Austin Round-Up: The New Hotbed for Mobile
By Levi Shapiro
Jim Messer started Transverse last year in New York with a cadre of wireless industry veterans. This year, the company relocated to Austin. "We found everything we need in Austin-- at happy-hour prices. My commute is 10 minutes and I get double the house I had in San Diego for half the price". The combination of technical talent, creative culture and low costs has made Austin the newest hotbed in the wireless industry.
Take a walk down 6th Street and in addition to live music at The Dizzy Rooster, "Kinky Friedman for Governor" posters and fried pickle spears at Katz's Deli, you will probably see signs saying "Keep Austin Weird". Austin's development owes as much to its vibrant, bohemian culture as the concentration of tech companies like Dell, Qualcomm, Siemens, Intel, AT&T, IBM, Motorola, Apple, AMD, ARM, Marvel, Borland, Google, PayPal, Vignette, Texas Instruments, SD Micro, Silicon Labs, Broadcom, Freescale, nVidia, Trilogy, etc. In his groundbreaking book "The Rise of the Creative Class" (Basic Books, 2002), Professor Richard L. Florida correlated the density of "Bohemian Clusters" with a city's economic development. Austin has attracted wireless entrepreneurs by offering an eclectic, tolerant alternative to the sterility of Silicon Valley- which author Joel Kotkin calls "Nerdistan".
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