Saying that Austin’s pool of technical workers is becoming tapped out, 30 Austin high-tech CEOs are heading to California this month in search of talent.

The recruiting trip, sponsored by the Austin Technology Council, will include a reception in San Francisco on Sept. 13 and another in Sunnyvale on Sept. 14.

The gatherings will let Austin tech leaders talk with engineers and marketers one-on-one with the goal of luring them to Austin, said Julie Huls, president of the Austin Technology Council.

“We want to let the Bay Area know about everything that’s happening here,” Huls said. “There’s no question Austin has a lot of tech talent, but there is a gap right now, and it’s going to take a combination of sources to fill it.”

Participating companies include HomeAway, Bazaarvoice, Whaleshark, Calxeda, BancVue, Gowalla and Gazzang.

The idea for the trip came from a CEO summit sponsored by the technology council in May. At the conference, business leaders worried that an increasingly tight job market for tech workers with crucial skills could slow the industry’s growth here. Skilled engineers and experienced product marketers are hardest to find, they said.

Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron, who is taking part in the trip, said Austin “has fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent, especially in engineering, programming and software development roles. The zero-sum-game hurts the overall tech community, so we’ve decided to come together to seek out new additions to Austin to help us all grow.”

The group is targeting engineers with experience in Java, Ruby on Rails and Python programming, and is contacting California user groups in those areas to spread the word about the events, Huls said.

According to the technology council, several dozen Austin companies are recruiting technical talent, including software engineers, data engineers and information architects.

In addition to startups, other companies hiring skilled tech workers in Austin include eBay Inc., Rackspace Hosting, Polycom Inc. and Electronic Arts Inc.

Also, a number of small California companies have relocated to Austin in search of talent and lower business costs. They include Main Street Hub, a social media marketing firm that moved here in May from San Francisco, and 58Phases, an online affiliate marketing company that moved from Venice, Calif., last month.

In recent years, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce has focused on recruiting California companies to move operations to Austin.

Last year, 28 companies, including nine from California, moved their headquarters or opened new operations here, including Facebook and LegalZoom.

via Austin American Statesman
lhawkins@statesman.com; 912-5955

What do communication patterns tell us about how communities are connected to one another?
AT&T mobile phone data was used to create this interactive map of the United States that illustrates connectivity between counties based on phone conversations and SMS (text) communications.

Connections to Travis County, TX are selected below. Click on the map below to access the visualization. How regionally and nationally connected is your county?

Interactive Map

Call Data Community Map

Administrative boundaries are often at odds if one compares these to a bottom up approach calculating the regional delineation only based on how people interact. Communities based on call data is one example of how such interaction-based communities can be defined. The result is striking in that some states merge and others split. For example sister states emerge, such as Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and Tennessee and Kentucky among others. Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and West Virginia form a new “state”, while St. Louis (Missouri) expands its reach and splits Illinois into two communities. New Jersey and California also split into two separate communities because of large cities. In contrast, Texas remains whole, despite potentially splitting cities of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. We observe that the inter-city communication is strong enough to hold Texas together.

More about the Connected States of America project:
Press Release: The Connected States of America — Using mobile communications to redraw community boundaries.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Researchers at MIT Senseable City Lab, AT&T Labs-Research and IBM Research are revealing new research that redefines regional boundaries in the United States, using patterns of social connectedness across the country derived from anonymous and aggregated cell phone data.

In some cases, connectedness follows traditional demarcations such as state lines — but in other cases, new patterns are emerging that have little to do with political or administrative boundaries. By looking at billions of instances of aggregated[*] mobile communication, researchers are able to define communities through the more informal lens of social networks.

“This work proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to understanding cities and human communities in space,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab.

Cities play an important role in defining community boundaries, as they tend to pull nearby counties into their radius of influence. This radius of influence depends on factors such as size, population density and geography of the city’s surroundings. The researchers explain cities’ radius of influence in terms of laws similar to Newton’s laws of gravitation: Larger places attract more people and businesses than smaller ones, and the attraction between closer places is greater than that between remote ones. As a first approximation, the likelihood of two people communicating with one another depends on the respective populations of the origin and destination of the call, and drops off according to the distance between them.

The “Connected States of America” provides a more natural delineation of regions that follows relationships between family, friends and business partners. However, “telecom and state partitionings of the US results are very similar, as 90% of counties in the official state partitioning fall within a corresponding (by largest overlap) telecom community” – comments Francesco Calabrese, advisory research staff member at IBM Research-Ireland. “Sister states” emerge, such as Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and Tennessee and Kentucky, among others. Metropolitan areas often form pockets of influence that extend into neighboring states or communities; for example, Chattanooga, Tenn., is more closely linked to communities in Georgia and Alabama than to the rest of Tennessee. Pittsburgh, Penn., and West Virginia form a new “state,” while St. Louis, Mo., exhibits an expanded reach that splits Illinois into two regions. New Jersey and California also divide into two distinct regions due to large cities. In contrast, Texas remains whole: Despite the potentially splitting influence of cities such as Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin, the researchers found that there is enough inter-city communication to hold the state together.

However, a simple gravitational model does not explain all of the results. For example, distance between places can be measured in several ways: as the crow flies, along transportation routes or by travel time. Mountain ranges and other geographic features influence how people interact, because they contribute to an increased perception of distance and therefore hinder communication. “This phenomenon may explain, for example, why Chattanooga appears cut off from the rest of Tennessee and better connected to parts of Georgia and Alabama,” says Dominik Dahlem, a postdoc at the Senseable City Lab.

Interestingly, analyzing boundaries according to aggregate and anonymous records of text messages (SMS) instead of phone calls yields a different map of connectedness. Some sister-state pairings change — for example, instead of Georgia-Alabama and Louisiana-Mississippi, SMS data link Mississippi and Alabama, leaving Louisiana and Georgia as stand-alone states. Oklahoma and Arkansas break apart, while West Virginia and Ohio join together. California splits into three communities instead of two. According to the researchers, these differences can be explained by the fact that SMS is generally favored by a younger population and is less likely to reflect cross-generational communication. Also, the SMS map is more divided overall, indicating that people are less likely to send text messages over large distances than they are to make phone calls.

This data reveals patterns of social and economic activity that the researchers expect will be of interest to social scientists and policymakers. “We are particularly interested in how such rich information can help us gain a better understanding of our society, which in the future, could lead to more democratic, bottom-up structures of governance,” Ratti says.

“This example illustrates once again the insights that can be inferred from aggregated communication patterns, as wells as how collaboration across fields of research can benefit for society,” said Alexandre Gerber, a researcher at AT&T Labs.

Analogous results for Great Britain were recently published by the same team in the journal PLoS ONE, which analyzed 12 billion anonymized records representing more than 95 percent of Great Britain’s residential and business landlines. In that study, communities that emerge out of people’s communication habits were found to be more cohesive than administrative boundaries.

The research was done in partnership with AT&T Labs-Research, IBM Research and the National Building Museum in Washington. Support was generously granted by the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, the MIT SMART program, GE, Audi Volkswagen, SNCF and the members of the MIT Senseable City Lab Consortium. For visualizations and more background information, please visit http://senseable.mit.edu/csa.

[*] All communication data was aggregated by county, determined by the caller’s and recipient’s most frequently used cell tower, which was assumed to be near their residence. In order to determine which counties are connected most closely by communications, researchers analyzed anonymized location data for both ends of the calls and texts. No personal information was used.

Hundreds of thousands of people immigrate every year, with some countries seeing higher rates than others. To compare and to gain a better sense of the number of people moving around, Carlo Zapponi created peoplemovin.

Each side is a super long stacked bar that represents international migration in 2010, and countries are in alphabetical order. Click on the left to see emigration from the selected country or click on the right to see where people have immigrated from.

I’m kind of struggling with the line lengths because the bars are so long. You’re looking at migration — people moving from point A to point B — but a long line doesn’t mean anything. The color scheme, which I think represents migration rates, is also not clear. So take it for what it is. It’s still interesting to click around.

via FlowingData.com

Austin, Texas, tops the list.

What cities are best positioned to grow and prosper in the coming decade?

To determine the next boom towns in the U.S., Forbes, with the help of Mark Schill at the Praxis Strategy Group, took the 52 largest metro areas in the country (those with populations exceeding 1 million) and ranked them based on various data indicating past, present and future vitality.

We started with job growth, not only looking at performance over the past decade but also focusing on growth in the past two years, to account for the possible long-term effects of the Great Recession. That accounted for roughly one-third of the score. The other two-thirds were made up of a a broad range of demographic factors, all weighted equally. These included rates of family formation (percentage growth in children 5-17), growth in educated migration, population growth and, finally, a broad measurement of attractiveness to immigrants — as places to settle, make money and start businesses.

We focused on these demographic factors because college-educated migrants (who also tend to be under 30), new families and immigrants will be critical in shaping the future. Areas that are rapidly losing young families and low rates of migration among educated migrants are the American equivalents of rapidly aging countries like Japan; those with more sprightly demographics are akin to up and coming countries such as Vietnam.

Many of our top performers are not surprising. No. 1 Austin, Texas, and No. 2 Raleigh, N.C., have it all demographically: high rates of immigration and migration of educated workers and healthy increases in population and number of children. They are also economic superstars, with job-creation records among the best in the nation.

Perhaps less expected is the No. 3 ranking for Nashville, Tenn. The country music capital, with its low housing prices and pro-business environment, has experienced rapid growth in educated migrants, where it ranks an impressive fourth in terms of percentage growth. New ethnic groups, such as Latinos and Asians, have doubled in size over the past decade.

Two advantages Nashville and other rising Southern cities like No. 8 Charlotte, N.C., possess are a mild climate and smaller scale. Even with population growth, they do not suffer the persistent transportation bottlenecks that strangle the older growth hubs. At the same time, these cities are building the infrastructure — roads, cultural institutions and airports — critical to future growth. Charlotte’s bustling airport may never be as big as Atlanta’s Hartsfield, but it serves both major national and international routes.

Of course, Texas metropolitan areas feature prominently on our list of future boom towns, including No. 4 San Antonio, No. 5 Houston and No. 7 Dallas, which over the past years boasted the biggest jump in new jobs, over 83,000. Aided by relatively low housing prices and buoyant economies, these Lone Star cities have become major hubs for jobs and families.

And there’s more growth to come. With its strategically located airport, Dallas is emerging as the ideal place for corporate relocations. And Houston, with its burgeoning port and dominance of the world energy business, seems destined to become ever more influential in the coming decade. Both cities have emerged as major immigrant hubs, attracting on newcomers at a rate far higher than old immigrant hubs like Chicago, Boston and Seattle.

The three other regions in our top 10 represent radically different kinds of places. The Washington, D.C., area (No. 6) sprawls from the District of Columbia through parts of Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. Its great competitive advantage lies in proximity to the federal government, which has helped it enjoy an almost shockingly ”good recession,” with continuing job growth, including in high-wage science- and technology-related fields, and an improving real estate market.

Our other two top ten, No. 9 Phoenix, Ariz., and No. 10 Orlando, Fla., have not done well in the recession, but both still have more jobs now than in 2000. Their demographics remain surprisingly robust. Despite some anti-immigrant agitation by local politicians, immigrants still seem to be flocking to both of these states. Known better s as retirement havens, their ranks of children and families have surged over the past decade. Warm weather, pro-business environments and, most critically, a large supply of affordable housing should allow these regions to grow, if not in the overheated fashion of the past, at rates both steadier and more sustainable.

Sadly, several of the nation’s premier economic regions sit toward the bottom of the list, notably former boom town Los Angeles (No. 47). Los Angeles’ once huge and vibrant industrial sector has shrunk rapidly, in large part the consequence of ever-tightening regulatory burdens. Its once magnetic appeal to educated migrants faded and families are fleeing from persistently high housing prices, poor educational choices and weak employment opportunities. Los Angeles lost over 180,000 children 5 to 17, the largest such drop in the nation.

Many of L.A.’s traditional rivals — such as Chicago (with which is tied at No. 47), New York City (No. 35) and San Francisco (No. 42) — also did poorly on our prospective list. To be sure, they will continue to reap the benefits of existing resources — financial institutions, universities and the presence of leading companies — but their future prospects will be limited by their generally sluggish job creation and aging demographics.

Of course, even the most exhaustive research cannot fully predict the future. A significant downsizing of the federal government, for example, would slow the D.C. region’s growth. A big fall in energy prices, or tough restrictions of carbon emissions, could hit the Texas cities, particularly Houston, hard. If housing prices stabilize in the Northeast or West Coast, less people will flock to places like Phoenix, Orlando or even Indianapolis (No.11) , Salt Lake City (No. 12) and Columbus (No. 13). One or more of our now lower ranked locales, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, might also decide to reform in order to become more attractive to small businesses and middle class families.

What is clear is that well-established patterns of job creation and vital demographics will drive future regional growth, not only in the next year, but over the coming decade. People create economies and they tend to vote with their feet when they choose to locate their families as well as their businesses. This will prove more decisive in shaping future growth than the hip imagery and big city-oriented PR flackery that dominate media coverage of America’s changing regions.

by Joel Kotkin, New Geographer
see the list at Forbes

The very rich have planes and helicopters and yachts. They can go wherever they want, whenever they want.

On today’s Planet Money, we pose a question being debated in state capitals around the country: Do the rich flee high-tax states?

We talk to a bunch of people and read a bunch of studies. We hear stories about rich people moving from high-tax to low-tax states — especially when they retire.

But when economists look at the big picture, the anecdotes don’t add up to data. As one expert tells us, “Taxes [have] essentially no impact on causing people to leave a state.”

For More:

Boston College study cited by NJ Gov. Chris Christie.

How taxes influence migration patterns in New England.
Summary: The impact of state and local taxes on migration is a perennial concern. When generating new revenues for public services is suggested, the prospect of people fleeing the state is inevitably raised. The available evidence, however, suggests that the impact of taxes on cross-state migration decisions is weak. There are many reasons households do not flee from a state when taxes are increased, including the fact that they value the public services financed by taxes, the cost of relocating to a different state (both financially and psychologically) is quite high, and the potential gains from moving are often small. The main reasons for moving to a different state are employment, family-related matters, and education. Taxes account for little of the migration from New England.

How a New Jersey tax hike affected millionaires.
Summary: This paper examines the migration response to a millionaire tax in New Jersey, which raised the tax rate on top earners by 2.6 percentage points, becoming one of the highest rates in the country. Drawing on complete NJ state tax micro-data, we estimate the migration response of millionaires using a difference-in-difference strategy. The results indicate little responsiveness, with semi-elasticities mostly below 0.1. Tax-induced migration is higher among people of retirement age, people living off investments rather than wages, and potentially those who work (and pay tax) entirely in-state. The tax is estimated to raise $1 billion per year and modestly reduce income inequality.