Vancouver’s tech history is illustrated in this beautiful infographic

A beautiful new infographic from Visual Capitalist illustrates a timeline of Vancouver’s tech history.

More than four years ago in these pages, Brent Holliday, now of Garibaldi Capital, wrote about how the innovation sectors in Vancouver were a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but really had no defining force the way Waterloo did with BlackBerry.

“When you think of Ottawa and technology, you think telecommunications. When you think of Waterloo and technology, you think RIM,” said Holliday. “When you think of Vancouver and technology, you think… umm… well lots of things. That is the problem and the opportunity with Vancouver’s high technology industry: Jack of all trades, master of none.”

How things have changed in such a short time. Today, Vancouver is absolutely bustling with heavyweight candidates such as Hootsuite, Vision Critical, D-Wave and the underappreciated BuildDirect. As the graphic tells us, tech has emerged as a dominant force in British Columbia, generating $23-billion in revenue in 2012, compared to just $10.2-billion for mining and $15.5-billion for construction. As an economic force, tech now trails only -you guessed it- real estate.