I was very fortunate to be invited, along with 3 other bloggers, to have breakfast with Mr. Robert Bell, co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum, and some of the staff from City Hall.  It was an amazing couple of hours and I left very pleased to have been invited.  There are some very exciting things happening in Metro and some of the technology being developed is amazing.

Here are a few technological tidbits about Metro I didn't know:

• Moncton is the first City in North America to offer free, high speed, wireless internet access on all of its public transit system
• Metro has the first automated, environmentally friendly water meter reading system in Canada
• It was choosen 2008 "Hero of the Year" by the Information Technology Association of Canada for its innovative "Wifi Moncton" - Canada's first free ooutdoor wireless mesh network
• The Frontier Centre for Public Policy ranked Moncton as #5 in Canada and #24 in the world, for affordable housing.  To achieve an affordable rating our housing index needed to be below 3.0 which meant that the median house price was 3 times or less the median household salary. Moncton's was 2.4.  For comparison, Vancouver's was 8.4

The Cit of Moncton has created a couple of new promotionsl videos which are very cool.  One has a real "Blue Man Group" flavor to it and is really well done.  I thought some of the promotional material they have done in the past was pretty good, but this is very edgy and upbeat.  They are supposed to be posted to their website (www.moncton.org) sometime soon and they are worth a watch.  Speaking of which, the City's website is a great source of information for this area.  If you are considering relocation to the area, go spend some time on that site.  There is a lot of good information about the cost of doing business here vs other areas, and some good data about our industrial parks and so on.  If you need more details contact us anytime.