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.