Categories: Geek

Wired’s Top Ten Tech Cities, Toronto and Toronto Tech Week

Here’s something of interest to those of you who are interested in helping promote Accordion City as a great place for techies to live, work and play: Wired’s article, 10 Top Tech Towns, in which they list the top 10 cities across the U.S. “to get your geek on”. The cities, in alphabetical order, are:

Austin
Boston
Los Angeles
New York City
Orlando
Pittsburgh
Raleigh-Durham
San Francisco Bay Area
Seattle
Washington, DC

The factors that were measured in choosing these cities were:

Proximity to top-ranked engineering schools

Tech jobs, per capita, on Dice

Personal ads, per capita, on Geek 2 Geek.

Craigslist postings per capita

Number of attendees at local meetings of Dorkbot, a group for “people doing strange things with electricity”

Availability of free Wi-Fi

Comic book stores per capita

Circuit City stores per capita

With the inclusion of Canadian cities and some minor substitutions — for example, substitute “Future Shop” or “Best Buy” for “Circuit City”, and thing like “DemoCamp” and “Sumo Robot Challenge” for “Dorkbot” — I think that Toronto could easily find itself in this list.

Of course, it’s one thing to have the virtues of a top 10 tech city and another to have them known. Luckily, we’re working on that — Toronto Tech Week will take place at the end of May, and I’m hoping to play a key role in its success. I’ll write more on it later, but for now, check out Mark Kuznicki’s piece on Toronto Tech Week.

Joey deVilla

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Anonymous says:

January 6, 2007 at 12:24 pm

Raleigh-Durham is not a city. It's an airport, and not an exciting one at that. It has a bunch of big-box tech nology companies around it, and if you get far enough away in two nearly opposite directions, you find Durham, which is a nice enough place to live, and Raleigh, which might be, but I've never lived there. From the perspective of a place like Boston, they're not really cities anyway, more like concentrated suburbia.

(yes, I know, I should be going and flaming wired...)
Anonymous says:

January 6, 2007 at 3:05 pm

The Wired article doesn't have a comments section, so feel free to make your points of order here.

If you're going to quibble, "San Francisco Bay Area" is also not a city.

As satellite cities cluster around primary cities and form megalopolises, what we refer to as a "city" becomes a little more vague -- hence the references to the Research Triangle near Raleigh and the Bay Area surrounding San Francisco Bay. What happens in the end is that locals use the "proper" terminology for those places, while outsiders refer to an area by the names of the airport(s) that serve it.