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October 23, 2014

Competion heats up for Bay Area with Silicon Beach, Silicon Alley

  • Tech firms are popping up in places other than Silicon Valley as it becomes easier and cheaper to start companies.
    • By RYAN NAKASHIMA
    AP Business Writers

    LOS ANGELES — So long Silicon Valley. These days entrepreneurs and engineers are flocking to a place better known for wave surfing than Web surfing. Amid the palm trees and purple sunsets of the Southern California coastline, techies have built “Silicon Beach.”

    In the past few years Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and YouTube have opened offices on the west side of Los Angeles from Santa Monica south to Venice and Playa del Rey. They are joined by hundreds of startups including Hulu, Demand Media and Snapchat, which nixed a $3 billion takeover offer from Facebook. Major Hollywood players like The Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. have launched startup accelerators to help local tech entrepreneurs. The city of Los Angeles even hired its first chief technology officer, former Qualcomm executive Peter Marx, earlier this year.


     
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