Silicon Valley Need Not Apply

There was no red carpet, no crush of paparazzi and no fans who had camped out to catch a glimpse of the honorees at the 1997 Southern California Software Industry Awards on Thursday night.

To the 200 attendees of the event at the tony Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey, that could have been just one more sign that technology in Silicon Valley’s southern neighbor doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Indeed, raising the profile of the Southland’s high-tech companies was the major motivation for hosting this Academy Awards-style ceremony, now in its fourth year.

“Unfortunately, our region lacks the identity of Silicon Valley or Route 128 [west of Boston] or the Research Triangle” in North Carolina, said C.J. D’Angelo, chairman of the Software Council of Southern California, which sponsors the annual event.

Top honors of the night went to Activision’s Robert Kotick, winner of the CEO of the Year award. Kotick paid $500,000 for a 25% stake in the then-struggling video-game maker in 1991, and annual revenues the next year were less than $2 million. This year, Activision expects to record $250 million in sales and boost its work force to 700 employees.

But what really won the crowd over was the fact that Kotick moved Activision from Woodside, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to Santa Monica, where it has flourished.

“The infrastructure here simply did not exist,” Kotick recalled in his acceptance speech. “We had to get venture capital from New York and technical assistance from Silicon Valley.”

Those are the kinds of problems that still plague the estimated 6,000 software companies that operate between San Luis Obispo and San Diego. Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Pepperdine University Institute for Public Policy, delighted the crowd in his keynote speech with jibes at “self-absorbed, self-financed and self-promoting” Silicon Valley. (His contention that The Times ignores the local tech industry did, however, strike some of us as a little odd.)

All of the Southern California boosterism made for an awkward moment for GeoCities’ co-founder and Chief Technology Officer John Rezner. While accepting the Internet Company of the Year award on his company’s behalf, Rezner described GeoCities’ strategy of giving away free World Wide Web pages to “homesteaders” and arranging them by topic into “neighborhoods.”

For example, the neighborhood for politics and government is called Capitol Hill, the one for personal finance is called Wall Street, and the one for computer technology is called . . . Silicon Valley. (Rezner didn’t mention this Thursday, but a different neighborhood about the future of technology is called Research Triangle.)

CitySearch CEO Charles Conn won the Software Entrepreneur of the Year award for growing the Pasadena-based online city guide maker into a 500-employee business against formidable competition, including America Online’s Digital City and Microsoft’s Sidewalk.

GoldMine Software of Pacific Palisades was named Developer of the Year for its contact management software, which helps people keep track of their business contacts. Jon Ferrara, GoldMine’s executive vice president, said the privately held firm would do almost $20 million in sales this year, and he gave the credit to its Los Angeles employees, whose salaries and bonuses make up 65% of the company’s budget.

The winner of the Multimedia Company of the Year award was Digital Domain, the Venice-based special-effects company that produced the Barbie Fashion Designer CD-ROM for Mattel. More than 1 million copies of the disc have been sold worldwide.

In years past, the bulk of the awards have gone to companies based in Orange and San Diego counties. But the sweep by firms in Los Angeles County underscores the growing importance of software companies in the Internet and new media fields, said Bill Manassero, the Software Council’s executive director.

All of which should help the region shake off the big chip on its shoulder.

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Karen Kaplan covers technology, telecommunications and aerospace. She can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com