Winner of Google's most wired Australian town award is...North Sydney?

Google has decided North Sydney is Australia's “eTown of 2013”, because it is “the region whose web-savvy small businesses are outpacing the others.” Those who like Vulture South work in the enclave, which styles itself the third-most significant central business district after Sydney proper and Melbourne, may find the notion …

[Gray Ham]

Even more surprised to see South Canberra in the list ... are there any businesses there (aside from cafes and shops selling designer clothing)?

[Denarius]

South Canberra?

or North Cooma ? South of the lake there must be a few places of use. Yep, a ships chandler. As for being wired, only the locals after another double shot to wash away the cheap booze of the night before. But I digress. As expected, the sell off of Telstra has resulted in the feared loss of affordable telecommunications access and increased costs. Attempting to rectify this at great expense via NBN, the main contractors include overseas government owned telcos. Decent network access remains out of reach indefinitely if ones does not reside in a central hell hole and is chancey even then. Bring on lots of low earth orbit mesh networking satellites not owned by Oz firms. organisations or governments.

[Anonymous Coward]

South Canberra

When they say South Canberra perhaps they are obliquely referring to the big IT shops that are disguised as govt depts? And which use many small businesses as suppliers - aka contractors?

Not sure how far Sth Canberra goes in their world, but Woden and Tuggalot have some pretty big IT shops. Health, Medicare, Centrelink, IP Aust, spring quickly to mind. Not to mention Parlt House.

(And lets not forget the famous Deakin telephone exchange cum nuclear bomb shelter cum alternative govt HQ, whose true role is well known to some tinfoil hat wearers.)

[cracked]

Holdfast Bay

No surprise for us in The Bite ...

Holdfast Bay is the trendy (seaside) bit of Addy. Plenty of expensive motor yachts to watch, while you sip your skinny-latte in front of a wide choice of venues. Many (many, many) options for lunch (from very trendy ... to Maccers). It's a nice relaxing place (if you avoid weekends in holiday season, anyway!), plenty of clubs and bars at night too (and hotels, expensive down to wouldn't-keep-a-cat-in).

I will put a fair bit of money on the Digital-Consulting-Industry having a sizable presence there. 30-mins from the CBD (in traffic), walks on the beach for those Blue-Sky meetings, they get whales off the coast and joss-sticks are available in many of the boutique gifty-type shops ... Ideal!.

My guess would be that the cheaper (industrial estate!) South/East areas of the suburb, are where the SMEs making good use of technology (Google Adwords, by any chance!?) are located. And I could name you an SME doing very well from making good use of that technology (AdWords) ... but he hardly ever pays me, so I won't ;-)

And because I am a (long time) tourist, I can tell you Holdfast Bay is where the settlers first landed (it was too far to walk from Melbourne!) ... and left behind their ship's wheel (easy things to lose, eh?!).

[El Commenter]

Whilst it's true that North Sydney has, at all times of the day, a certain woebegotten hollowness to it, I can't pass up this opportunity to mention the North Sydney Book Exchange, an excellent second hand bookstore located down a few stairs on Mount St, next to a decent coffee place and a great Japanese restaurant. During the few years I worked there it was one of the very few places I discovered that has the "lived-in" feel of a real city.

As for the tech, well, who knows. I do know, speaking of tech, I always thought it should be connected to the rest of the city with one of those high speed moving walkways you might find in an Asimov novel. I can already picture Tom Cruise running across it with his arms pumping and an expression of steely determination as he races to Right Some Wrongs.

[ChrisInAStrangeLand]

My guess is that they are collapsing the entire North Shore area into North Sydney as shorthand, for the benefit of people who don't live in Sydney and don't know the suburbs. There's a few interesting small companies in Neutral Bay and Cammeray too.

[kokoro]

Well, there's way better eating options, healthy competition in food prices and no less dead than the financial end of the cbd after hours. Just don't expect a party on a saturday night as my recent school reunion was a marker of.

But hell, Google were not reviewing my workplace when they were measuring internet bandwidth and connectivity! And dwindling? Didn't Coke just move in to their deformed wedge in recent times?