The days when you had to move to Silicon Valley to get your IT company off the ground are over. The trusted and long-running business magazine Bloomberg Businessweek is one of many to offer some alternative sites for getting your company off the ground. Here are a few of the cities Bloomberg mentions:

  • Boulder, Colorado: The site says that this popular outdoors location is also becoming a tech wonderland, “with the University of Colorado and national research labs attracting talent and funding.” Cisco Systems, Google, and Microsoft have all established Boulder locations, and Level 3 Communications (a communications and information services company founded in 1985), is located in nearby Broomfield, Colorado.
  • Cambridge, Massachusetts: After graduating from Harvard or MIT, many students stick around to pursue their startup dreams, and numerous others flock in from other locations to take advantage of the attractive venture capital. Analog Devices, BBN Technologies, Symbolics, and Thinking Machines are just a few of the historic technology firms which emerged in the city.
  • Bellevue, Washington: Microsoft has its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, but Bellevue is also an attractive city that is overcoming its historic categorization as a satellite city of Seattle. Between 2000 and 2009, the population grew by almost 20,000. Microsoft’s proximity is certainly one feature which has drawn in tech companies, but the direct access to Seattle doesn’t hurt either.

You can see Bloomberg Businessweek’s full list here. Entrepreneur.com also selected some popular cities back in 2009. One of the cities named was Orlando, Florida, which offers numerous opportunities through its Disney Entrepreneur Center. Here, both government and private agencies collaborate with new small-business owners. Another popular city is Phoenix, Arizona, which, “over the last 20 yearshas grown by more than 50 percent.” As in Cambridge, Arizona has an academic center pulling a lot of weightArizona State University, with its Spirit of Enterprise Center. The city is open to a variety of entrepreneurial efforts, but technology is an especially popular industry. Entrepreneur.com also names Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a growing business center, despite its lack of ports or airline access. However, Chapel Hill does have one thing backing it upthe nearby star power of the Research Triangle Park, established in 1959.