Demystifying technology
From her windowless office in the basement of the Cape Cod Community College library, Teresa Martin has a clear, bold view of the region’s technology future.
It’s not one pegged to the imploded ambitions of the Silicon Sandbar, which envisioned the Cape as a modest version of Route 128’s high-tech community. Hers is built on the more modest premise that technology should be accessible to every company, no matter its size – in ways that will enhance business productivity and expand personal horizons.
As executive director of the Cape Cod Technology Council, this Silicon Valley émigré wants to “demystify technology and make it a natural thing we all do.”
“It’s there today to make it easier and more profitable to run a hospitality business or a wedding business,” she said. “It’s about the tools we all need to drive buying and selling in many different industries.”
She points to businesses such as that owned by Diane Langland, who publishes Edible Cape magazine and Web site from her home office, relying solely on a computer, e-mail and off-the-shelf software.
In the last two years, Martin, 45, has worked diligently to redirect the technology council from a group of high-tech businesses to one that partners with the public schools, community college, chambers of commerce and town governments to make technology accessible to everyone.
That strategy has helped engineer Unwired Village, an initiative to turn whole towns, such as Orleans and Falmouth, into WiFi zones; or the Junior Tech program, which encourages private companies to collaborate with the Cape’s talented students in subjects such as math and science.
“At the core of our commitment is how to make the Cape more competitive economically,” said Martin. “How do we improve education; how do we support the professional community; how do we drive growth through collaboration.”
Life-altering technology
Martin, a single mother, arrived on the Cape from Palo Alto, California, at the start of the new millennium. She had just sold one of the first online publishing companies, and was figuring out what to do next, just as the Internet bubble was exploding.
Her main focus in 2000 was not business, but her daughter, who is deaf and needed a cochlear implant. Martin had targeted either Boston or New York City because of leading children’s hospitals in both cities.
When a Quincy software company recruited her to be its chief operating officer, the decision was made. Having always loved the Cape, she decided to purchase a home in Sandwich and commute along Route 3. While housing prices were high, they were nothing compared to the Silicon Valley.
What Martin remembers most upon her arrival was the sense of “connection, and human scale.”
“I was sitting at a restaurant and overheard a conversation about windows. Only after a few minutes did I realize they were talking about those things on houses, not an operating system,” she laughed.
For Martin, technology has been more than a professional platform; it has been a very intimate, life-altering force. It gave her daughter the capacity to hear.
“Until my daughter’s fourth birthday, she had never heard a human sound. Now, after successful implantation, she is a pretty normal third-grader who yaks away.”
An ‘Open’ Cape Cod
Her affinity to the Cape made it much more comfortable to consider a leap from the private sector to the nonprofit technology council three years ago. That’s when Martin was approached by board members, at a time when the organization was struggling to redefine its mission and stem waning membership.
It was not even a full-time position at that time, and it paid very little, but she decided to take the position with minimal due diligence. “My job was to look at the council much as a consultant would. Should it be built up or shut down? What were the realistic options?”
As 2007 begins, the council is far from shut down, but it also is not out of the woods. Currently, there are about 160 business members, paying dues ranging from $129 for an individual to $2,500 for a large company. “We are growing and retaining members,” said Martin, “but it’s still a struggle. How do we articulate the benefits of membership – especially with so many chambers of commerce and business associations competing for members’ limited dollars and time?”
Martin’s major goal is to shift the council to an organization dedicated foremost to economic development and education. Technology, she believes, should be viewed as a key tool to achieve that end.
She also has set out to create what she calls “an intellectual watering hole,” a place where professionals of all types can congregate to enjoy each other’s company and learn together. The focus of this initiative is the monthly First Friday breakfast, where she recruits some of the nation’s leading technology leaders to speak about issues ranging from robotics to anti-spam software.
Then, there is the council’s growing connection to educational partnerships with the community college and public schools.
Her office in the college library is a concrete example of that partnership. There, she is helping engineer OpenCape, a program that is building a regional data transport infrastructure. The college, WHOI, UMass Dartmouth, and most Cape towns are participating in the process. Its goal is to expand the region’s bandwidth.
“We currently do not have the critical bandwidth to be economically competitive,” she explained. “We need to expand it so we can attract more industry, science and education. These industries need to push huge amounts of data through T1 and T3 lines as well as the Internet for collaboration, research, remote learning and emergency communication in times of crisis.”
At a recent OpenCape summit, more than 100 attendees representing information technology companies, towns, educators, elected officials, health and emergency preparedness interests gathered around the commitment.
“Before the end of 2007, an OpenCape entity will be legally set up with the help of county economic development funds and, hopefully, with financing from the John Adams Innovation Institute,” said Martin. It envisions two separate networks running parallel. One would be for education, research and nonprofit traffic; the other would be for commercial use.
The Unwired Village also means that anyone with a wireless laptop can connect anywhere on the peninsula wherever they find a specific red logo, explained Martin. “If you can access your account at one Unwired Village, say, Orleans, you can eventually access it at any Unwired Village – all the way to Falmouth, and then to other locations off-Cape.”
She likened it to the CLAMS system, where you can take out or return a book at any participating library in the group.
With growing numbers of home-based businesses here and expanding ambitions for institutions such as Woods Hole and the Marine Biological Laboratory, OpenCape will be critical in coming years, she insisted.
There’s also the trend toward more telecommuting, not only for those living here and working off-Cape, but also for local businesses that cannot find adequate office space on the Cape and prefer to let employees work from home.
“I still cannot access the same information and resources here that I could in Palo Alto eight years ago,” said Martin. “Information and the ability to turn it into knowledge is what levels the playing field.”
When you listen to Martin, you hear a person transported by a passion for technology, but never as the mad scientist. She views technology as a humanizing force with particular relevance in a place like Cape Cod.
“In many ways, information technology is letting me live on Cape Cod and be as relevant and productive as I could be back in California or in Boston,” she said. “It gives me the flexibility to balance work and home so much better. I don’t need to commute two hours each way to work.
“I can get up early and handle my e-mail; then take a break to get my daughter on the bus. I don’t need to be tied to a particular set of hours or a particular place. I can move boundaries and improve productivity. I can bring my life more into balance.”
Originally published in the March/April 2007 issue of Cape Business.
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