructure plan. The key is planting the seeds for building inward, not outward.

“Our hope is we can put the infrastructure there so employers locate there and that will help residential infill development,” Galloway says.

“When we tear up our streets, we have to put in fibre optics. But where? How do we put technology into the transit corridors? We have to look at all that.”

The trick is providing infrastructure to a sector that changes at “lightning speed,” Fleming says.

“We need to make sure that what we’re doing is malleable to changes over time.”

That kind of thinking will keep growing companies such as diply.com in London, its founders say.

“We thought of going elsewhere, and we’ll likely have to have at least a sales team in (Los Angeles), but our content development is here,” Ablitt says.

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But what else should we do?

Making sure there are qualified people to work at the new businesses is next on the list. “Our biggest problem is finding qualified people,” Ablitt says.

That’s echoed at most tech firms, big and small, that want to grow.

Western and Fanshawe do a good job of teaching software development and “old web” skills, but smaller companies rely on self-taught mobile app and web-based development to bridge the gap between school and work skills.

One, Inner Geek, is teaming with the UnLondon digital and media arts group to bring a coding school here, run by developers who work in the field.

“There’s a lot of excellent web talent but not a lot of people who can do front- and back-end web stacks,” says Greg Smith, Inner Geek’s lead web developer who graduated from Fanshawe in 2004.

“London is old web, and we want to develop that into new web,”

Inner Geek chief executive Colton Hathaway started the web design and mobile app company 18 months ago with three others. The Dundas St. business employs 15 and is looking to hire more.

At the same time, the city and its core have to be attractive places to stay and work.

“We need a city that’s attractive to millennials: A thriving downtown, lively cultural scene, great recreation, spaces that allow for multiple forms of connections to people, a place that is highly walkable,” Fleming says.

“Those are the things we need to have for the tech sector demographic to be looking at our city.

“What the city does in the next few years will have a significant impact on the kind of labour force we’re able to attract.”

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What’s going on downtown?

Here is just a handful of examples of how downtown London is quickly becoming a tech corridor:

UnLondon has moved part of its shared space for digital media artists downtown from the research park near Western University.

“We want to be at the intersection of art and electronics,” says Titus Ferguson, director of the new space called 121 Studios.

It’s being billed as a funky place where people can record podcasts, work together on videos and collaborate on projects.

“We need people who are here and who are good at what they do to want to stay,” Ferguson said. “We can be a part of that.”

The Roundhouse Project, a renovated railway building on Horton St. that used to be home to the Great West Steakhouse, will soon be home to digital companies ATMOS Marketing and rtraction that took home this year’s top honours at the London Business Achievement Awards in March.

Other digital companies also are leasing part of the funky space.

The restored building is a good example of tech companies using architecturally interesting designs, not traditional office buildings.

Diply.com, the fastest growing website in Internet history, moved from the outskirts of London to an office at King and Richmond streets.

“London is a great spot,” says Justin Ogglesby, the company’s chief marketing officer. “With the college and university here, it lets us recruit a lot of people.”

Most of the company’s employees have graduated in the last two years.

“Downtown is central to everything. We want people to have fun at work, to be close to restaurants, places to hang out after work. It’s nice to have other companies around us,” says Ablitt.

Fanshawe College will soon be the beating heart of the city’s digital hub, with students in the downtown campus graduating with much-needed skills.

Almost a year ago, the college opened its Centre for Digital and Performing Arts on Dundas St., just west of Richmond St. After a hard-fought battle, its IT program will relocate to across the street in what used to be the Kingsmill’s department store.

Many of tech companies on the cusp of growth will you the same thing: It’s tough finding qualified employees.

“One of the biggest issues is recruitment of employees,” Fleming says. “With Fanshawe there and expanding with its IT program, you can see the development of the sector.”

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What they said

"The advantage of London is that you can live downtown, start a family, move to Old South or Old North and still be relatively close to downtown. In Toronto, you’d need to be working a lot more and making a lot more money to live that close to work and to downtown."

Mike Moffatt, economist

"We’re hopeful that we’re seeing a (tech) cluster in its early stages of development."

John Fleming, City planner

"You have to be what you are, not try to recreate Toronto or Waterloo or Silicon Valley. We’re not starting from nothing. It’s all there, we’re not doing a good job of connecting it."

Amanda Stratton, Startup Canada

"We need a mix of traditional IT people who have side projects that can spin off. These are the jobs that are being created in London and all over the world."

Joel Adams, Hacker Studios (co-working space)

"Waterloo brags a lot and we don’t. We have to stop comparing ourselves to KW and tell our own story. When we (compare ourselves) it makes everyone think we’re second rate and we’re not."

Marilyn Sinclair, TechAlliance

"It’s healthy for the tech industry to have cross-pollination."

Colton Hathaway, chief executive and co-founder of Inner Geek