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U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr [D-6th District] led a contingent of Washington DC based Internet Association members on a Small Business Crawl through Asbury Park’s downtown Wednesday morning.

Aimed at showcasing the depth and breadth internet job possibilities within the city, top executives from Google, Facebook, Yelp, Spotify, Etsy, Airbnb, Expedia and Paypal got a behind the scenes glimpse of the entrepreneurial spirit trending in Asbury Park.

In turn the local venues learned the importance of the internet to their development and the development of Asbury Park.

“Part of this is to just create awareness and to highlight something that is maybe obvious to the individual business owner but, as a collective, it is not,” said Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of The Internet Association. “Today we saw four different models but each one of them is able to grow and be successful and hire people and make the community tighter because of the platforms and the companies that are here today.”

Beckerman said the crawl helped connect the popular downtown venues with better ways to use the internet and learn about sites they may not have aware of.

“The internet is local,” he said. “It’s about creating jobs in the community, about making communities tighter, about the one degree of separation. They can have fans anywhere around the world now, where years ago that wasn’t a thing. If you didn’t walk by a business or you didn’t know about it from being a member of the community, you would be able to know about them at all. Asbury Park is a perfect example of people from all over the world coming here. Some are finding it on Trip Advisor, Yelp, Facebook, Google, Expedia, and everything else. It’s bringing everyone into the community in a way that has never happened before. The jobs from internet companies and the jobs the internet is creating are in Asbury Park. Every single one of these businesses is enabled by these platforms and is able to add value to the community because of them.”

Their first stop was at Confections of a Rock$tar gourmet bakery [550 Cookman Ave], which hit the scene in 2012. Owners Kimmee Masi and Lisa Lasky have drawn national attention with their rock themed creations and guest baker videos that spotlight rock legends.

Over at the House of Independents [527 Cookman Ave], the internet executives got a first hand look at the transformable House of Independents space that has brought a mixture of global and local talent to deliver everything from theater and dance to film, comedy, and other unlikely events, like the weekly Shore Christian Church services and a pop up produce and craft market.

Their last stop was at Main Street’s Junction Hall, the collaborative union between Second Life Bikes and Cowerks that not only brings together their entrepreneurial ventures but those of Yellow Five Studios’ film and video production and the soon to be launched High Voltage Cafe.

“Over the course of the past six years we were able to go from a 700-square-foot space to over 9,000 square feet in two locations,” Cowerks Co Owner Bret Morgan said. “[We are mostly] serving technology, entrepreneurial startups, and people who really just want to work outside of a New York City, Philadelphia or San Francisco.”

While some of the unified success may be attributed to right place at the right time synergy, city Mayor John Moor attributes much of the city’s recent revitalization to the creative vision fostered within its small business community. In the past year, Asbury Park and its newest hotel and entertainment venue The Asbury landed on Travel and Leisure’s best of the best lists. The Asbury garnered USA Today’s Best new hotel list. 

“Asbury Park is the buzz word in New Jersey and probably the east coast,” Moor said. “The common thread of the four places we visited are the owners and workers. Asbury Park came back because of people like this who live here and give back to the community.”

In making note of Asbury Park’s rich and bustling history, Moor said it is just a matter of time until the west side neighborhood’s nascent stage of development begins to flourish.

For Pallone, the emphasis on how small businesses here use the internet to reach a global platform is part of a the federal issue to keep net neutrality in place under the Trump administration.

Net neutrality is the term used for small internet service providers ability to access all content and applications, without the favoring or blocking of particular products or websites. Hard fought rules are under threat by newly appointed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a proponent of competition over traffic equality.

“They say they are replacing the legislation but my fear is that could take a long time and it may not be as good or as strong,” Pallone said. “One thing we think that Democrats and Republicans in the Trump administration can work together on is expanding broadband. Trump has talked about a major infrastructure initiative and my committee [House Energy and Commerce] deals with the internet, telecom, energy, drinking water, a bunch of things.

“We want to make sure that a broadband infrastructure initiative is part of any larger infrastructure program that we put together,” Pallone said. “Specifically what I’d like to see is what we did with the stimulus package where internet providers are provided with grants to expand broadband. This is a national thing but it is important in Asbury Park and everywhere else.”

This was Pallone’s third visit to the city in four days, conducting a standing room only town hall meeting Saturday to help people interested in getting involved with the Democratic Party. He returned Sunday to Second Baptist Church to support colleague Bonnie Watson Coleman and her husband Bill Coleman’s return to the Atkins Avenue house of worship.

“There’s a lot going in Asbury Park,” Pallone said. “I’m from Long Branch and as a kid we’d always come shopping on Cookman Avenue and the west side. The bottom line is that what is happening in Asbury Park right now is this grassroots effort, this political energy has just manifested here more than any other place.”   

[Photos, in part, courtesy of The Internet Association]

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