None of this would be that big a deal if the city weren't undergoing a new-economy transformation, the kind of boomlet that feeds on young, tech-rich talent -- a bunch of couch-sleepers, no doubt. Business-to-business support services, including telemarketing and credit-card management, has become the fastest-growing industry in the state. The trend is led by such companies as EnvisioNet Computer Services Inc., of Brunswick, which provides tech support and customer service to companies like Prodigy Communications and Microsoft; Wright Express, in South Portland, which recently took on Avis Rent a Car's commercial MasterCard program; and MBNA, a credit-card-service company.
There are also 1,500 Internet-related companies in the state, double the number there were two years ago. Forty percent are based in or near Portland. In addition to Resort Sports Network, superstars include Gofish.com, a buying-and-selling Web site for fish traders, and BroadcastAmerica.com, which transmits radio and news channels online, including Dick Clark's United Stations Radio Networks.
That's a good thing, because Maine's traditional industrial base has been eroding for years. And Portland's one-time largest employer, disability insurer Unum, merged last year with a Tennessee-based company and is expected to drop 1,500 of its 3,800 Maine-based positions. But despite deep cuts in paper, pulp, and leather manufacturing, the state has seen a net increase of 65,000 jobs since 1995. Credit is due in large part to the growing crop of Internet and Internet-support businesses.
If there was any one event that helped put Portland on the digital map, it was having been chosen as a pilot site for new high-speed Internet access.
For Portland to nurture this expansion, it has to craft an image of itself as a tech center. The hard part will be getting those 26-year-old wunderkinder setting off for Silicon Alley to head north instead. Portland may need to pull a Seattle-East move, stitching a variation on high tech and fishing and coffee and punk rock and rain together into an economic crazy quilt.
None of that is impossible. Portland is a comeback champ, having already engineered one renaissance back in the early 1980s. Restoration of the Old Port commercial district began in 1982, thanks partly to "a national awareness that you need to preserve historical buildings rather than plow them down for skyscrapers and parking lots," as longtime local businessman Michael Mastronardi remembers. Real estate boomed, tourists and new residents showed up, and the city thrived. Then, in 1987, a change in the tax laws and a reduction in monies for historic renovation put an abrupt halt to the surge, and the city's momentum slowed just as the national recession hit in 1991. "We didn't make much progress out of that setback until the last three years," says Mastronardi.
In the 1990s, even though Portland was still a place where people wanted to live, there was no economic growth. There were few professional creative jobs there, a function of the city's true remoteness. Many professionals moving to Portland had to bring their own work with them if they expected to make a living.
Then everything changed. If there was one event that can be said to have catalyzed the new reality, it was when Time Warner/Media One installed its pilot Road Runner cable lines for high-speed Internet access in 1997. Only 10 markets were chosen for the rollout. One was Portland.
"Portland was always used as a test market by companies like Procter and Gamble because its media were insular," says Jim Hauptman, founder of Hauptman & Partners -- and a Connecticut native who arrived in Portland in 1988, during the last boom. "Time Warner looked at the markets they had and the cable penetration here, which was high on a per capita basis. They made the city one of their test markets, and it was really well received." (Portland is still a guinea-pig town: an online music company, Listen.com, is currently testing a system for delivering whole albums over the Internet in just two markets -- San Diego and Portland.)
The new cable lines positioned Portland on the forefront of the digital economy, giving its businesses and citizens Internet access at the same lightning speeds as those available to their more cosmopolitan counterparts in New York and California. "Before Road Runner, it would take half an hour to upload the changes I was making to a site," says Joe Charlton, founder of Portland Web-development company Mystyc New Media. "Now I can do that in less than 30 seconds. You can see how that can increase your productivity; bandwidth is it."
Charlton is one Portland entrepreneur who was raised and educated in this city. He started his company three years ago, moonlighting after his day job at Systems Engineering. Mystyc has introduced more than 300 businesses to the Web -- high-end cabinetmaker Thomas Moser, the home-based dog-collar manufacturer MrsBones.com, and handyman franchisor Rent-a-Husband.com, to name a few -- and 98% of its customers are based in greater Portland. "It's unbelievable how rapidly the tech community is gearing up here," he says. "A year and a half, two years ago, it was easy to say nobody gets it. Today you can say that maybe people do get it."
Gofish.com is building colorful new space, but the views make it. Employees gaze on Casco Bay, the downtown, and the mountains in distant New Hampshire.
"Colors stimulate the resource centers in your brain," Liam Somers is explaining. Director of operations and current ad hoc color consultant for Gofish.com, Somers is showing off the burnt orange, custard yellow, light bluish gray, brighter bluish gray, and sea green walls of the office space the company will move into in four weeks. The space will be, he claims, "the premier dot-com office in Portland."
