We think we're so hot; Colorado likes to believe we're Silicon Valley II. Not according to the national media.

• Author: Lainson, Suzanne

Colorado likes to believe we're Silicon Valley II. Not according to the national media.

In November 1993, USA Today proclaimed the Denver metro area the "capital of high-tech, interactive TV."

In August 1998, The New York Times dubbed Dallas "the hub of the telecommunications industry."

In July 1994, Boulder and Denver were a hotbed of Internet activity, third in commercial domain name registrations behind the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

In November 1998, no Colorado city made Newsweek's list of hot high-tech cities.

We Coloradans think we're so hot, so high-tech. We like to believe we're Silicon Valley II. But a ColoradoBiz survey of national media shows that, to the rest of the high-tech world, we don't even rank as road-kill; at some point, it seems, Colorado slid off the radar screen.

Why?

There are several reasons:

* Few national business writers are based here. If you want to find high-tech business writers, the two places to look are New York (e.g., Dow Jones, Bloomberg) and San Francisco (The Red Herring, The Industry Standard, Wired).

The Wall Street Journal has mining reporter Bob Ortega here.

"I don't cover high-tech, so I don't think about it or worry about it," he said. "You have to understand how the journal works. Although we have bureaus all over the country, we also break down coverage by industry. For example, although TCI is based in Denver, cable is covered from New York."

But when Colorado can lure reporters here, even just for a visit, we have lots to show them.

"I thought of it as a very cool scene when I was out there," said Jake Ward, a reporter for The Industry Standard who wrote an article about Front Range telecom companies in August 1998. "I met a lot of smart folks. There's definitely no shortage of smart, savvy people out there."

Colorado's capital resources impressed Ward. "What I think will make Denver interesting is that Qwest, Level 3, US West all have really big plans that require an incredible amount of money to implement," he said. "That's where you have an advantage over Boston or Dallas, which have interesting concepts and a fair amount of venture capital, but not as much."

So did the state's leg up on the Internet.

"As far as the plumbing, the backbone of the Internet, you've got Verio, which is now the world's largest ISP, and Qwest, Level 3 and US West," Ward noted. "If the next step is to go to really high bandwidth, Denver has the necessary physical infrastructure, which puts it in...