The Hot New Tech Cities

Austin, TexasBangalore, IndiaBoise, IdahoBoston, Massachussetts

Cambridge, EnglandChampaign-Urbana, IllinoisSalt Lake City, UtahSeattle, WashingtonTel Aviv, IsraelWashington, D.C.

CAN ANY PLACE EVER HOPE to match the awesome success of Silicon Valley? To answer the question, venture capitalist Joe Schoendorf leads a visitor to the roof of 428 University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., wedges his shoe in the door so it won't lock and walks to the railing. It is a clear, crisp day in the epicenter of the world's most imitated economic phenomenon.

""This is ground zero,'' he says, sweeping his hand past Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Sun, Netscape, Apple, Stanford University and, he guesses, at least 5,000 start-up companies where visions of megabuck IPOs dance in founders' heads. Also passing under his gesture are thousands of supporting actors--high-tech PR flacks, intellectual-property lawyers, late-night sushi chefs, freelance circuit-board designers and entire squadrons of CEOs-in-waiting, lined up like paratroopers poised to leap into the wild blue stock-option yonder. ""Everything I need to start a company is here,'' he says. His implication is clear: here, and nowhere else.

Oh yeah? How, then, to explain the explosion of Silicon Valley wanna-bes, both domestic and overseas, that have already begun transforming cities, regions and, in some cases, entire countries? Their boosters may embarrass themselves with copycat nicknames (Silicon Alley, Silicon Fen, Glen, Woods, Forest, ad nauseam). But the results can be as revolutionary as, well, the technology itself.

Take Austin, Texas, a very nice town once famous for slackers, snipers and Willie Nelson. Now it's known as the home of both dorm-room billionaire Michael Dell and the guys who made your computer into an astral war zone with Wing Commander. Almost 2,000 high-tech companies employ 20 percent of the region's work force. ""It takes an entrepreneur to think there's life outside Silicon Valley,'' says Austin Ventures' Joseph Aragona, the Hoss of Texas's high-tech venture-cap cowboys. ""And when they do, they come here.''

They also come to Salt Lake City, Utah, where the Wasatch Front (at the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains) has more high-tech companies than fast-food restaurants. And to Seattle, where Microsoft is only one of an impressive roster of billion-dollar software giants (Amazon, RealNetworks) that have geekified the entire Northwest. Not to mention Boston, fully recovered from the extinction of its minicomputer empire and now a hip hotbed of exotic start-ups, as well as the second biggest recipient of venture-capital funding (behind you-know-where). They even come to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where the company town's key industry isn't government, but the Internet: Dun & Bradstreet reports that the area has one of the highest percentages of info-tech-based employment of any comparable market, including San Jose.