The World's Hottest Tech Towns – And What Makes Them Tick

We've all heard of Silicon Valley - home to headline-grabbing US firms like Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter among many others - but there are several other global cities that are just as important in the worldwide electronics and IT business.

We are talking about the places where electronics are actually manufactured, where tech startups are sprouting like nowhere else, and where the IT sector dominates. Silicon Valley might be where it all started, but California has plenty of competition.

Let's start with the capital of computing for the Western world, which gets its name from the humble silicon chip (Semiconductor Valley doesn't sound nearly as good) despite it being increasingly a centre of startup, venture capital, product design and tech concepts rather than finished products.

Although it represents one of the world's biggest ever entrepreneurial explosions, Silicon Valley has become such a generic term for the US-based tech industry that it's easy to forget its geography. Silicon Valley is the nickname for the Santa Clara County area around the city of San Jose in Northern California, which is part of the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Stretched over 45 miles, Silicon Valley towns like Palo Alto, Cupertino, Sunnyvale and Mountain View are home to the HQs of Apple, Google, Intel, HP, Oracle, Facebook, Evernote, eBay, Agilent, Adobe... the list is endless.

As a visitor there's little to see unless you're an industry bod with a stack of meetings, but near to Google's HQ in Mountain View is the Computer History Museum.

It's now as much about wise investment decisions and innovative services as about engineering degrees and technical know-how, but why is there an unbeatable entrepreneurial ecosystem here?

Hewlett-Packard (created in 1939 and generally thought of as the initiator), Stanford and Berkeley universities, the US Navy's early experiments with radio, all played a critical part in creating a post-war tech industry where teams of engineers moved between companies and helped create names that still reverberate today, such as Intel and Apple. It also didn't hurt that the area was all fields and orchards, so land was cheap.