This Colorado city north of Denver is an unusual place for startups

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It’s home to the University of Colorado, one of the largest and arguably most liberal schools in the U.S. The university has always had a strong engineering and physics school, with many of its alumni working at NASA. The city’s concentration of programmers is second only to Palo Alto. But Boulder owes its current success as a startup hub to the TechStars incubator. In 2006, entrepreneur David Cohen created the startup “camp”: 10 companies would spend three months preparing for their first round of funding. Today, TechStars is the most successful incubator in the U.S., with locations in New York, Boston, and Seattle. Boulder has an interesting culture of mutual support and enthusiasm; it’s a kinder city than the Valley. And it’s also calm: it’s like the Valley in its early days, in the ’60s. And there are mountains nearby. It is also unique in that a strong startup community has developed there almost in spite of the policies of local authorities, and the authorities are also the main obstacle to turning Boulder into a powerful innovation hub.

Boulder’s example has inspired other incubators around the country nursing homes email database to try to bring startup culture to older research centers. LaunchBox Digital, based in Durham, North Carolina, was named one of the top five most successful incubators in the U.S. this year. The Research Triangle, the area between Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill that includes the University of North Carolina, Duke, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been home to a research park since the 1950s. Research Triangle Park is still one of the largest research centers in the world, with an 11,000-person IBM lab, a 5,000-person GlaxoSmithKline lab, and 170 other major corporations.

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Austin
Austin, Texas is home to America’s premier startup event, South by South-West (SXSW). However, SXSW was originally (and still is) known as the world’s largest music and film festival. SXSW featured Twitter and Foursquare, and hosts a slew of startup and programming competitions every year. But Austin was a notable tech city even before the festival. It is home to the headquarters of companies like Dell and Freescale Semiconductor (formerly a division of Motorola), as well as many other leading US tech companies. Austin Ventures is the largest fund outside the Valley, with $4 billion in capital. Austin’s startup scene has historically been short on consumer-facing companies, but that has changed with the rise of SXSW’s tech scene. However, Austin’s strong point is green projects, which are heavily supported by the Austin Tech Incubator at the University of Texas. Many of these projects are focused on new energy, an interesting direction for the US’s leading oil state.

Los Angeles
Not all California startups live in the Valley. And while the city’s best-known startup is currently the moribund MySpace, Southern California’s startup community is thriving, though the atmosphere is very different from the Valley. Like many other parts of the country, it’s harder to raise capital, or more accurately, to get big funding. Investors in Los Angeles are more pragmatic, and startups have to worry about monetization much earlier, which affects the types of companies that are born here. LA has produced companies that laid the foundations of online advertising: Overture (contextual advertising), Applied Semantics (AdSense), ValueClick (ad networks). But the city’s main advantage is its entertainment industry. Los Angeles is home to many game developers (Activision Blizzard), music and video startups. The proximity to Hollywood has spawned many content producers for the Web: the startup Machinima, for example, has more than 500 million monthly viewers.