Firms take advantage of BlackBerry's woe by moving to Waterloo, Canada

BlackBerry is down, but its hometown is far from out.

On Friday, BlackBerry released another grim earnings report, posting US$4.4 billion in losses and a 56 per cent drop in revenue for its fiscal third quarter. The report was the latest in a string of cringeworthy quarters from the company, results that have forced BlackBerry to begin laying off 4,500 people, or 40 per cent of its workforce.

But unlike some cities that suffered when a big local technology business faltered, as Rochester in New York state did with Kodak and Xerox, BlackBerry's backyard of Waterloo still bubbles with energy. Technology companies large and small are coming to the city, about 115 kilometres southwest of Toronto, Canada, to recruit BlackBerry's talent - and several of the companies are setting up shop in town.

Google, a local presence for nearly a decade, was recently joined by its Motorola Mobility hardware subsidiary. Square, the mobile credit-card processing service started by Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder and chairman, opened an office. Cisco announced this month that it would create 1,700 research and development jobs within commuting distance.

And several start-ups that left Waterloo for the talent of Silicon Valley, including Thalmic Labs, a gesture-control computing company, have come home.