Santa Monica Mayor Kevin McKeown has deep ties to technology, and has been at the center of the city’s technology boom since day one –- literally. In the 80s, with an early Apple II computer, McKeown became publisher of an international online newsletter and a local activist on Santa Monica’s Public Electronic Network.
McKeown served on SMMUSD’s technology advisory committee, the City’s Telecomm Working Group, the steering committee of Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights, and as chair of the Wilshire/Montana Neighborhood Coalition, before being elected to City Council in 1998. Volunteering his computer skills to Santa Monica public schools led to his current career, Macintosh consultant to the district.
McKeown has lived in Santa Monica most of his life, but was born just outside New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and won a full scholarship to Yale. In 1973 McKeown drove cross-country to California, and by 1977 was general manager of KROQ.
Now in his fifth term on the City Council and Mayor of Santa Monica, McKeown focuses on affordable housing and environmental sustainability, and was Council liaison to the Planning Commission, Housing Commission, Landmarks Commission, Arts Commission, and our Task Force on the Environment.
Can you shine a light on some of the more notable tech businesses that have set up shop in Santa Monica’s, and how they play into LA’s overall tech / entertainment ecosystem?
Any list of tech and entertainment firms calling Santa Monica home is bound to leave out key players, but among the locals are Hulu, Cornerstone on Demand, Edmunds.com, TrueCar, Demand Media, Lionsgate Entertainment, and Universal Music Group.
New emerging start-ups include ParkMe, Tongal, Science Inc., GumGum, and TigerText. Uber has just signed a $28 million, ten-year deal for Santa Monica office space right by the beach on Ocean Avenue.
Tell us about a few of the things that make Santa Monica a great place to live & work.
Getting started is as easy as succeeding in Santa Monica. Almost twenty different flexible shared workspaces, incubators and accelerators, like CoLoft, Cross Campus, and MuckerLab, are augmented by a rich schedule of tech-related events, hackathons, investor pitch nights, tech talks, and conferences.
Any downtown Santa Monica happy hour is abuzz with tech firm networking, and local colleges and our business community’s annual Santa Monica Youth Tech Program provide a deep pool of potential employees with both business and coding skills.
What is Santa Monica doing to attract & retain new businesses in the tech space?
Technology enabled my start in local political activism; in the late 80s, I was one of the founding users of Santa Monica’s pioneering municipal teleconferencing system, the Public Electronic Network. We used 1200 baud modems and posted just text. It was primitive, but no other city had ever tried wiring residents together online.
Santa Monica’s leadership in all things tech has been recognized with well over fifty major awards from the Center for Digital Government, the Public Technology Institute, Information Week magazine, and others, starting with a 1989 Urisa Government Achievement Award for the Public Electronic Network, all the way to our most recent honor, being named a Top 10 Digital City by the Center for Digital Government.
Twenty-five years and a few processor upgrades later, Santa Monica is one big digital beach party on a 100 Gbps city-owned fiber pipe – Santa Monica City Net has built its own fiber optic cable network to serve its downtown-based businesses, and continues to grow. http://www.smgov.net/departments/isd/smcitynet.aspx
What technological advances has Santa Monica adopted to make life easier for its residents?
Living in Santa Monica is as much fun as working here, and residents enjoy direct connection to local government through citizen engagement apps like GO Santa Monica, SMAlerts, and WIN, our web information network.
The extensive smgov.net website gives mobile access to digital video and audio archives of City meetings, and GIS mapping tools for everything from zoning information to mashups of on-line police patrol and crime data. One of our newest innovations, an Open Data portal at data.smgov.net, provides query, filtering, and visualization tools for access to a broad and deep reservoir of raw government data.
In the mid-90s, not yet a Councilmember, I served on Santa Monica’s Telecommunications Task Force and helped write the long-term plan that had us bury fiber whenever we did trenching for utility installation or street maintenance. That once-dark fiber is now the fastest municipal broadband network in the entire country, CityNet, delivering a scorching 100 Gbps with no throttling and complete net neutrality.
A boon for business, that unparalleled connectivity will someday be extended to residences — a pilot program starts this year. Meanwhile, free public wifi saturates our commercial and transit corridors, plus 33 “hot zones” in parks, at beaches, and along the Third Street Promenade, for example. Yes, you can code, shop, and tan all at the same time in Santa Monica.
What do you see in store for the future of Santa Monica, 2015 and beyond?
Santa Monica is home to over 2,400 tech and entertainment businesses. Something like 22,000 employees work in “Silicon Beach.” Santa Monica provides a uniquely inviting environment, with unmatched opportunities for entrepreneurial collaboration and mutual support. There’s also an electric social scene, especially at the heart of Silicon Beach in downtown Santa Monica.
We’ve only begun to make Santa Monica the perfect place for cross-pollinated tech innovation, access to venture capital and a skilled workforce, enjoyment of a tech-savvy local culture, and the unmatchable Southern California beachside lifestyle.
