In 2010, Silicon Valley accounted for the lion’s share of venture-capital investment by far: $9.1 billion, or about 40 percent of the total. New England, with its high-tech complex running from Cambridge and Boston to the surrounding Route 128 area, was second with $2.6 billion, 11 percent of the total. New York, with its newly ascendant Silicon Alley, was third, with roughly $2 billion, or 8.6 percent. The Southeast states — mainly North Carolina but also Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama — attracted $1.2 billion (5.1 percent) mainly concentrated in biotech, software, telecom, and media. Texas accounted for close to another billion ($942 million), or 4.1 percent with its investments mainly focussed on energy as well as software, media, and semiconductors. And while the level of venture investment in the South-Central states (including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Louisiana) remains low relatively speaking, the region saw a staggering 540-percent growth between 2005 and 2010, the largest increase across any region of the country by far. Overall, roughly one in ten of the nation’s venture investment dollars are spent in the South.

- Richard Florida, The Spread of Start-Up America and the Rise of the High-Tech South

Florida is making a super weak argument here. The entire south — southeast and south-central states, and Texas — collectively raised about $2B in venture in 2010, which is the same as New York City.

Besides, innovation culture is an emergent property of cities, not broad geographic regions. Would be much more useful to see this broken out by cities, where I am sure that the Geoffrey West superlinearity equation — Y(0) = N0Y(t)B — would predict that a city of 2 million will get 1.15 times as much as a city of one million, on average, because B ≈ 1.15.

Tech investments in N.Y. top Mass. - Boston.com

New data shows what we have been seeing at a grassroots level: NYC is surpassing Boston at the second largest tech scene in the US, especially when you discount the biotech area:

The data being released today by New York investment research firm CB Insights show that New York has had 261 technology deals over the last six quarters, versus 250 for Massachusetts. New York tech companies received investments worth a combined $1.6 billion. Massachusetts companies got $1.4 billion in the same period. Both are behind California’s Silicon Valley, which has a firm grip on the number one position by a wide margin.

New York’s growth is fueled by the kind of technology start-ups that venture capitalists currently find attractive: digital media and advertising companies, which build on Manhattan’s base of older-technology firms in the same fields.

“There’s no disputing that New York is on fire now. It’s a very hot market,’’ said Michael A. Gree ley, general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston and past chairman of the New England Venture Capital Association. “Massachusetts investors now have a new respect for Manhattan.’’

The first indication that New York was challenging Massachusetts came at the beginning of this year, as the venture capital industry was starting to process investment data from 2010. On the eve of releasing last year’s venture capital investment numbers, CB Insights posted a preview of a “trend that caught our eye.’’

In the area of Internet technology, “N.Y. is starting to credibly close the gap between itself and its northern brother, Massachusetts,’’ the firm stated.

Massachusetts still beats New York by a significant margin in total venture funds invested, CB Insights acknowledged. New York has very few life sciences start-ups, for example. That sector generally demands significant investments from venture capitalists. Life sciences start-ups in Massachusetts attract millions of dollars in investment every quarter.

But in hot investment sectors such as the Internet, mobile technology, and social media, New York really had caught up to Massachusetts.

“Sentiment is very bullish in New York right now,’’ said Anand Sanwal, cofounder of CB Insights, “so we thought it was worth noting.’’

New York and New England: Tech partnerships already happening - Mass High Tech Business News

Interesting piece that makes an attempt to link Boston-to-NYC together in a tech corridor, analogous to Silicon Valley. I don’t think it works, perhaps because there are a bunch of states involved that don’t really work together on texch policy, taxation, etc.

And even though I am from Boston originally, I sort of threw up in my mouth at this characterization:

Still, there is a growing trend in the New York-New England corridor of taking advantage of what each city has to offer, and that means basically that the Greater Boston area has the brains and New York has the bodies – not in the sense of dumb bodies, but the trained content creators and media workers needed to produce product at a commercial scale.

“In Boston here, we crank out a gajillion engineers from really good institutions,” Pescatello said. And Ohanian pointed out that New York dominates in media creation. “Most of the media produced in the United States comes from a pretty small radius around mid-town New York,” he said.

Pescatello also pointed out another difference between the cities is in venture capital. “The VC sector in Boston is bigger and stronger in Boston than in New York,” he said.