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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The tech scene here is on the move. In comparison to other U.S. cities, Seattle has had the largest growth in tech jobs, and has moved up to #9 (from #10) in total number of tech workers. By comparison, Boston ranks #6 in number of jobs gained and #4 in total tech employment.

That’s all according to the American Electronics Association’s “Cybercities 2008″ report that compiled stats from 60 cities. The AEA rankings were based on labor stats from 2006, the most recent data available, and were not normalized to population. In terms of raw number of tech workers, the top five metro areas were New York, Washington DC, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In 2006, the Seattle area had a net gain of 7,800 tech jobs, a 7 percent increase over 2005, for a total of 127,700 jobs. The average wage for those jobs was $96,200 (#5 nationally, compared to $95,100 for Boston—no slouch itself). Seattle ranked first in software publishing (thanks largely to Microsoft) with 42,600 jobs, ninth in telecom with 18,800 jobs, and ninth in manufacturing of measurement and control instruments with 6,400 jobs. The area had a total of 4,900 high-tech establishments—as compared to 8,200 in Boston—according to the survey.

Some (including me) have questioned whether the 2006 growth stats are still relevant in 2008. The experts I’ve talked to say the answer is definitely yes—at least for the Seattle area. “My sense is there has not been a slowdown,” says Seattle-area Web entrepreneur and Xconomist Andy Sack. “I saw the article on the #1 fastest growing… and my thought was, well that explains why recruiting has been and continues to be so difficult.”

A word of caution, though—echoing University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska’s Xconomist post from yesterday. “Future growth depends on our ability to make high-tech careers attractive to our children,” said J. D. Hammerly, a vice president at Battelle Seattle Research Center, in an AEA press release. “We need to spark more excitement and enthusiasm for technology, sciences, and math. These skills are critical to prepare young students for an increasingly technical world, providing them with the foundation to become highly paid tech workers.”

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By now you’ve seen the 2008 Milken Institute “State Technology and Science Index.” Washington ranks fifth, behind Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, and California. Not too shabby? Let’s take a look under the covers.

At the outset, it’s important to acknowledge that all such rankings have a huge bogosity quotient—they’re highly sensitive to the precise criteria that are evaluated, and they’re subject to gaming. Still, there are probably some things to be learned.

The Milken index has five components:

—Risk Capital and Entrepreneurial Infrastructure, where Washington ranks 4th.

—Technology and Science Work Force, where Washington ranks 4th.

—Research and Development Inputs, where Washington ranks 8th.

—Technology Concentration and Dynamism, where Washington ranks 8th.

—Human Capital Investment, where Washington ranks 16th.

Each of these, in turn, has between 10 and 21 sub-components, listed at the bottom of the Web pages. There’s a huge wealth of detail available—I urge you to take a detailed look.

For now, though, let’s not spend any time on the first and second components, where Washington ranks 4th among the states (in both cases, up several notches from the most recent previous ranking, carried out in 2004). Or even on the third and fourth, where we rank 8th.

Instead, let’s focus at the other end—”Human Capital Investment”—where we rank 16th, by far our worst performance.

Don’t take solace in the fact that we’re in the top third of the states. Yes, we beat out North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Idaho, West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Arkansas. But that’s not the competition. Every state that you’d think of as a tech competitor—and many that you wouldn’t—dominated us.

Here is our ranking on a few of the sub-components:

—Average Math SAT Scores: 25th among the states
—Average Verbal SAT Scores: 25th among the states
—Recent degrees awarded in science and engineering per 1,000 civilian workers: 35th among the states

Here’s the message, in a nutshell: Our state is doing an outstanding job at competing nationally and globally in the 21st century economy. But we’re doing it by importing talent from elsewhere. This includes me, and it probably includes you.

Our K-12 system is failing our kids—it’s not preparing them for, or teaching them to aspire to, 21st century careers. And our higher education system also is failing our kids—there is insufficient investment in bachelors-level education, and even within that, insufficient investment in science and engineering.

In other words, we’re failing our kids. We’re creating 21st century jobs, and they’re going to other people’s kids.

Ask your state legislator what he or she is planning to do about this. If you don’t, who will?

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As if its sports teams’ bragging rights weren’t enough, Massachusetts has now topped the state rankings in science and technology prowess. Meanwhile, Washington placed a respectable #5.

That’s the word today from the California-based Milken Institute’s 2008 State Technology and Science Index. The rankings are based on 77 indicators across five broad categories: R&D inputs, risk capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure, human capital investment, technology and science work force, and tech concentration and dynamism. (You can get the full state list here, and the full report here.)

A whopping four New England states placed in the top 10, with Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island also represented—and all three have improved their positions from 2004, the year of Milken’s last state survey. Washington is up one spot from sixth place, while Massachusetts maintained its dominance at the #1 position.

The report notes that Massachusetts scores “well ahead” of the competition, and attributes this to its world-class research institutions, cutting-edge firms, and ability to attract and retain a highly skilled work force.

Everyone loves a Top 10 list, so here it is, with notable changes in parentheses. The release said these states are “in the best position to succeed in the technology-led information age.”

1. Massachusetts (held position since 2004)
2. Maryland (up 2 spots)
3. Colorado
4. California (down 2)
5. Washington (up 1)
6. Virginia
7. Connecticut (up 3)
8. Utah
9. New Hampshire (up 3)
10. Rhode Island (up 1)

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