About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about how Charlottesville, Virginia (where VibeAgent is headquartered) has many of the essential ingredients to becoming a successful breeding ground for technology startups. We’re home to Mr. Jefferson’s University, and we have lovely weather, a robust live music scene, fancy art galleries, access to world-class parks, beautiful vineyards, free polo matches on Sundays, plenty of rich and famous people, and fantastic coffee and coffee shops; basically, we’ve just got an all-around high quality of life over here.

The only challenge of building a world-class technology business in this great place I alluded to in 2007 was the fact that we needed more nerds. Specifically at VibeAgent, we need more people who understand the web and can build, market and deploy great software. I referenced Paul Graham’s fantastic essay on why Silicon Valley is so good at producing successful technology startups. My post catalyzed an even more interesting discussion over on the OpenSource Connections blog, a talented software development shop also based in Charlottesville. And in personal conversations with Daniel Strickland over at Cloudbrain, Jeff Gunther at Intalgent, Eric Pugh at OpenSource, Otavio Freire at OpenQ, and others, we’ve developed a consensus on one thing - we all want more nerds!

Well, since that post, VibeAgent has grown to 14 people, moved to shiny new offices on the beautiful downtown mall, been covered twice each in TechCrunch, USA Today, and MSNBC, been named a top up-and-coming travel site in the Washington Post and on Forbes.com, and been featured just this last week in our own local paper, the Daily Progress. We’re about to make a major financing announcement, a major partner announcement, and roll out two major software releases. (/blatant self-promotion)

But…..our biggest challenge continues to be finding good technology people, and Charlottesville still needs more nerds. We would hire five talented developers tomorrow if we could find them locally, but so far, we haven’t. And this is forcing us to consider other options for our business, including opening up an office somewhere more nerdy.

So, with a little more experience under our belts, I’d like to put forth five concrete proposals on how technology firms in Charlottesville like VibeAgent can band together to gain some critical mass and solve the #1 challenge facing our business. We love this town, and we’d rather not have to go elsewhere to satisfy our nerd quotient.

How to Strengthen the Charlottesville Technology Community

1. Create an Active Charlottesville Technology Networking Club
Real world social networking is essential to creating strong bonds and gaining critical mass. I’ve set up a group using Cloudbrain’s blastogo to form an sms network for a monthly CvilleNerd meet & greet (if you want to join the sms network and be notified of the time and location of our first event, simply text “follow cvillenerd” to 32075). The idea here is to have a monthly social event to start making more connections and strengthening the Charlottesville technology ecosystem. I’m hoping the active members of Neon Guild and Chuug will join this list, along with all of us who work in the online world here in Charlottesville, and we can start to develop some critical mass.

As this club grows organically, we can create a web site and job board, form groups on existing social networks, and provide a way for Charlottesville technology companies and technology people to get to know each other better in an informal setting. But it takes that first step, so join CvilleNerd today.

2. Develop Stronger Ties to UVA’s Engineering & Applied Sciences Schools
There are a myriad of opportunities for strengthening relationships between the local technology business community and UVA’s leading technology and applied sciences programs. Career fairs, speaking engagements, case studies, internships, school projects, and other activities help build stronger bonds between the worlds of academia and business.

The need here is for a common touch point for Charlottesville technology businesses, and a desire by the University to support the local community. The City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County can also develop programs to stimulate mutually beneficial collaboration between UVA and Charlottesville’s business community. A strong local economy provides more job opportunities for families who relocate here, and increases demand for Charlottesville’s existing businesses. We can all do more to strengthen these ties, and with the development of CvilleNerd, we will.

3. Establish More Continuing Education Options in Applied Technologies
Charlottesville employees need more continuing education options to help them stay current on new technologies, starting with training courses in programming languages such as PHP, Java, C++, and Ruby, as well as in advanced project management methodologies and tools. UVA and Piedmont have practically no curriculum options for these types of classes. With a common organizing body to aggregate demand for and promote the desire for more technology education programs, our goal should be to attract better teaching resources to both of these institutions, and/or develop our own training programs and make them accessible and affordable for our community. Just as America needs to focus on re-training our work force for the new competitive global landscape, Charlottesville needs to invest in training programs for our technology community. The economic future of our city will be driven by our ability to attract, train, and retain the knowledge workers that are increasingly the driving force behind our continued economic prosperity.

4. Actively Market Charlottesville as a Great Home for Startups
Many of you are already familiar with the Aspen vs. Austin conversation. Will Charlottesville become a community with a strong university, arts programs, and a thriving middle class - like Austin - or will it go the direction of Aspen, another city known for its beautiful surroundings and high quality of life, but that has become too expensive to support a middle class and instead caters to retirees and the superrich? The choice, put in these terms, is clear. The outcome, however, is not.

Charlottesville needs to redouble its efforts to market itself as a great place for small businesses, especially in the technology fields, and to promote policies and investments that successfully support small businesses growth. The downtown mall is a vibrant place where lunch time means bumping into colleagues from other companies and strengthening the bonds that create community. I envision a time when the mall is littered with high-tech startups tackling exciting business challenges and simultaneously supporting the local economy. These things have a tipping point, a phenomenon well documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s book of the same name. We just need to give it a little push.

5. Share Charlottesville’s Technology Startup Success Stories
When you say the words “dot-com startup” to people who have lived in Charlottesville for over 10 years they immediately recall Value America. The company actually relocated from Nevada to Charlottesville in 1998 and went public in April 1999, gaining a valuation of $2.4 billion without a dime in profits. But a little over a year later, the firm had filed for bankruptcy and quickly became a “dot-bomb.”

Those days of irresponsible excess and greed are over. Businesses today have a much higher hurdle to reach before being showered with venture capital. The markets have also become wiser, and are valuing businesses based on their fundamentals once again. A lot of the entrepreneurs that are starting businesses today actually founded businesses and raised venture capital during the bubble days (myself included) and have learned a lot from the experience. There are also significant structural improvements in the web environment that make it far easier to get a startup successfully off the ground these days. They primarily relate to the ability today to a) tap into existing revenue streams in the form of advertising networks such as Google AdSense; b) tap into existing online communities and user bases such as Facebook and MySpace; and c) roll out software and hardware infrastructure at costs approaching zero by leveraging open source software and elastic computing clouds.

So, there are many new Internet success stories out there, and we hope to be one of them. Let’s share the good news, the best practices, the key takeaways that we discover in our collective startup experiences, through face-to-face networking and aggregating our online worlds.

We here at VibeAgent look forward to supporting the development of a more robust and cohesive technology community in Charlottesville. Because, together we can build something much greater than the sum of our individual efforts.

Together, we can create a little Silicon Valley of the south.

(VibeAgent is focused on providing you the biggest selection of hotels and the best travel deals.)