Industry committee  Sure. There were a couple, I suppose. One of the big ones was ultimately cost, of course, but it was cost in the ongoing maintenance of the environment. It's very expensive to build up a server infrastructure, because it's constantly atrophying. The trouble with technology, as we all know, is that the second you buy it, it's out of date.

Industry committee  I'm a Nova Scotian boy. I took off to Boston to do a degree in physics and biochemistry at Harvard in the mid to late 1990s. Instead of going to med school, I ended up in IT in Boston in the late 1990s period, in the heyday of the dot-com era. I built up a portfolio of client relationships and started a dot-com in health care IT in the late 1990s.

Industry committee  Honestly, for us it's a mix. In some ways we don't care. For the services we use to run our business, I'm not terribly concerned about where they exist. We'll rent a service from Salesforce for CRM. We're a Google Apps customer for messaging. For file storage, we use Dropbox wherever those servers live.

Industry committee  Thank you very much for inviting me and letting me join you from another cloudy day in Halifax via video conference. As you mentioned, I'm founder and president of TeamSpace. We're a custom software development and video game studio based here in Halifax. We maintain a full-time staff of roughly 80 people, the majority of whom live here in Nova Scotia, and some in Toronto, the United States, and England.

Industry committee  Sure. We're about 80 people. We're largely a services-driven firm with an original IP game development studio in-house as well. The bulk of our clients are U.S. based. We have a few in the U.K., but most of our clients are large enterprise media and entertainment companies. For concrete examples, we have a team of 20, out of our 80, who build almost all of Nickelodeon's and MTV's websites.

Canadian Heritage committee  For my part in Halifax, I would give you a resounding “yes” to that, Mr. Armstrong. My business is largely export-driven. The more help I can get that drives dollars across the border into this region, the better it is for Canada. I would also argue that those efforts would pay doubly in that they help us with recruiting.

Canadian Heritage committee  I do, but not very much, I will confess. We are actually in conversations with EDC now, exploring receivables insurance. We are familiar with a couple of the other programs. It is not been an organization we've had deep involvement with yet over the lifetime of our company.

Canadian Heritage committee  I would loudly echo that. That was exactly the comment I wanted to make as well. Banks in this end of the country are familiar with the R and D programs and the SR and ED tax credit programs. They are familiar enough that they are comfortable financing against some of those projects with the right other government partnerships in place.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'll make two quick points. One that may be worth looking at is companies that provide cloud infrastructure. Much of our technology delivery, as Mr. Armstrong alluded to, is moving to the cloud for digital download. We've seen a number of clients who want to use cloud infrastructure not move forward with projects, particularly Canadian-based projects, because most of the large cloud hosting environments tend to be based out of the U.S., and folks here in Canada are worried about exposing themselves to Patriot Act things in the U.S. that mandate the release of personal and private information.

Canadian Heritage committee  May I, from Halifax, respond as well?

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, but I would offer that our growth has certainly slowed in the last 12 to 18 months, largely related to the dollar. Two to three years ago, when the dollar was stronger, we had tools available to help us win new work and to be competitive. We have some major contracts with Nickelodeon and MTV that renew every year.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, I suppose it is. As I mentioned, the temporary foreign workers we've tended to engage have been people with specialized skills—more senior and experienced skills. We have a fairly diverse portfolio of clients across a number of media sectors and a number of different specialized technologies.

Canadian Heritage committee  That's 99% of what we do. As I mentioned in my remarks, we really don't build a lot of stamped-on DVDs or large blockbuster console games. Everything I do, everything I export, is bits and bytes. Every game we build is either available online in a web browser, has been optimized for a mobile web browser, or is a mobile application built to be installed on your iPhone or Android device.

Canadian Heritage committee  That's absolutely true. I grew up an hour north of here, close to your neck of the woods. We've been exploring setting up satellite teams in more rural parts of the province, partly because some of the tax credit regimes we have here in Nova Scotia have rural incentives to encourage companies to look outside the urban cores, which I think is a great idea.

Canadian Heritage committee  Your comment is a fair one. We certainly see that the entry-level folks grow into mid- and senior-level resources, but that's always been the case. I've been doing this for 12 years, and this has always been a problem. It seems that we have a voracious need for more talent in this industry.