Silicon Valley's Clones All Seek To Be Nerd Kings

Eric Ellis, Denver

March 18, 1998

We've all heard of Silicon Valley - that precocious, hard-driving standard-bearer of Bill Clinton's much-hyped "new economy" that stretches for 100km south-east of San Francisco. But what about "The Digital Coast"? Could it be a Paul Theroux thriller about a downsized salaryman's struggle to build a cable company in tropical Belize?

Er, no. And "Silicon Beach"? No, its not a teenflick remake starring an ageing Annette Funicello and her trauma at the hands of a Malibu plastic surgeon played by a geriatric Frankie Avalon.

The Digital Coast, Silicon Beach and other sites like "Wireless Valley" and the "Tech Corridor" are emerging challengers to San Francisco's so far undisputed title as king of nerd heaven.

Until now, Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley was best known for the quality of the pornography that emerged from the earthquake-prone warehouses that punctuate its endless suburbia, as celebrated by the box office hit Boogie Nights.

Indeed, the only silicon found there 10 years ago was in the face-lifts of ageing housewives.

Not any more. "Newer Jersey", as it is known locally, now sits in the heart of the sprouting Tech Corridor stretching along the 101 Freeway from Hollywood through the valley to Ventura County on the coast just north of the LA megalopolis.

There it borders Silicon Beach, once the well-heeled heartland of Reaganomics centred on the retirement villages of Santa Barbara. That was 10 years ago. Silicon Beach is looking half its age, thanks to a barrage of internet-related boutique software houses and telecoms firms.

Just east of LA is the "Inland Empire", a heavily irrigated pastureland now leading experimentation in biotechnology, particularly as it relates to agriculture and food development. It boasts a chamber of commerce-like group which doesn't call itself a chamber, or even a progress association, but CORE21, Connecting Research and Economic Development for the 21st Century.

Closer to the coast from the Inland Empire is Pasadena, best known for its Rose Bowl football match and movie star weekenders. Now an influx of well-heeled Asian immigrants and their offspring are "vision-seeking" into the stars and beyond. It is here that NASA's historic Mars probes have their genesis.

Further south, Japan's Sony and the fast-growing telecommunications giant Qualcomm, which is wiring vast swathes of the developing world, anchor Wireless Valley, the wealthy area just north of San Diego.

The Southern California region in itself is an economic phenomenon in that it simply exists in the harsh desert sun.

That it churns out more than $US500 billion ($757.5 billion) in gross domestic product, including 19,000 tech-based companies, is all the more remarkable. It is as if the area around the Kimberly Ranges in far north-western Australia was one of the world's economic engines.

Firms like Vetronix in Santa Barbara are typical of the local entrepreneurial flair.

It develops software for car diagnostic equipment and has tripled in size in the last four years, ironically as one of the US's most famous auto parts companies, General Motors Deco, scaled back.

In San Diego, tech-related employment has quadrupled in the past four years, picking up the slack left behind by the Cold War-inspired slump in the defence and aerospace sectors that anchored the Southland economy during the 1970s and 1980s.

Qualcomm has come from virtually nowhere in five years to have 10,000 employees, adding 3,000 last year, and its name to San Diego's football stadium, where the recent Superbowl was held.

But the contest to be the next Silicon Valley does not end here; something all the more poignant for once-hyped Asia's sudden loss of its Pacific Century vision and role as the rising challenger of US global economic and technological primacy. As Bill Gates no doubt reminded anyone who asked while in Australia, the area around his home town of Seattle makes strong claims to be a Silicon Valley pretender, with hundreds of firms alighting from the Microsoft share options gravy train.

In the Texan capital of Austin and in nearby Houston, Dell and Compaq have sprouted in this decade to dominate an area now known as the Silicon Desert and sometimes the Silicon Prairie. About 1,000km to the north-west is another Silicon Prairie with squat glass towers that surround Denver and Boulder's aerospace start-ups.

And there is still Boston's famous Route 128 - home to Digital and Lotus -and thousands of small firms spinning out of Harvard and MIT. And Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina. And Manhattan's Silicon Alley of entertainment-related multimedia shops.

The list seems endless and with an estimated 20 million now hooked to the internet, and 50 per cent with a home computer of some sort, so does Americans' appetite for new products and innovation.

The next phase of major development centres on speech technology, enabling computer access and entertainment by voice, and thus neatly combining Middle America's distaste for exercise (a third of Americans are designated as clinically obese) and obsession for popular culture with a "non-active activity".