39 karma · joined December 13, 2010
Here's one attempt, as an appropriate illustration for the Bay Area: https://teleport.org/cities/san-francisco-bay-area/ (skip the top for startups, worst for housing and unfold the leisure, culture and tolerance categories, for example).
For salary distribution comparison deep dive: https://teleport.org/salaries/
And Helsinki salaries: https://teleport.org/cities/helsinki/salaries/
Without knowing your personal tax situation it is hard to deduct your net hourly income from this - so probably more useful to discuss and compare gross (pre-personal-tax) billing rates when trying to understand the market?
Two more LA cost & quality of life, as well as salary comparison research links for you: * https://teleport.org/cities/los-angeles/ * https://teleport.org/salaries
And on the global search for alternatives, should US not work out, here's some overview data of 110 most startup-friendly cities in the world: http://my.teleport.org/ -- and a mobile app for searching among them: http://teleport.org/mobile (visa data layers coming soon, too, but dozens of other cost & quality of life criteria already there)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Peripheral-William-Gibson/dp/03991... next in queue
For example Erply (http://www.erply.com/), an award-winning startup, recently made news with porting their web based POS solution to iPads recently. Any others you know?