Glittery Silicon Valley -- it's no longer one of a kind

That issue has been on the minds of the region's technology pioneers since the early 1980s, when property values and traffic were already considered out of control.

Now the question has taken on a new dimension, with the rise of rival technology cities around the globe, from Bangalore to New Hampshire. "Many of them are just taking a page from Silicon Valley's success," said journalist Brad Stone, who contributed to Newsweek's cover story this week on the rise of Silicon Valley wannabes. "You've got a lot of venture capital, you have a research institution that's heavily invested in the local technology community ... now a lot of other cities are starting to realize the value of that formula and copy it."

Ironically, these widely dispersed centers are able to succeed partly because of the growth of information technology, developed in the Valley itself.

"The Internet brings everybody together," Stone said. "You're going to see Seinfeld posters and videogame consoles in Yahoo!'s offices, down in Silicon Valley, and you're going to see the same thing in Tel Aviv and Cambridge, England. You have this model that has been duplicated worldwide."

The mini-Silicon Valleys are no longer solely about cute monikers such as "Silicon Prairie," "Silicon Alley" or "Digital Coast." The thousands of high-tech companies in Austin, Tex., for example, now employ 20 percent of the work force, and Tel Aviv has drawn on a rich talent pool of engineers and programmers to launch a number of high-profile startups. In most cases, these technology hotbeds don't appear in a vacuum. They take advantage of existing resources, such as a major research center and favorable investment climate, in the case of Cambridge, England, or a pool of talent with technology training from the Army, as in Israel.

High-tech, high-cost
Silicon Valley's success -- and the attendant increases in the cost of living and traffic congestion -- have also fueled the boom in some areas, such as Salt Lake City, Utah, as companies try to locate in places where their employees want to live.

"Over time, what we're seeing is a trend to put technology centers where people want to live," said analyst Rob Enderle of Giga Information Group. "There's the need to aggregate in one place, but that's increasingly offset by the [desire] to attract employees to areas where they want to reside." Most observers see the high-tech business fragmenting away from the Valley, but the area between San Francisco and San Jose continues to have the biggest concentration of powerful companies.

Impossible to duplicate
The area, experts say, boasts a business infrastructure that would be impossible to duplicate anywhere else. Despite its relentless focus on the future, the Valley's biggest asset seems to be its history of innovation.

"To get where it is today, it took Silicon Valley since 1934, when a Stanford professor named Frederick Terman advised Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard that they should take their invention, an audio oscillator, and try and make a business out of it," said journalist Stone.

And despite the Valley's worship of cyberspace -- where distance is meaningless -- geography is what makes doing business here so easy.

"The physical proximity, and the opportunity for informal interactions; that's what makes the Valley different," said longtime Valley resident Paul Saffo, research fellow at the Institute for the Future. "Here, everybody's constantly bumping into one another. It's what I imagine the alleyways of Venice were like, circa 1500 -- you can't go to the market without bumping into someone you know or might want to do business with."

Many of the new companies that come out of Champaign-Urbana, Ill., or Boston, find it necessary to establish an office in the Valley; even the mighty Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT) recently consolidated its Silicon Valley offices into one Redwood City, Calif., location.

Can't rest on their laurels
Still, the continued predominance of the area can't be taken for granted, observers said.

"If everybody kicks back and says 'We did good,' [the Valley] will fail," Saffo said. "If they are ruthless about tearing apart traditions, it'll succeed. We're old enough to have a couple of museums now, and that's a dangerous sign. The Valley is still a wonderful place to be, but it's less unique than it was five years ago."

ZDTV's Monica Lopez contributed to this report.