How attractive is San Diego as a place to start a company compared with the Silicon Valley? Santa Barbara? Los Angeles?

On Thursday evening the "Sweat Equity" series of seminars sponsored by San Diego's Software Industry Council (SDSIC) brought together a distinguished panel with a venture capitalist and successful entrepreneurs answering questions, drilling into their experiences, as well as exploring perceptions they've developed over several years doing business in San Diego. More than 50 interested attendees with the hope and aspiration of either starting their own company, or breaking away from the corporate world with a startup, provided an enthusiastic audience to support the discussion and Q&A.

Panel members included:

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."  Lewis Carroll

The San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC) continues to bring valuable seminars and training to the community.  Tuesday night the topic was "Landing Page Design: Beyond the Landing Page" with Larry Marine, owner of the new media consulting company "Intuitive Design."

The SDSIC splits its focus to provide both training to members on a variety of business skills related to technology, as well as providing a professional networking venue to help create business and individual career opportunities. 

SocalTech.Com reported on Friday (22 May) that Bill Snitzer has created a new Twitter robot pushing real-time earthquake information to subscribers.  @earthquakesLA is a good utility, providing both text and graphic information using data supplied by the US Geological Survey (USGS), including expanded location information.

Twitter is rapidly gaining interest as not only a social networking tool, but also a utility used for emergency notifications.  Recent fires in the Santa Barbara area (Jesusita fires, May 2009) moved so quickly that normal city emergency notifications could not meet the needs of residents and students in the affected areas.

Students took the lead in quickly establishing a notification system through Twitter, giving Twitter users the information they needed to both evacuate and avoid getting caught in the path of a killer wildfire.  While it is hard to quantify actual results of "TwitterNet" on personal safety in the Jesusito fires, it is safe to assume immediate information at a minimum served the purpose of alerting many people they were in harm's way, and to get to a safe location or rallying point.

BizJournals posted their 2009 Top 100 Tech City Center listing on Monday.  Three SoCal locations ranked within the top 25 tech center cities, including San Diego (6), Los Angeles (12), and Oxnard/Thousand Oaks (17).

San Jose topped the list, with the San Francisco/Oakland area coming in 4th.

BizJournals' methodology for ranking tech centers looks at a combination of factors, including: