With March Madness officially over, Forbes is feeding the thirst for some statistical gamesmanship with its latest “Midas List,” an attempt to rank the country’s top 100 venture capitalists. The Seattle area has just one entry on the list: Madrona Venture Group‘s Matt McIlwain, at No. 75—in fact, there were more women in the rankings than people from the Puget Sound region. Forbes cited, of course, the huge $2.25 billion purchase of Isilon Systems by EMC, along with the 2008 acquisitions of World Wide Packets and Farecast.

The Forbes rankings are based on both data and subjective factors. You can check out the full methodology statement, which acknowledges “blind spots” in record-keeping. Shorter version: They analyzed exits of $200 million or more during the past five years for venture-financed companies in the U.S., Europe and Israel (Asia will be part of a separate list). That data also was weighted, for example giving higher scores to earlier-stage investments, and an expert panel chimed in with some less mathematical judgments.

I’d think that with a five-year timeline, we might see more local VCs mentioned, but maybe the dollar threshold is the key. Please feel free to register any complaints with the methodology, oversights, or general displeasure with this particular bit of media click-bait in the comments. Also, prepare for a horrifyingly intrusive rollover video ad on the Forbes site.

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Everyone loves a Top 50 list. Everyone except me.

Wall Street Journal, you can take your “Top 50 venture backed companies” list, published today, and…well, just take it. Not just because it counts a grand total of one—ONE—Boston-area company among its luminaries (Westborough, MA-based ExaGrid, at #42). Not just because the criteria for the list are pretty arbitrary (it’s determined by a formula that includes VC track record, amount of capital raised, and Dow Jones VentureWire editors’ picks). And not just because 35 of the 50 companies are based in California (mostly Silicon Valley). But because the companies you have picked to be “the next big thing” in terms of “technological breakthroughs” look to be just plain boring.

OK, I’m probably overreacting. The list is good if you think enterprise health benefits, enterprise Wi-Fi, sales compensation management, and wireless infrastructure are really exciting, and could become the Facebooks, Twitters, and Groupons of tomorrow (all of which I would have panned a few years ago, too, truth be told). To WSJ’s credit, the list also includes companies in slightly more popular fields like data management, multimedia over broadband, and mobile device analytics—though these are not exactly rocking my world either.

In any case, the lone Boston-area representative is no stranger to us. My colleague Wade profiled ExaGrid, the Massachusetts disk-based storage company, back in 2007. Meanwhile, notable East Coast companies that fell off the WSJ list between last year and this year include Boston-Power and Gilt Groupe. (Incidentally, only one Seattle-area company made the list too—EndoGastric Solutions, a surgical tech company that has raised a ton of money and isn’t really based in Seattle anymore; it moved headquarters to Silicon Valley.)

It’s notable that four New York companies made this year’s list: Recycle Rewards (municipal recycling), Etsy (marketplace for handmade goods), Everyday Health (online health publisher, looks like a future AOL acquisition), and TxVia (e-payments).

OK, thanks for letting me vent. Now let’s get back to work.

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Seattle 2.0′s monthly startup index reports that Cheezburger Network and Zillow still lead the pack of local Internet startups in terms of traffic estimates. Feedjit, Survey Analytics, SEOmoz, and Smilebox moved up the ranks in the top 10, while Sporcle, Entertonement, AppStoreHQ, Evri, Zulily, and Onehub made strong upward moves in the top 50. Seattle 2.0 CEO Jennifer Cabala noted that April was a good month for entertainment sites and information discovery services.

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The Seattle 2.0 website announced its monthly ranking of local tech startups based on Web traffic estimates. For January, Cheezburger Network, Zillow, BuddyTV, and Picnik ranked as the top four. In the top 20, gains from the previous month were made by Survey Analytics (IdeaScale) at #5, Feedjit at #7, Cozi at #17, and Delve Networks at #18. New companies on the list include Tanga, Amaranth Games, and BigRuby.

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Seattle-based Cheezburger Network, a collection of humor websites, retained its top position in Seattle 2.0′s monthly rankings of local startups’ Web traffic for December. It was followed by Zillow, Picnik, and BuddyTV, whose rankings didn’t change from the previous month. Redmond, WA-based Smilebox, a maker of electronic greeting cards, moved up seven spots to #5. Other notable gains were made by Cozi, Delve Networks, and BigStartups.

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At least 17 Seattle-area startups rolled out new websites last month, according to the latest edition of Seattle 2.0′s startup index. The index now lists 373 companies, which are ranked on the basis of Web traffic estimates. The top 10 sites didn’t change much from previous months. The startups that are new to the list are HasOffers, BigStartups, Team Apart, Boxoh.com, EnergySavvy.com, Couchsoft (Mentby), Osnapz, Social Kind (TweetToCall, Escape My Date), Fotozio (PicTranslator), Adometry (Veracity), Qbiki Networks (iPhoneSeattle), HotelsOutlook, BuzzMinder (2Reminders), Splitts.com, Data Applied, Baldy Beanbag (The Big Magoo), and Megosi.

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Tech manufacturing exports from Washington state grew for the sixth straight year in 2008, up to $3.5 billion (15th out of 50 states), according to a TechAmerica Foundation report highlighted today by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). Washington ranked fifth nationwide in consumer electronics exports, which totaled $320 million. The top three tech export destinations for the state were Canada, Taiwan, and the Netherlands. The report did not include software exports.

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Seattle-based Pet Holdings, owners of I Can Has Cheezburger and other humor sites, has taken over the top spot from Zillow in Seattle 2.0′s startup index for August, a ranking of website traffic estimates. The rest of the top five are BuddyTV, Picnik, and CarDomain. Big gains were made in the top 100 by EVO Media Group, Raveable, and nPost. Others Online and iLike were taken off the list after their recent acquisitions by the Rubicon Project and MySpace, respectively.

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Beneath the friendly, laid-back veneer, the Seattle tech community is a rough-and-tumble lot ready to throw down at a moment’s notice. That’s what you might surmise after the past week, anyway. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. (Though the heat wave might have had something to do with it.)

Here’s a quick update for those who missed the action:

—We’re getting pretty sick of being compared to Silicon Valley. Most of the time, we defer to the sheer number of startups, entrepreneurs, and venture firms in the Bay Area, taking solace in the quality of our talent and companies. But every once in a while, someone really stirs the pot, like UW TechTransfer’s Janis Machala did last week at a public forum on campus. She said Seattle pays a price for its laid-back, outdoors-y lifestyle, and implied that some of our entrepreneurs don’t work as hard as those in the Valley. To which many local observers, including Dave Schappell of TeachStreet, have taken offense (albeit respectfully), arguing that Seattleites work just as hard.

Silicon Valley readers apparently believe they can learn a thing or two from Seattle’s startup efforts. Case in point: Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa and Seattle 2.0 has taken considerable time and effort to blog about lessons learned from Sampa’s demise, and he’s getting a lot of readership in the Bay Area.

—And don’t even get us started on Portland, OR. We Seattleites hate to be ranked behind Portland in anything. Yeah, so they still have a pro basketball team, and a pretty good Japanese garden and bookstore, but that’s about all we are willing to concede, right? So when Entrepreneur magazine ranked Portland as one of the top cities for startups and snubbed Seattle (at least that’s how it was perceived), this meant war. Even though Gerry Langeler of OVP Venture Partners was quoted as saying Portland is “too small to have competing ventures,” and its entrepreneurs tend to lack a “killer instinct.”

TechFlash went on the offensive, calling out Portland for its relative dearth of venture capital and venture-backed public companies. The Oregonian and Silicon Florist came to Portland’s defense; blogger Rick Turoczy pointed out that Portland entrepreneurship is incredibly diverse, with startups not just in software and cleantech, but in food and drink, clothing, books, comics, and other creative arts. In short, Portland is a collaborative, entrepreneur-friendly town, and its culture is separate from Seattle’s. (OK, it’s not quite Red Sox-Yankees blasting each other in the tabloids, but you get the idea.)

—I say we settle all this bad blood with a Battle of the Tech Bands: Seattle Vs. All Comers. Xconomy CEO and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi has already dropped hints that he wants to stage a Boston vs. Seattle band battle. Judging from the quality and tremendous energy of the bands we saw at the Pyramid Alehouse last week, it could shape up to be quite an epic. (See more photos from the Battle and WTIA party here, courtesy of Kevin Pedraja.)

I don’t know about you, but my money’s on this guy (left), Peter Dixon from the metal band Juda’s Wake (representing Microsoft), winning it all… You want a piece of Seattle? Come and get it.

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Seattle 2.0′s monthly startup index is out for May 2009, and Seattle-based Zillow, Pet Holdings, and BuddyTV top the list in terms of traffic estimates to their websites. Notable gains were made in the top 100 startup websites by Gist, LoudLaunch, and Zooppa.

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Seattle, the Washington D.C. area, and Orange County have moved up in Milken Institute’s ranking of top high-tech center areas in North America. From 2003 to 2007, Seattle passed Boston and became America’s second-ranking high-tech metro area. San Diego is at seventh place. (These are Xconomy’s network cities.) The number one spot belongs to Silicon Valley, which “continues to lead all other metropolitan regions in North America in the breadth and scope of economic activity it creates through technological innovation,” according to the study.

According to Milken Institute, the Top Ten North America high-tech centers are:

2007 Ranking (2003 Ranking) Metro Area Total High Tech Score

1 (1) San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 100.0
2 (3) Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA 46.4
3 (2) Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA 45.2
4 (5) Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 41.8
5 (4) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA 40.2
6 (6) Dallas-Plano-Irving, TX 21.8
7 (7) San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 19.3
8 (11) Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, CA 17.7
9 (9) New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ 16.8
10 (8) San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, CA 16.1

The study was done with 2007 benchmarking data. The report, called “North America’s High-Tech Economy: The Geography of Knowledge-Based Industries,” was presented by Milken Institute director Ross DeVol at the 2009 IEDC Technology-Led Economic Development Conference on Tuesday.

Metro areas were ranked by “their ability to grow and sustain thriving high-tech industries.” The study compares wages and employment in the metropolitan areas, and adds a location quotient, which measures the concentration of high-tech employment or wages in the area.

In the separate Life Sciences Small Business Vitality Index, the Top Five ranking was 1. Greater Los Angeles 2. Greater San Francisco 3. San Diego (tie) 3. Boston (tie) 5. Greater Raleigh-Durham, according to DeVol’s presentation.

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Seattle 2.0′s latest startup website rankings show no changes in the top five companies (Zillow, Pet Holdings, iLike, Picnik, BuddyTV), but some strong gains were made by CarDomain (up to #6), Walk Score (#28), Trumba (#32), and Entertonement (#33). The rankings are based on traffic estimates on the websites of Seattle-area technology startups.

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Marcelo Calbucci’s Seattle 2.0 index of local startups’ websites is out for February, and shows little movement at the top. Zillow, Pet Holdings, iLike, BuddyTV, and Robot Co-op have the top five sites, based on traffic estimates. Calbucci points out a few sites in the top 20 that were not there a year ago: BigOven, UrbanSpoon, Menuism, Avvo, Feedjit, and nuTsie (Melodeo).

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Seattle 2.0′s monthly ranking of local-area startup websites is out for January. Based on traffic stats compiled by Marcelo Calbucci, Zillow and Pet Holdings remained #1 and #2, with iLike, Picnik, BuddyTV, Robot Co-op, and PayScale making gains in the top 10. Notable gains in the top 100 were made by SEOmoz, Mixpo, TeachStreet, GotVoice, Zooppa, Visible Technologies, and Twilio. Calbucci notes that 25-odd sites were removed because they had shut down, and only four new sites were added to the list.

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Seattle 2.0′s monthly rankings of local tech-startup websites is out for November. Based on traffic estimates compiled by Marcelo Calbucci, Zillow remained #1, though its lead over Pet Holdings (#2) is nominal. Picnik, BigOven, and WidgetBucks continued to climb upward within the top 10, and Athleon, Visible.net, CultureMob, GoGoMo, and Jackson Fish Market also made strong gains in the top 100.

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In a report released Tuesday, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation named Massachusetts the nation’s leading state when it comes to the structural economic factors that make the state’s businesses competitive in the “New Economy”—defined as global, entrepreneurial, knowledge-based, rooted in information technologies, and innovation-driven.

Massachusetts hung onto its #1 ranking from the foundations’ 2007 report, with a score of 97 on an index aggregating some 29 measures, from the educational attainment of the workforce to the quantity of exports, the amount of job churn, the penetration of broadband Internet access, venture capital activity, and the number of patents issued to local inventors.

Washington state, meanwhile, climbed from the number-four spot in 2007 to the second-place spot in this year’s report, with a score of 81.9. Maryland (80), Delaware (79.3), and New Jersey (77) were close behind.

The top-ranked states, according to an announcement from the Kauffman foundation, are rich in “knowledge jobs” requiring at least a two-year degree. They all show above-average levels of entrepreneurship, have large numbers of citizens who use the Internet, and benefit from large numbers of skilled immigrants, both from other states and from other countries.

Massachusetts’ New England neighbors Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont fared well in the rankings, placing 6th, 11th, 13th, and 19th, respectively. Washington’s neighbor Oregon came in 15th. The five lowest-ranking states were, in reverse order, Mississippi, West Virgina, Arkansas, Alabama, and Wyoming.

“To succeed in the New Economy, states face a new imperative to boost the competitiveness of their economies—not just relative to each other, but to other nations,” Robert Atkinson, president of ITIF and primary author of the report, said in the announcement. “If they are going to meet the economic challenges of the future, states will need to overhaul their familiar approaches to economic development.”

Of course, having picked Boston as our first home city and Seattle as our second, we here at Xconomy could have predicted the study’s results. But California, home to our third bureau in San Diego, may have some catching up to do. It dropped from 5th place in the 2007 report to 8th place this year, with a score of 75.

Here’s the complete rundown:

* Rounded to nearest integer.

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Bellingham, WA-based Tatango, a mobile-applications startup focused on text-messaging to groups, rose 77 spots to #91 in this month’s edition of the Seattle Startup Index. Other big gains were made by Frugal Mechanic, an auto-parts shopping site, and Smart Desktop, an office-software maker, according to Marcelo Calbucci, who compiles the monthly list.

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In terms of eco-friendliness, the Pacific Northwest and New England—Xconomy’s two homes—are both sitting pretty. In terms of education, however, one of them is not.

That’s according to the 2008 Business Facilities rankings report, released this week. The annual survey, which compares different business environments around the country, ranks cities and states based on everything from air pollution and renewable energy incentives to K-12 spending and graduation rates. The report covers a wide range of topics, but I want to highlight two lists that caught my eye.

First, the good news. Washington, Oregon, and five New England states made the list of top 20 greenest states, with Oregon and Massachusetts leading the way:

1. Oregon
2. Massachusetts
3. Colorado
4. Washington
5. California
6. Connecticut
7. Minnesota
8. Arizona
9. Vermont
10. New York
11. Maryland
12. Hawaii
13. New Mexico
14. Rhode Island
15. Wisconsin
16. New Hampshire
17. Texas
18. Iowa
19. New Jersey
20. Florida

That’s based on pollution levels, financial incentives and policies for energy efficiency and renewable energy, number of hazardous waste sites, percentage of people who use public transit, and a couple of other metrics.

The “greenest” rankings by city are a little less meaningful, as they are based solely on data from the U.S. Green Building Council—basically a measure of the number of “green” buildings in town. Nevertheless, Seattle tied for first place with Chicago. Portland, OR, was next, and Boston and Cambridge, MA, placed 7th and 9th, respectively.

Now for the bad (or at least mixed) news. Although Seattle and Portland ranked #1 and #4 in … Next Page »

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Earlier this week I saw Marcelo Calbucci’s monthly “Seattle Startup Index” on his blog, Seattle 2.0, and I was a bit puzzled. There are 299 local websites on his list, ranked using Alexa and Compete—services that estimate Web traffic numbers by extrapolating from the browsing behavior of users of Alexa and Compete’s toolbars. The top five sites were Zillow, iLike, BuddyTV, I Can Has Cheezburger? (I still have no idea what this site is about), and Wetpaint. But what do the rankings actually mean?

I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth, so yesterday I sat down with Calbucci, who has been intimately involved with the startup community since 2005. That’s when he left Microsoft after seven years (four-plus with MSN Search) to start up Sampa, a Redmond-based family-networking site for which he is chief technology officer. In March, Sampa revamped its site and landed $1 million in angel investment.

Calbucci described how he arrived at his startup rankings, which he does in his spare time. It all started in 2006 when John Cook of the Seattle P-I put out a list of 60-odd local Web startups. Calbucci took the list and started ranking the sites (using Alexa and Compete) and looking for more of them. He blogged about them and asked people to send him info about their companies. Pretty soon he was up to 100 Web companies. Towards the end of 2007, he started adding other local startups in software, hardware, and wireless—and that’s where the rankings become more difficult to interpret, and sometimes controversial. “Every once in a while I get emails calling the list ‘useless,’” he says.

The thing to remember, Calbucci says, is that the rankings measure the popularity and “reach” of startups’ websites—and even then it’s only an estimate based on certain users, not an unbiased survey of the number of unique addresses of visitors, for instance. What’s more, tech companies whose main business is not driven by their websites will not rank high. So, successful firms like Seattle-based Pelago, creator of the popular mobile social-networking service Whrrl, ranks only 76th, and Mercer Island-based Napera Networks, which does hardware for network security, is way down at #237.

The biggest surprise to Calbucci? “You’d think the ranking might correlate with funding level, but it doesn’t,” he says. Some highly-ranked sites, such as 43 Things (at #6) run by the Robot Co-op, have raised little or no money from venture capitalists or angel investors, yet are getting a lot of traffic. With these caveats in mind, I think Calbucci’s list is a very useful resource for people who want to keep up with the innovation community.

Our chat touched on some other interesting topics as well. A few highlights:

—On running a local tech blog: “My goal is to make the community more dynamic,” he says. “In 2005 when I started Sampa, there were basically no local blogs about startups.” He launched Seattle 2.0 in March 2007. “The first three months were very slow. Then it started growing and growing. The last six months have been very good [in terms of traffic].”

—On Sampa (named after his hometown of São Paulo, Brazil) and entrepreneurship: “My long-term dream is that everyone will have a Sampa website. Just like email, in 10 years everyone will have a website. I hope it’s Sampa… The challenge now is marketing, getting it into people’s minds and creating a brand.”

—On Microsoft and Yahoo’s recent battles: “I don’t think a deal will happen… It wasn’t that Yahoo turned down the bid, it was that they pooh-poohed the offer and made it sound like being owned by Microsoft would be the most evil, evil thing,” he says. “Yahoo might be bought in a few years, maybe by Fox… Microsoft has so much money, they can afford to be incompetent for a decade… but then they won’t be able to buy customers and traffic.”

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Tired of city rankings yet? OK, I’ll be brief. So the July/August issue of Men’s Health, out this week, ranks Seattle #1 in “most environmentally conscious” drivers. Not that surprisingly, the Northwest did well in the survey overall: Portland, OR, and Spokane, WA, also made the top 10. The analysis of 100 American cities took into account gas consumption, annual mileage, vehicle efficiency, air quality, and mass-transit usage.

My colleague Luke and I have certainly done our part—we both recently ditched our cars. But how are local companies doing on greening up transportation, energy, and other technologies?

Startup activity in the cleantech space is certainly one good measure. According to DowJones VentureSource data for 2007, Washington state came in third in VC investments in cleantech (behind California and Massachusetts), with $175 million. It was dominated by a few big Seattle-based company deals: biodiesel maker Imperium Renewables raised $117 million in equity, but canceled its IPO at the end of the year; Targeted Growth, an agricultural biotech company, raised $22 million; Powerit Holdings landed $7 million; and Propel Biofuels raised $4.75 million.

(For a sense of what a larger cleantech cluster looks like, see the MIT Entrepreneurship Center’s energy map of New England here. Of course, it takes a lot of driving to visit all those companies.)

There is also some anecdotal evidence that local employers have contributed to the greening of Seattle. Microsoft and a few other companies run employee shuttles throughout the area. And roughly 70 percent of biotech giant Amgen’s staff in Seattle use something other than a single-occupancy vehicle to commute, says company spokesperson Carol Pawlak. Amgen runs a shuttle service from downtown, subsidizes bus and ferry transportation, and arranges van pools.

Xconomy doesn’t do that yet, but at least Luke and I will be getting our exercise.

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