Oracle Inc. Headquarters, Silicon Valley, California. CC-licensed Picture by (nz)dave on Flickr.
… if it hasn’t done already
In California the streets aren’t paved with Gold, they are paved with Silicon. Many a Californian has made their fame and fortune from Silicon-based commerce. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Oracle, Apple the list goes on and on. Silicon paves the streets of Silicon Valley.
Silly Valley is often imitated but rarely bettered. Here is a small selection of imitators from a fully blown stamp collection of silicon valley places in wikipedia:
- Silicon Alley, New York
- Silicon Fen, Cambridge UK
- Silicon Roundabout, London
- Silicon Glen, Glasgow and Edinburgh, Bonnie Scotland
- Silicon Gorge, M4 Corridor-ish (Bristol, Swindon, Oxford etc)
- Silicon Mill, Manchester and North West England
- Silicon Shipyard, Newcastle, Middlesborough etc
If you don’t have a Silicon Valley cluster near where you live, there’s an easy part and a hard part to creating one. The easy part is, just prefix the name of your local area with the magic S word Silicon. Easy. The hard part is building the universities, businesses, technology, communities, start-ups and investment that makes a technology cluster like Silicon Valley successful [1,2,3]. How can it be done?
Refererences
- Mietek Jaroniec (2009). Silicon beyond the valley Nature Chemistry, 1 (2), 166-166 DOI: 10.1038/nchem.173
- Paul Graham (2006). How to be Silicon Valley paulgraham.com
- Chris Vallance (2012). Silicon Britain: Inside the country’s tech clusters BBC News
O'Really? 