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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

If we're seriously going to ask "The next Silicon Vallley?" then it's worth asking if Boston, NYC, etc would look all that different.

In fact, I would gander that there must be metropolitan areas of the world that have more startups per square mile/km.

Israel is 20,000km/sq

NYC is 1,200 km/sq (metro area 30,670 km/sq, but we can discount a lot of it if we're just looking for a concentration)

Boston metro area is 12,000km/sq

I'd imagine the "concentration" is higher in these two cities, but maybe not. Does anyone have any data?

EDIT: boston.areastartups.com claims that Boston has 1511 startups. This map lists 628.

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But if you're looking just at NYC or Boston, shouldn't you be looking at just Tel Aviv or Herzlia? Two small cities that host about 80% of Israeli startups.

Yes, though its possible that doing so might make the numbers even worse for Israel /Tel Aviv in the comparison.

To be really fair we have to compare roughly the same population density areas I suppose. But if we're asking ourselves if "Israel" (which may be too nebulous and maybe we should say "Tel Aviv") is the next Silicon Valley, and we can point to any region that has a greater concentration of startups (aside from silicon valley), then the premise of the title becomes a little odd.

In other words, its worth asking if the map actually presents an "amazing concentration" or simply a normal-for-a-tech-metro-area concentration. Maybe it is amazin, but maybe its simply a "just plain average" concentration.

And so I'd love to see more data here, because I would guess that its not particularly out of line with NYC/Boston/etc and, if anything, the concentration in those metro areas is greater.

But Israel is not a tech-metro-area, that's my point. Roughly 60% desert with sparse population in the south, and rural areas in the north. The tech scene is almost exclusively in Tel Aviv/Herzlia/Haifa.

here is a link that provides some NYC data -- http://mappedinny.com

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