Free downtown Wi-Fi reflects tech growth

With a pantomime flourish, Marquette Tech District Foundation board chairman Jeff Maurer "turned on" free downtown Wi-Fi on Thursday evening during the Marquette Techfest celebration.

"The proverbial switch is now flipped," he said, encouraging attendees to log on.

He made the announcement on the top floor of the Marquette tower, which technically still is unfinished. Maurer said the still-exposed concrete and wiring reminded him of what the majority of the Marquette looked like during last year's TechFest.

But now, shiny, new businesses fill just about the entire building, from Barista's Coffee Bar on the ground floor to the ever-expanding Codefi cells on the sixth, fifth and soon-to-be fourth floors.

And the free downtown Wi-Fi, he said, represents a similar growth outside the tower's walls, as well as the impact tech is having on Cape Girardeau's downtown as a whole.

Jeff Maurer, board chairman of the Marquette Tech District Foundation, speaks Thursday at the TechFest reception in Cape Girardeau.Fred Lynch

The signal serves parts of Broadway, Main and Spanish streets, Maurer said, and expansions are planned for more of Spanish Street and western portions of Broadway.

Chris Carnell, co-founder of Codefi, later helped quantify how growth in Cape Girardeau's tech sector is spurring growth in other sectors, too.

Codefi, he said, now has about 200 members representing 80 companies.

Twenty-eight startups have launched from the Codefi stable, generating roughly 100 jobs.

One of those, Edible Education, now operates in 21 states and is on track to hit $1 million in sales, Carnell said.

"There's great people doing great things," he said.

Part of the TechFest celebration was the announcement of the winner of the Hackathon to help Big Brothers Big Sisters.

A team from Cape Crucible who designed a web app to streamline the matchmaking process won the $5,000 prize. The finalists of the 1ST50K startup competition were also on hand to talk about their projects. The entries included entrepreneurs from Cape Girardeau to New York to Moscow.

Key to the continuance of Cape Girardeau's tech successes is youth education, Codefi co-founder James Stapleton said.

In the weeks leading up to TechFest, dozens of children attended coding camps hosted by the Marquette Technology Institute, during which children such as 10-year-old Nathan Harris learned how to program robots called finches. Harris was part of a group whose programming skills were showcased during TechFest.

Stapleton announced a funding campaign designed to raise $1 million to provide access to tech education in grades three through eight to keep local children such as Harris engaged in learning the skills necessary to pick up where today's entrepreneurs leave off.

There are plans to start youth coding leagues -- analogous to the sport kind -- in which children can train in programming after school and evenutally compete with their peers.

He said the $1 million mark would seem far loftier were it not for the $400,000 already pledged in donor commitments.

Cape Girardeau Area Chamber of Commerce president and CEO John Mehner later praised the accomplishments of the Marquette Tech District.

He said ouside St. Louis or Kansas City, "There's nobody in this state that's doing what this group is doing."

He said the group and its leaders have put Cape Girardeau "on the map" in terms of entrepreneurial activity in Missouri, and the waves being made here are being noticed across the country.

tgraef@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3627

Pertinent address:

Marquette Tower, Cape Girardeau, Mo.