Yesterday’s news that Amazon is opening an engineering office in Vancouver is a really good one for the city. While development offices can never replace having “real” anchor companies in a community, they can help attract and train talented developers that at some stage leave the company and start new companies. It is this typical cycle that has long fueled innovation in Silicon Valley – and the Google engineering office in New York City has shown what impact an engineering office of a large web company can make for a community. So let’s hope that Amazon will quickly expand their operations in Vancouver and BC (my former company AbeBooks – now an Amazon subsidiary – still has their 100+ people HQ in Victoria) and that many other web companies will follow suit – Facebook? Google? Twitter? Continuously ranking as one of the most livable cities in the world Vancouver should be one of the top locations for North-American tech companies to build a presence in.

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• Amazon to open Canadian office in Vancouver (techvibes.com)