Silicon Valley North(West)

For my entire academic and most of my professional career, I grew up in Canada's Tech Triangle, bordered by Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge; an area dominated by RIM and the University of Waterloo. This area didn't receive the label "Silicon Valley North" which was given to Ottawa; dominated by Nortel, Alcatel, Corel back in the day. Seattle, which has always been known as a "tech-ish center" thanks to MSFT and Boeing, got props from NYT's John Markoff today: Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley.

When I lived here to work for RIM, I didn't see much of the entrepreneur culture. At Livemocha, I've really enjoyed participating/ attending/ witnessing the action:

• Ignite Seattle: This is great. Put on my O'Reilly, a dozen folks get 5 minutes to hammer through a presentation on something geeky. I liked Dave McClure's Product Marketing Metrics for StartUps and Shawn Murphy's Hacking Chocolate.
• Refresh Seattle: Typically a speaker on something design related, then drinks in Ballard. I saw CommonCraft Lee Lefever give this talk on Community is Like Hosting a Party.
• StartPad: Pretty cool concept - basically it's an organization that offers shared space allowing startups to share costs and collaborate. They put on a session on OpenSocial a while back - no we're not building an app... yet.
  
• StartUp Weekend: I'm not this hardcore, but I like the idea. Teams of 8 compete over the course of a weekend to kick off their start up.

On related news, the Seattle 2.0 list came out today - Livemocha is #35!