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London and Berlin have 3).

• ahomescu1 13y ago
  London and Berlin have a lot of people in general, from different fields (finance and government as much as tech). Is the number of programmers/capita higher in those two cities than average? I think Silicon Valley is the highest you can get (that's my guess at least). EDIT: IMHO, the closest thing Europe has to these is actually Zurich: it has top universities, money and big companies all in a small geographical area.
  • justincormack 13y ago
    Zurich is a tenth the size of silicon valley by population though, and it is a big financial centre too. There are other comparable tech-specific places, like Sophia Antipolis, Toulouse. By github usage, which seems a decent proxy [1], London is second after San Francisco, followed by Paris, and Berlin is only 7 (much smaller city though, so density could be higher). [1] http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/376551/where-world-are-github-users http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/376551/where-world-ar...
• wisty 13y ago
  Unfortunately, London and Berlin are national capitals. Silicon Vally (even if you extend it to San Francisco) isn't even a state capital. National capitals have defence contracts and government IT, which so lucrative it sucks a lot of talent away from industry. London is also a financial centre, so that's even more competition.
  • justincormack 13y ago
    London does not have defence contracts, thats largely out west, Reading way. It does have a fair amount of government IT, but that is more dispersed too (uk.gov is a new exception, but historically things like tax collection were moved out of London back in the 1970s).
• justincormack 13y ago
  London has two world class universities and Cambridge is pretty local.