Why do I care about Southern California?
September 26th, 2008 by Benjamin KuoI was recently talking with the CEO of a high tech startup here, and he asked me — why did I bother covering Southern California companies? Why not go big and focus on all startups, only cutting edge Web 2.0 startups/etc., Silicon Valley, etc? Why not write more articles about Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. Why care about Southern California as a place for high tech?
The reason socalTECH started (it used to be a side hobby I did as a software engineer, and has become it’s own business) was because of the misconception years ago that Southern California did not have any technology. I recall reading on one hand, that Southern California had no technology, but then on another hand that “Silicon Valley” companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm were doing very well and ruling the world. (note to those still uninitiated into basic geography: Broadcom is in Irvine, Qualcomm is in San Diego — not Silicon Valley).
It was very clear — and it often seems, it continues — that the media (and even many bloggers) think of technology only as being a “Silicon Valley” thing. socalTECH was started to focus on and highlight the innovation and technology being grown here in Southern California. There are a lot of very successful companies located here who people seem to think are based in Silicon Valley, for whatever reason. The raison d’etre behind socalTECH has been as a place to see what’s going on, get the latest news, connect with the technology community HERE, not in Silicon Valley.
People are still surprised when I tell them the very lengthy list of companies which were started in Southern California — MySpace, Overture, Lowermybills, Pricegrabber, Rent.com, JAMDAT, Geocities, Earthlink, NetZero, QLogic, Broadcom, etc. — all of which have spawned out startups and helped create the community that exists here today. Companies here are innovating in thousands of different ways in an in different industries. Our goal is to cover that innovation — because almost no one else does.
Everyone covers Google, everyone covers Facebook, everyone writes articles on the latest micro-second-of-uptime at Twitter. There’s enough of that from not only Silicon Valley itself but from all the mainstream newspapers who think only Silicon Valley has technology companies. That’s fine — let them cover that. We’re here to serve and deliver news to Southern California, about Southern California’s great high tech industry.