July 9-10, 2013
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The Startup Genome has analyzed 50,000 startups around the world to create what it is calling the first “data-driven ranking” of the top 20 tech hubs on the planet. And to highlight just how important startups are to national and global economies.

Who knew, for example, that Sydney, Australia, is global capital of “data-driven startups?” Or that the top nine startups of the last 15 years have generated nearly a trillion dollars in value, helped along by the likes of Facebook, Google, and Amazon? And while everyone would likely have guessed that Silicon Valley is the top hub of entrepreneurship on the planet, with Tel Aviv high on the list (if not exactly second), Los Angeles coming in third is a bit of a surprise.

The conclusions are based on data from startups that use the Startup Compass, a tool that helps founders make better  decisions through data. Startup Genome analyzed factors such as startup incidence, funding availability, business performance, founder mindset, technology trends, support networks, and talent availability to find the hottest locations to start and grow a company.

Here are the top 20 technology hubs, as defined by the Startup Genome:

1. Silicon Valley
2. Tel Aviv
3. Los Angeles
4. Seattle
5. New York City
6. Boston
7. London
8. Toronto
9. Vancouver
10. Chicago
11. Paris
12. Sydney
13. Sao Paulo
14. Moscow
15. Berlin
16. Waterloo (Canada)
17. Singapore
18. Melbourne
19. Bangalore
20. Santiago

More valuable than the ranking, Startup Genome provided the ranking data for each technology hub on eight key criteria. Using these criteria you can see, for example, that while Vancouver ranks 14th in the support index, probably due to being a relatively young ecosystem, it ranks second in the mindset index (indicating that it has plenty of eager and driving founders) and fourth in the talent index.

Tel Aviv, on the other hand, ranks second in startup output and equivalent to Silicon Valley in funding, but only 12th in performance, perhaps due to Israeli startups’ sometimes-wondered-at predilection for building smaller companies, outfits that don’t turn into enormous enterprises.

The report is rich in data and many more details — you can get your own copy right here.

Image credits: Startup Genome

Blue: percent of execs who say tech innovation will move away from Silicon Valley

Those are among the results of KPMG’s Global Tech Innovation Survey 2012. The audit and advisory firm asked 668 business execs about the future of disruptive technologies and about where the next epicenter of innovation will be.

VentureBeat talked to Gary Matuszak, global chairman for IT at KPMG, about the results.

It may not be surprising that 60 percent of Chinese executives believe Silicon Valley would lose its pre-eminent place, but it’s a little more surprising that almost 30 percent of American business leaders agree with them.

And when the CEOs and directors were asked “which region showed the most promise for disruptive breakthroughs,” only 39 percent of American execs picked the home team, while 71 percent of Chinese leaders said China was the future.

In a statement, Egidio Zarrella of KPMG China said, “These survey findings also demonstrate that China’s innovation investment has fostered an environment for the development of disruptive technologies that is growing by leaps and bounds.” According to the KPMG report, the Chinese government is fueling intensive investments in cloud computing, mobile payments, and outsourcing services as part of China’s twelfth Five-Year Plan.

But while the press release announcing the study was titled “China projected to be on par with U.S. as a future tech innovation leader,” Matuszak wasn’t certain that replacing Silicon Valley was going to be an easy process:

“A number of places in the U.S. have tried to replicate the Valley and failed. You could imagine people in places like Israel and China not understanding it either. But, they see themselves as making gigantic strides and believe they should be able to replicate Silicon Valley’s success.”

Where global execs thing the world’s center of tech innovation is going (among those who think it is moving away from Silicon Valley)

I talked to Robert Scoble, startup liaison officer at Rackspace and social media guru, about Silicon Valley and whether it is replicable elsewhere.

Scoble recently talked to the founders of Atlassian, the software development toolkit company. They moved to Silicon Valley from Australia for four reasons:

“First of all is money … you can’t get funded to do risky weird shit in very many places. Secondly, it’s PR … most of it is here, for example at Google I/O tomorrow. Third, it’s talent — the guy who built a 20,000 node server farm for eBay, he lives here. You can’t get that anywhere else.”

Fourth and finally, Scoble said, it’s the culture.

“Just on Sunday walking on the beach I ran into the guy who runs the welding team at Tesla … he lives here, not anywhere else. It happens every single day, and you just don’t have this anywhere else.”

Scoble doesn’t see Silicon Valley losing its luster anytime soon.

“There’s a little area of Tel Aviv like this, a small space in London, maybe a neighborhood in Beijing. But they don’t have the big companies, and they don’t have the complete ecosystem.”

Which made me wonder why American executives seemed so down on the Valley. A question I asked KPMG’s Gary Matuszak was whether American execs who are not in the Valley or intimately connected to the Valley really understand how it works. He replied that he wasn’t certain anyone knew why it really worked, and there’s some truth in that.

“What China does have going for it is a huge population of internet users,” said Matuszak. “It’s a huge home market,” which the country’s entrepreneurs can exploit without too much outside interference, thanks to the great firewall of China, by which American companies such as Facebook cannot do business in China.

Whether that is enough to help China become a global technology superpower is unclear. Certainly Scoble thinks it’s not that easy.

“Look at this the other way,” said Scoble. “In Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon kicks out so many good geeks every year. They pretty much built the Google self-driving car. But no geeks stay there. There’s no culture, no ecosystem. And no weather!”

Image credit: ShutterStock

I’m setting up meetings during my stay at the Israel Innovation Marathon event on March 27 and 28, and have arranged for several half-hour slots to meet with entrepreneurs, hear their ideas, and provide feedback.

The event itself will worth attending. I’ll be talking with Israeli high-tech investors Zohar Zisapel, founder of RAD, and Ed Mklavsky, founder of Gemini Israeli Funds, among others.

The trip is part of our effort to find the best companies for VentureBeat to write about and also to find the most disruptive products globally to launch on the stage of DEMO, the conference we produce. The next DEMO conference will be held next month.

If you’re based in Israel and you’re interested in meeting me while I’m in Tel Aviv, please fill out this form, and we will be in touch with further details shortly.

See you in Israel!

For those of you who read VentureBeat, you’ll know I’ve been on a world tour, trying to find the most innovative companies to write about, but also to invite to our conference DEMO.

What better place to have as our next stop than the Israel Innovation Marathon, on March 27-28? The event is being organized by BootCamp Ventures, the same group that organized the Istanbul tech conference I attended back in November.

I’ll be opening the event with a talk about the global landscape of investing, comparing the major tech centers of the U.S., Asia and Europe. Honestly, though, my main reason for going will be to explore Israel, while trying to answer the question posed by the book Startup Nation: “How is it that Israel — a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources — produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada and the UK?”

At the event, I’ll also be interviewing two respected Israeli high-tech investors, Zohar Zisapel, founder of RAD, and Ed Mklavsky, founder of Gemini Israeli Funds, where we’ll discuss similarities and differences between Silicon Valley, and what the one can learn from the other.

I’ll also be moderating start-up presentation sessions featuring some of the hottest new companies in the region.

Joining me will be 14 other experts and investors from different countries.

Can’t wait. For now, though, I’m stuck in the tumble jumble world of Austin’s exciting SXSW, where the buzz never stops. It’s like 1:45am right now, and the place is still alive. Notably, an Israeli-based company, Fooducate earlier today won a mobile application competition hosted by analytics company Flurry, beating out 700 other competitors. Fooducate is a pretty awesome app, in my opinion, providing key nutrition information about grocery store items while you shop (it lets you scan bar codes with your phone, providing you all kinds of information). I interviewed the founder and CEO, Hemi Weingarten, whose team is based in Tel Aviv. Hope to write more about it soon.

I’m really looking forward to meeting more disruptors in Israel.