layout: post title: "PEI: Visitors from Silicon Valley" created: 1279720669 categories:

• Personal tags:
• PEI
• Great George Hotel
• Yelp
• Canada

Had a great breakfast at the Great George Hotel. You sit in armchairs and sofas in the lobby and have little tray tables in front of them. Standard "continental" breakfast - toast, yogurt, and some hot quiches.

As I sat down, I walked into the middle of a discussion by two women about different types of careers that you can "go to school for", and pick directly (vs. ending up in a job/career through circumstance). They talked about engineering and becoming a lawyer and mentioned computer science, but then also talked about how artists and musicians often end up in computer science.

Turns out they were visiting as part of a group getaway from Silicon Valley. Mainly for golfing, but they were part of the "non golfing" spouses. I told them about some of the speaking I would be doing while I was here, and quizzed them a bit about Yelp and so on.

My take away from the discussion was that there is lots of desire for more information about building for the web. They definitely did use "technology" to do research and so on before coming, but their next step was to ask the front desk about certain things. Good old word of mouth.

They had heard of the Regis & Kelly shows on PEI that had happened a week ago, but their decision to come was before that (and they were glad that they were potentially missing a wave of visitors who were inspired by watching the shows).

I talked a little bit about building websites. One of the women shared a story about a non profit she was involved with getting a website built for $500. I tried to have a discussion about what the needs of the website were, but mainly just got to talking about how it should be "easy to use" and that they could update it themselves (and that the "donate" button worked!)