Last year, I attended the TechColumbus Innovation Awards. This year I followed it on Twitter by following the #IA09 hashtag.

It looks like it was a great event.

Of course, there’s always some disgruntled guy out there. Take a look at the tweets in the photos. This guy flat out called TechColumbus as a racist organization that doesn’t know good tech.

Having worked with TechColumbus over the past few years, this guy’s assertion is far from the truth.

And I just wanted to let people know that the TechColumbus I know is not racist. it is full of great people that know their stuff and truly have the entrepreneur’s best interest in mind.

I can only speculate that this guy went to TechColumbus for funding, but didn’t get any. Well boo hoo. If he would have taken the time to work with TechColumbus, they would have advised him on the funding process and coached him to make a better go at it the next time. Instead he went and burned any bridge he may have with TechColumbus. And possibly any investor that may come accross his tweets.

I can respect him if he doesn’t like TechColumbus and levies some valid arguments against them. I do know that there are some in the community that disagree with how they are going about things. But those are valid opinions, which should be discussed in a civil manner.

But this guy chose to air his grievance with a tag he knew that others are following. Instead of valid critisisms, he played the race card. That was totally uncalled for and I for one will stand up and defend my peeps at TechColumbus.

Good luck sir in life. However, I will not be visiting your startup.

I’ll be at the TechColumbus Innovation Awards tomorrow and will tweet the event and blog about it after. You can follow my tweets, I’m @wyliemac. I’ll also tag my tweets with #tcia. Hopefully others will join me in the tweeting.

I wanted to provide a list of all the nominees here, but unfortunately the list on the TCIA website is an image and there are way too many nominees to type out. I thought I’d be clever and try and OCR the text, but the resolution is too small and my program did not recognize one nominee. Oh well. I’ll be rooting for Startup Weekend sponsor dynamIt in the categories of Outstanding Service (less than 50 employees) and Outstanding Technology Team.

Here’s the image of nominees.