Group Tells Members to Coast Awhile

It was a good 90 minutes before business owner Sue Marrone asked the question that was on everyone’s mind at Santa Monica’s Electronic Cafe last week, where about 50 people had come to hear the latest on a pair of efforts to boost Southern California’s high-tech visibility.

“How can people like me, who have listened to you ad nauseam, actually participate?” said Marrone, owner of the Valley Village educational software firm Themes & Schemes.

That was one topic the three ambassadors from the Tech Coast Alliance and the Digital Coast Roundtable managed to avoid in their lengthy presentations to members of the International Interactive Communications Society’s Los Angeles chapter, which sponsored the meeting.

The answer--put our logos on your Web sites and wait for a chance to join one of our committees--seemed to fall short for an audience that was willing to contribute its enthusiastic efforts right away.

Indeed, before the panelists took their seats at the front table--flanked by fake trees, fake animals, a four-armed mannequin and several TV monitors--attendees spoke excitedly about their hopes that the new organizations could help their high-tech businesses.

More than a few of the IICS members and guests who filled the cafe said that although they had heard about the Tech Coast and the Digital Coast, they didn’t understand the difference between them. (To make matters worse, both groups arrived Thursday night with very similar posters: logo-infested maps of Los Angeles and Southern California.)

Rohit Shukla, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Regional Technology Alliance, cleared up the confusion with a concise distinction.

“ ‘Tech Coast’ applies to the broad gamut of the technology industry. ‘Digital Coast’ more specifically applies to the universe of companies and talent in the interactive space,” he explained to a full house and anyone who tuned in to the cybercast. “This is not an ‘either-or.’ This is an ‘and.’ ”

David Hankin, president of the Digital Coast Roundtable, described his group as a collection of “50 decision-makers from many of the top companies in the Digital Coast region,” stretching from Ventura to the South Bay. Digital Coast Roundtable is the new name for the Los Angeles New Media Roundtable organized last year at the behest of L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan.

Then Chip Parker, chairman and chief executive of the Tech Coast Alliance, gave a preview of some of the marketing materials--including a magazine, Web site and TV show--his group will unveil in the coming weeks to promote the region’s technology industries around the world.

“Southern California is truly the center of innovation, and yet we’ve never gone out and staked our claim,” he said.

On that point, all the panelists heartily agreed.

“I want people to think Los Angeles is the center of interactive media, like the way they think of Hollywood,” Hankin said when asked how he would define success for the Digital Coast Roundtable.

Shukla told members of the audience not to be shy about talking up themselves or the Southern California tech community.

“We might as well be known for what we are--we’re the capital of hype,” he said. “Promote yourself. When [Oracle Chairman] Larry Ellison does it, he’s considered a good businessman.”

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Times staff writer Karen Kaplan can be reached via e-mail at karen.kaplan@latimes.com.