Anyone needing reassurance that California hasn’t lost any of its high tech luster should have stopped by the DEMO Fall 2012 conference last week in Santa Clara. DEMO attracted 77 ambitious tech start-ups from around the country, competing with six-minute pitches for their apps, services and products. Just the fact that this event takes place in Santa Clara reinforces the reality that California is still the epicenter of America’s high-tech Internet economy. We’re still the place where budding tech stars come to be discovered. And we have a huge stake in seeing that our innovative technology isn't smothered by unnecessary regulation.
Of the top start-ups selected at DEMO 2012, the number one spot went to RentLingo, a startup just up the road in Palo Alto, founded by Stanford graduate students Dan Laufer and Byron Singh. Their winning product is a social networking approach to finding an apartment. But RentLingo wasn’t the only California start-up in the top echelon. They were joined by Birdeez. From its humble beginnings as a student project at UC Santa Barbara, this central coast-based startup launched a smartphone app called Bird Alerts. Amateur Ornithologists can give Bird Alerts a list of the birds you most want to see and the app will send you an alert every time one has been spotted within 30 miles of your location.
Will RentLingo or Birdeez make the big jump from innovative startups to financially successful companies? Nobody knows. But we do know that Internet users are always looking for the cool new things, and as California’s tech sector reacts to that insatiable demand it remains an economic bright spot that’s creating jobs and economic growth from San Diego to Sausalito. A new national study by Bright Labs ranks Silicon Valley number one in new tech jobs posted from January through August. The Valley posted 9,874 tech jobs, but down south in the Silicon Beach stretch between Santa Monica and Venice, 7,360 new jobs were posted, making it the fifth hottest tech center in the country.
Tech hotspots are popping in all parts of California, but they also have plenty of out-of-state competition as a recent Bright Labs infographic shows. The high-tech community, business leaders, and policymakers across the country need to reinforce the lesson over the last 20 years—that investors will more confidently invest, innovation will flourish, and consumers will further benefit from more and better choices when the high-tech industry can thrive in a smart regulatory environment and not be hampered by excessive and uninformed policy.