High-Tech Name Game
The lexicon of high technology baffles most of us, but we all recognize the monikers that this field’s industrial centers have embraced. Silicon Valley is the San Jose home of America’s tech industry. The tech area in Boston is Route 128, named after the highway it grew along. The Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina has been tabbed the Research Triangle. And a little part of our biggest city, New York, is known as Silicon Alley.
Southern California has yet to be christened with a high-tech name although Los Angeles and Orange counties’ combined employment in the industry rivals that of Northern California. If the vibrant technical centers of the Southland had a catchy nickname, they might attract more entrepreneurs, skilled labor and, most important, venture capital to spur greater growth.
Manufacturing and services in computers, bio-med, “new media,” electronic components and communication equipment have developed in clusters amid the Southland sprawl. In the Burbank/Glendale area, the emphasis is on post-production and animation for the entertainment industry. In the Westside/South Bay area, so-called new media companies hold forth. An emerging advanced communications and advanced materials center stretches from the west San Fernando Valley to Camarillo. Search and navigation equipment and instrument companies have settled in the San Gabriel Valley. The Irvine Spectrum in Orange County has become a magnet for computer and bio-med companies.
In 1996, 235,300 people were working for an array of high-technology firms in Los Angeles and Orange counties, compared to 240,700 such employees in San Jose County.
In some quarters Southern California is known informally as “Tech Coast,” a name coined by Tim Cooley at the Orange County Business Council. Now a formal search is on for a marketing-plan name that would put more focus on our region. Silicon Beach and Digital Epicenter are among an estimated 150 names said to be vying for the crown. Whatever the name, it will, we hope, leave La-La Land in the dust.
