Small-Town Appeal Charlottesville's ambiance is attracting young technology firms and revitalizing its downtown.
	Debra Weiss found a "real community" when she moved herself and her internet-based business to Virginia five years ago. Photo by Mark Rhodes

By Sally Kirby Hartman
Five years ago, Debra Weiss was a Southern California resident yearning for a neighborly place to run her business. She decided to leave the state the day she baked cookies and was one egg short. "I had lived and worked in my neighborhood for eight years, and I didn’t know anyone well enough to borrow an egg," recalls Weiss. As she drove to a store to buy the missing ingredient, she vowed to move her home and business.

Weiss found a home in Charlottesville, where she had once visited a friend. She liked the feel of the city, so she moved there in 1995. She could have gone almost anywhere, since her business — The Content Co. — operates through the Internet. Her company designs Web pages and provides trivia questions for online game companies.

Today, Weiss operates from the 1913 house she owns four blocks from Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. Not only does she know plenty of people who can cheerfully loan her eggs, but her business is flourishing. For fun, she staffs the counter at her favorite downtown bakery a few hours each week. "I do a lot of networking there, play loud music and get away from the computer," Weiss says.

Just as important as Weiss’ off-duty life is the core group of people who work at Charlottesville’s growing brood of Internet-related companies. Most are tuned to the same wavelength. "Every time I walk to the Downtown Mall I ... bump into someone I know," Weiss says. "I love it here. There is a real community."

Charlottesville has enjoyed a growing reputation in recent years as a trendy little college town with a touch of sophistication. So it’s no surprise that technology companies — which can do business from anywhere — have been clustering here. Youngish technology workers, who have dubbed the city "Cyberville," can be picky about where they live. Some, like Weiss, are transplants. Others are University of Virginia graduates who either never left or came back when they chose a location to do business.

Charlottesville also has a key financial advantage: The city and the surrounding Albemarle County are home to a number of well-off executives, attracted by the region’s quality of life, who are providing some of the early cash to grow young companies.

City leaders hope to accelerate the momentum of their rising technology sector. They’re proposing legislation to make the entire city a technology zone, which would cut taxes and fees of tech companies that set up shop there. The city also wants to turn a mile-long stretch of West Main Street between the downtown area and the university into a high-tech corridor, and city leaders are working with developers to assemble decent sites from a hodgepodge of empty lots and vacant or underused buildings. Key infrastructure is already in place for such companies. In 1996, Sprint completed a new local phone network, and three fiber-optic rings surround the city.

While Northern Virginia dominates the Internet world in providing the conduits to get people online, Char-lottesville "has a real chance of becoming the content capital of Virginia," says Walt Levering, president of the Virginia Piedmont Technology Council and a partner in Dax Media, another Internet content provider.

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When it comes to dreaming up Internet content, Charlottesville’s providers are an eclectic group. Some deal in pure entertainment, with high-profile Web sites devoted to games and music. Others appeal to a more serious market by digitizing medical books for physicians or the great works of philosophy for scholars. Collaborating with them are various digital art, Web design and computer programming firms.

The common link is their devotion to doing electronic commerce from offices clustered along Charlottesville’s tree-lined Downtown Mall. Like most American downtowns, Charlottesville’s town center hit the skids by the mid-1970s as stores bolted for suburbia. To revitalize the area, the city bricked the streets and closed them to traffic to create a pedestrian-friendly urban area. Although the concept failed in most places and floundered in Charlottesville for a while, it thrives there now, thanks in part to the dot-com entrepreneurs who call the mall home.

William Harvey, the city’s business-development specialist, says that when he moved here from Richmond 13 years ago, "the highest and best use of the mall wasn’t what it should be." There was constant turnover among small retail shops and no concentration of office workers to help make them profitable.

About five years ago, companies with odd names like Kesmai Corp. and Boxerjam Productions began moving into old buildings downtown. With them came casually dressed, young employees working quirky hours. It was a perk to have coffeehouses, booksellers and music stores nearby. Many of them also moved into apartments above the businesses or into vintage homes a short stroll away. Their presence has helped downtown retailers thrive and has even brought new ones: One developer has added an indoor ice-skating rink and a multiscreen movie theater to the mall.

"The success of the Downtown Mall is based on a critical mass of people," says Jack Smith, president of PeopleSpace Inc. Smith’s three-person company provides online games for a diverse group of clients, such as Sesame Street and Playboy. Although his business is less than a mile from the mall, Smith says he wants to be closer. "[I’m] moving as soon as I can find space. I want an older building with brick and beams." Until then, he uses any excuse to go downtown and mingle — for banking, book shopping or for coffee at the Albemarle Baking Co.

The demand from companies like Smith’s has consumed the supply of commercial and residential space downtown. That in turn has put developers to work on the few remaining empty buildings along the six-block mall and its side streets. One $8 million renovation is turning three older downtown buildings into offices and apartments. Across the street, two floors of apartments are going above a Footlocker store. "We are going through an economic revolution downtown," Harvey says.

Growing the technology sector is the main focus of the Charlottesville Venture Group, a nonprofit organization formed in 1998. Co-founder David Martin predicts Charlottesville will see a huge leap in investment capital in the next three to five years. Companies like Kesmai and Boxerjam, which have grown through the early stages of financing and become successful, are getting investors’ attention. "I think folks are starting to see ... that a local investment can be a spectacular yielding investment," Martin says. "The few people who [take] risks will see big yields," he says. "Others will realize they slept through an opportunity."

Martin says Charlottesville and the surrounding Albemarle County has a significant number of well-off executives who have either cashed out and retired there or just relocated. The same quality of life that brings the younger tech workers attracts them, too, Martin says. "I think they do come for the quality of life. This is a very good location to live and it’s a very good location to have a family," he says. "And then they happen to stumble into awfully good opportunities when they get here."

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In 1975, John Taylor left his family home in Suffolk and enrolled as a freshman at the University of Virginia. Twenty-five years later, he laughs that he "never made it out of town." During school he hooked up with classmate Kelton Flynn and started creating computer games for fun. After earning a graduate degree in computer science, Taylor took a job with General Electric while Flynn finished his doctorate. Taylor soon found his game hobby was earning him more than his real job, so in 1982 he and Flynn formed Kesmai Corp.

The company’s name comes from a mythical island in one of the first role-playing computer games Taylor and Flynn marketed on Compuserve. The company started out in Albemarle County and moved to the historic Michie Building on the mall in 1991.

"We didn’t move downtown because it was high-tech," Taylor recalls. "It was just a nice place to be." In 1992, Kesmai converted its games to the Internet and never looked back. There are about 26 different Kesmai games on the Internet, and the company has an $81 million deal with America Online to run its game channel. Today, the company has more than 100 employees working in the Michie, which also houses a yoga school, a performing arts theater and a jewelry store.

Kesmai has been through plenty of corporate changes. In 1994, Taylor and Flynn — who are still members of its board — sold the company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Then in January of this year, Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts bought Kesmai for an undisclosed amount. The buyout is expected to keep the company growing.

Kesmai isn’t the only game in town when it comes to online amusement. In 1995, Jeopardy! co-creator Julann Griffin teamed up with her sister and two U.Va. graduates to start Boxerjam. The online game company claims 150,000 visitors a day to sites hosting its 15 different games. Players are primarily busy women who unwind at night by challenging virtual opponents to games like "Strike A Match."

Boxerjam, which has 65 employees at its downtown Charlottesville headquarters, recently finalized $12 million in financing to help expand the company and open sales offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Boxerjam also has a 46-employee sister company in Charlottesville, Boxer Learning Inc., that makes online and CD-ROM math tutorials.

A company native to Charlottesville, Musictoday.com, got its start creating a Web site for the Dave Matthews Band. Today it hosts several bands’ Web sites and is a major provider of information for music fans. Its site boasts information on more than 6,500 artists and 20,000 concerts, as well as such esoteric tidbits as where to buy John Lennon T-shirts.

Also working from Charlottesville is 28-year-old Dirk Stevens, a former Oracle Corp. employee, whose Retro FX Web site generated 10,000 hits from visitors its first week online last year. Stevens is enhancing popular 1970s and 1980s arcade games with multimedia techniques and putting them online.

Debra Weiss, a former television game show producer, found her niche in game trivia. With the help of free-lance writers and researchers, The Content Co. fills constant demand from online game providers "for a thousand questions about music" and other topics.

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Not all the content coming from Charlottesville is fun and games. There are companies here providing online legal text and financial information. Among the specialized providers is InteLex Corp., which targets humanities professors with its full text editions of the works of Plato, Aristotle and other philosophers. By subscribing to InteLex’s Web site, scholars and professors "can create a custom library," says Brad Lamb, InteLex president. The 13-employee company started in North Carolina in 1989 publishing works on floppy diskettes and relocated to downtown Charlottesville in 1994. Its clients include 600 universities in 42 countries.

Charlottesville also is home to Silver Chair Science and Communications. The 25-employee firm started six years ago as a medical textbook publisher. Last October it launched its first online product — a complete edition of a 2,500-page reference book that is a standard in neurologists’ offices.

"This was among the first implementations of specialty medical publications online," says Thane Kerner, Silver Chair’s president. His goal is to update the book’s content weekly to keep the country’s 13,000 neurologists up-to-date.

Insiders say the city’s technology firms pride themselves on what they call "coopetition," which provides friendly competition for the best employees. Two Mondays a month, more than 40 information technology types gather to trade ideas and network over pizza and beer as part of the Neon Guild, which is run by volunteers Debra Weiss and Jack Smith. The informal group, which has 150 unofficial members, started about five years ago. The guild helped give birth two years ago to the more formalized technology council, which has 75 dues-paying corporate members.

Not all the news out of the city’s technology industry is so cheery, though. Like every other technology cluster, Charlottesville needs workers. Some vacancies can be filled by U.Va. graduates who want to stay in town. The technology council has teamed up with the Piedmont Virginia Community College to start courses in multimedia design. December’s announcement by Value America that it was laying off nearly half of its 600 employees — while not a happy time for the online retailer — was good news for companies anxious to fill job vacancies.

How big the city’s technology sector can grow is an open question: In such a volatile industry, the local scene is fast-changing, as the upheaval at Value America proves. Still, government and business leaders think the same chemistry that has gotten the city this far will carry it further.

"There is a vibrancy here to all aspects of life," says the technology council’s Levering, who moved from Boston 12 years ago. "We are attracting folks from all over who are tired of a commuter lifestyle and want a place that’s good for their children."

The area will find its own identity, says Harvey, the city’s business development specialist. "We don’t want to be like Northern Virginia. We just want to be Charlottesville."