“Bright orange tangerines sprayed the street, the crowd oohed and aahed, the media ran amok, and politicians gave their stamp of approval to the first annual E-business Day for the city of Tacoma.E-business Day 2000 came off without a hitch, and any who doubted the evolution of the high-tech industry in America’s #1 Wired City were sadly mistaken. Local technology companies joined forces to create an event centered on the quickly growing technology community within the downtown core. The day consisted of a proclamation declaring August 24th to be E-business day for the State of Washington and the City of Tacoma.All of the local companies provided open house tours of their facilities allowing the general public a unique opportunity to tour the companies that they have been reading about in the press.A tech map located on the E-business Day (http://www.ebusinessday.org) web site provided directions to each of the businesses participating in the open house. The event kicked off with Washington State Governor Gary Locke, joined by Brian Ebersole the Mayor of Tacoma, reading a proclamation declaring August 24th as the first official E-business Day for Tacoma and the State of Washington.After finishing his speech, Governor Locke went to the E-business Day information booth and surfed the Ebusinessday.org web site to view a map containing all of the participating local high-tech companies located within the Greater Tacoma area.Locke then visited Atomic Tangerine, a national e-business consulting firm, where he participated in the dropping of hundreds of foam tangerines from their balcony into the crowds below. Atomic Tangerine chose to locate their business in the Tacoma market after carefully measuring the benefits that the city had to offer.A special CEO summit met in the chamber offices to discuss the success of the growth in the Tacoma Technology sector, highlighting the fact that now Tacoma can begin to focus on promoting the successes of its local companies. The group agreed that in addition to the excellent standard of living, highly competitive bandwidth prices, and availability of employees, the city could now focus on the variety of unique technology services encompassing this region. The day finished off with an E-business day award dinner hosted by the Tacoma Pierce County Chamber of Commerce. The chamber presented awards to ten local technology businesses and one most wired individual who have played an instrumental part in facilitating the growth of the local technology community.The companies honored were: Web-X Inc., ContractQuest.com, Advanced Telecom Group (ATG), Paybycheck.com, Insynq, Essential Markets, Advanced Biometrics, Onfree.com, Highpoint Design, and IDmicro.Scott Bourne, of the Scott Bourne Consulting Group, was honored as the most wired individual based on his extraordinary involvement with the Chamber of Commerce, and his work on technology issues with Congressman Adam Smith. Special thanks were given repeatedly to Jamie Chase of ContractQuest for her integral part in organizing the event that pulled together the area’s technology community, and put the city of Tacoma in the technology spotlight.Jim Crabbe is co-founder of the Tacoma Network, a high-tech networking and advocacy group, and is director of sales for Web-X, a web application development company based in downtown Tacoma.Photo: E-business Day founder Jamie Chase of ContractQuest guides Governor Gary Locke through an online guide to the event at the Tech Map kiosk in the Tacoma Farmers Market yesterday, above. Photo: Steve Brown.Thanks go to the staff at Cheney Stadium, Michael’s, and Rod Koon at the Port of Tacoma for their logistical assistance. Congratulations and thanks are also due to all those who helped in making Tacoma’s first annual E-business Day a success. Especially the incredible, indomitable Jamie Chase.- Steve Brown, Editor “