HN Explorer

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ai09
HN,

I created this analysis to get another view of entrepreneurial activity in the US.

On a tech note, these graphs were created with Protovis, a JS toolkit discussed recently here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808334 Since Protovis and IE don't yet work well together (IE9 may change that), the page degrades for IE users to show PNGs instead of the JS SVGs.

The inspiration for this visualization came from the Stanford Visualization Group's choropleth here: http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/choropleth.html

I would appreciate comments and feedback! Thank you.

pg
It seems like the rankings are mostly an artifact of where state borders happen to be. Why don't you do it based on smaller regions, like metropolitan areas?
ssskai
Here's another ranking of the best states to do business in. (Not trying to trump your website, but just giving some more resources for folks!)

http://www.cnbc.com/id/37554006/

ai09
Thanks, ssskai. That article was helpful to me as the writer did a good job of describing the study and the relative merits of the different states.

I'm learning that creating the writing to describe a visualization is often as hard as creating the visualization itself.

pwntifex
As a Las Vegas entrepreneur I'm surprised to see Nevada so highly ranked. I knew Zappos had done a lot to legitimize Vegas as a potential location for startups, but I still don't see too much of a startup community in general here.

Perhaps we're getting some residual fundraising benefits being sandwiched between CA and CO.