The Economist:
LONDON and Berlin are vying with one another for first place among Europe’s big cities in many areas: museums, symphony orchestras, tourist crowds. Less well known, they are also competing to become the continent’s leading metropolis for digital start-ups. This week’s issue features one article about Tech City, east London’s burgeoning start-up cluster, and another on barriers to the creation of new companies in Germany. But how do these two ecosystems, as geeks call such clusters, stack up? This post is the first of three comparing the start-up scenes in Berlin and London.
IN A way comparing Berlin with London is unfair: the ecosystem in Germany’s capital is much younger than the one in London. Berlin has always had its fair share of conventional technology companies (Siemens, for one, has a strong presence there), but the cluster of internet firms is only about five years old. Compared to that tech toddler, London is a teenager: some date the beginning of Tech City back to the first internet boom in the late 1990s.
Categories: Europe, European Union