I added some to my Twitter list and it occured to me that almost all of them were in San Francisco or Silicon Valley so I decided to compile a list of companies/locations just for my own interests’ sake. Let me tell you, finding this information is hard work! These companies are very secretive. Clicking the ‘about us’ or ‘contact us’ links generally isn’t that helpful. Reading their job opportunities listings yields better results.

San Francisco

Blogs.com – best of blogs
Blurb – photo books
CBS Interactive – media
CNet – information
Digg – social bookmarking
Flickr – photos/social networking
Movable Type – blogging platform
Photobucket – photo storage
Rate It All – reviews
Six Apart – blogging platforms
Slide – slideshows and more
StumbleUpon – social bookmarking
Technorati – social bookmarking
Twitter – micro blogging
Typepad – blogging platform
Wikipedia – online encyclopedia
Wired – technology news
Wists – social shopping
Yelp – meet-up and reviews

Bay Area

CafePress (San Leandro) – custom-designed t-shirts and more
Pandora (Oakland) – internet radio
Shutterfly (Redwood City) – photo storage and albums
YouTube (San Mateo) – video sharing
Wikia (San Mateo) – find articles/communities
WordPress (Redwood City) – blogging platform

Silicon Valley

Adobe (San José) – graphics software applications
Alta Vista (Palo Alto) – search engine
Apple (Cupertino) – computer hardware, mp3 players, software, etc
Blogger/Blogspot (Mountain View) – blogging platform
Canon USA (San José) – cameras, printers, etc
Cisco systems (San José) – hardware and software
Del.icio.us (Santa Clara) – social bookmarking
eBay (San José)- online auctions
Facebook (Palo Alto) – social networking
Flock (Palo Alto) – social web browser
Friendster (Mountain View) – social networking
Google (Mountain View) – search engine, email, maps and more. What doesn’t Google do?
Hewlett Packard (Palo Alto) – computer hardware
IBM (San José) – computer hardware
Intel (Santa Clara) – computer hardware
Kaboodle (Mountain View) – social shopping
Linked in (Mountain View) – jobs/social networking
Netscape Communications (Mountain View) – search engine, browser, etc
Oracle (Redwood City) – computer hardware and software
Polyvore (Mountain View) – social shopping/online scrapbooking/advertising
Silicon Graphics (SGI) (Mountain View) – high-end computers
SmugMug (Mountain View) – photo storage and viewing
Sun microsystems (Palo Alto) – hardware and software
Verisign (Mountain View) – internet security software
Xerox (Palo Alto Research Center) – hardware and software
Yahoo (Sunnyvale) – search engine, email and more
YouSendIt (Mountain View) – send large files without FTP
Zazzle (Palo Alto) – custom t-shirts and more

Los Angeles

Blizzard Entertainment (Irvine) – computer games such as World of Warcraft
DeviantART – art/social networking
Magento – e-commerce platform
MySpace – social networking

New York City

AOL – internet
Etsy – handmade goods
Makeup Alley – makeup reviews/forum
Meet up – Meet-up
News Corporation – media
Sony USA – TVs, monitors, game consoles, etc
Time Warner – media

Other USA places

Amazon (Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington) – online bookstore giant
Craftster (Boston, Massachusetts) – craft
Dell (Round Rock, Texas) – computer hardware
Microsoft (Redmond, Washington near Seattle) – software giant
Lycos (Waltham, Massachusetts near Boston) – search engine
My Publisher (Valhalla, New York) – photo books
Philips USA (Andover, Massachusetts) – tvs, lighting, etc
Threadless (Chicago, Illinois) – t-shirt design contest and store
Vimeo (White Plains, New York) – video sharing
VistaPrint (Lexington, Massachusetts) – DIY printing
Zappos (Las Vegas) – online shoe store

* I will be adding to this when I discover new sites *

References:

Web 2.0 Innovations San Francisco map
Tour de Silicon Valley

I don’t know about you but in my ideal world and workplace it would be roughly 50% male and 50% female but of course this is not always the case!

The topic is rather complex and I found some good discussions on the topic:

1. Zeldman.com – Women in web design: just the stats

2. Attitude Design UK – Where Are The Female Designers?

3. F Berriman – Women of the web

4. Web Standards – Notable web experts who are: Women and non-Caucasians

Facts:
* Men outnumber women in this workforce by over three to one.
* Women who participate in the field may not be promoted as often or as high as their male colleagues.
* The percentage of women in the IT workforce has declined by 18.5% since 1996, from a high of 41% in 1996 to 32.4% in 2004. This is true even while the percentage of women in the overall workforce remained relatively unchanged. Women are also far less likely to return to the IT workforce…

Interesting!

It lists design salaries covering the fields of: graphic design, interior design, fashion design, multimedia/web design and architecture. There’s a lot of interesting graphs featuring comparisons between the different disciplines, different countries of the world and the different levels (junior, mid-level, senior).

I found the country comparisons particularly interesting and noted that the salaries in Australia and the USA were almost the same, and wondered why India was so high, and why China and Japan were not on that list?

Here is an extensive report (in PDF format) from Aquent featuring designer’s salaries in 2007.