Home town roots for BlackBerry despite turn in fortunes A man-sized iPhone greets visitors to the VeloCity Garage at Communitech, a tech incubator in Kitchener, Ontario where thirty teams of University of Waterloo students and recent graduates are building start-ups. It is an awkward product placement given that this region of Canada is home to BlackBerry, the struggling smartphone maker, and the company helped to launch Communitech. But it is also emblematic of the vibrant local tech industry of about 1,000 companies which has sprouted up here in part because of BlackBerry's success, and which locals are confident will absorb many departing employees. That is already happening. Last week, Thalmic Labs, which designs an armband that allows users to control electronics with finger and hand gestures, hired two senior ex-BlackBerry executives. The giant iPhone at VeloCity is a marketing tool once used by Reebee, which like many local tech companies - including the Pebble smartwatch, Thalmic, which recently received $14.5m in early investor funding, and BufferBox, which was acquired by Google last year - emerged from the university's well-regarded engineering and computer science programmes. Reebee is a mobile marketing application and like many software start-ups here it was first developed for the iPhone before becoming available on other devices. But the Kitchener-Waterloo region is BlackBerry country, from teenagers to grandmothers and everyone in between. Locals are fiercely loyal to their home town tech giant and confident that it will survive the "strategic review" it has announced, a move many analysts say may lead to the sale or leveraged buyout of the company. "I'm a BlackBerry user - I love their new [Z10 model] phone," says Vlad Pisanov, the 27-year-old co-founder of Weston Expressions. I'm rooting for BlackBerry because they're a Canadian company. That about sums up the local mood. The company is firmly anchored to the community, and vice versa, says Ian McLean, head of the Greater Kitchener Waterloo chamber of commerce. "[BlackBerry] has grown up here, we know the people who have grown it, they're our friends and family," Mr McLean says. The institutions, the not-for-profits, the arts, the jobs - their fingerprints are everywhere in this community . . . and people want to support the home town team. The company employs about 6,000 people in the region. RIM Park, which uses the company's former name, is a 500-acre green space on the town's northeast side. Founder Mike Lazaridis dropped out of the University of Waterloo's computer science programme a few months early to found RIM. He donated $100m to create the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which counts Stephen Hawking as a visiting professor. Mr Lazaridis is also a former chancellor of the university. Prem Watsa, the BlackBerry investor who has emerged as the leading bidder for the company, is the current chancellor. Marjorie Vogel, 43, says there's not a person in town who hasn't been affected by the turn in BlackBerry's fortunes. "I have friends who work there, and based on their LinkedIn profiles, they are clearly looking [for new jobs]," she says. They probably won't have to look very far, says Avvey Peters, head of external relations at Communitech, which houses 90 small, medium and large tech companies in addition to those in the VeloCity Garage. The region employs about 30,000 tech workers with about 1,000 job openings at any given time, she says. The scene thrives, says Ms Peters, because it is diverse, with hardware and software makers along with enterprise and consumer products, and it is attracting attention from Silicon Valley. Waterloo students launched Kik Interactive, makers of an instant messaging app with 50m users, which earlier this year picked up $19.5m in a second round of funding. Desire2Learn, which raised $80m last year, is an enterprise e-learning company founded by a Waterloo graduate and is housed in the same building as Communitech. Video marketing company Vidyard, another Waterloo student project raised $6m earlier this year. If BlackBerry restructures, departing workers can migrate to that vast network, which includes many companies founded by former employees, says Ms Peters. That may ultimately be the silver lining of BlackBerry's struggles, according to Tim Ellis, head of the tech accelerator at the university. "[In the past] BlackBerry would attract international talent and relocate people here, but it had an adverse effect on talent in that everyone wanted to work at BlackBerry," Mr Ellis says. It had a bit of a stunting effect on the start-up community. One benefit of BlackBerry's troubles is that it has allowed the local tech scene to flourish.