This week, Office hours, were not too busy but I did have a few interesting meetings:

Open Data

I had a few IT execs who live in Morrisville, very interested in the Town moving forward with an Open Data Initiative.   The main reasons cited were the success in having citizens develop apps, which can help increase the productivity of the Town and can lead to the growth of successful entrepreneurship ventures.

They did provide me some specific examples from the NC Datapalooza event, which I did attend, but there were companies, who emerged from the Open Data Initiative and were presenting to receive a spot at the CED Venture conference.

Cloud Computing 

Samudara VIjay, Founder of Sam IT Solutions, an IT services company in Morrisville, met with me to share ideas on how the Town could reduce our capital expenditures in IT by moving to a managed service model, where companies could manage servers for us in a data center, but do so at a much lower price point than if we worked directly with the Data Center.    Samudra cited specific examples, of how the Town of Morrisville could be moving our Exhange Servers, Disaster Recovery, and test environments to the cloud environment.

NC League of Municipalities is recommending cloud services to other municipalites as a more efficient way to run and deliver IT services,

Next step will be to introduce him to Bo and IT staff but I am very interested in creation of an IT Task Force or IT Advisory Committee, so we can leverage the IT minds we have in the area.

Bobby Bahraim, Excelerate Health Ventures 

I met with Bobby Bahraim, a successful entrepreneur, and now Managing Partner of an Angel/Venture fund for health care industry.    The fund, which is now closing on $5 million will target investments in software, and companies innovating in health care.

Bobby shared with me how the elimination of the Qualified Venture Tax Credit, will reduce incentives for investors to invest in North Carolina, and also highlighted the fact, that other states, like Tennessee and Arkansas, are making it easier for Venture investors to invest by allowing them to cash in tax credits in other states., or to increase the amount of credits or percentage of credits received by investors.

Next step will be that he and I will be organizing an Entrepreneurship/Innovation roundtable, where we can provide input to legislators, on what our region could be doing to innovate more and create more jobs.

Triangle Cricket League/Public works 

I met with Public works and the TCL to get an update on the reseeding of the Shiloh fields, etc.     Blake Mills will have a final update by next week and the League players are very excited about the Shiloh fields.