San Francisco, California
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The City of San Francisco is the fourth-largest city in California and the 14th-largest in the United States, with a 2005 population of 799,263. It is located on the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula and is the focal point of the San Francisco Bay Area, whose population is seven million. San Francisco is the second most densely populated major American city, after New York. The city is famous for its history in progressive social movements.
In 1776, the Spanish became the first Europeans to settle in San Francisco, which they named for St. Francis. With the advent of the California gold rush in 1848, and the Comstock Lode and silver mines in 1859, the city entered a period of rapid growth. After being devastated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt and is today one of the most recognizable cities in the United States.
San Francisco has a unique mix of physical characteristics, including its months-long episodes of fog, its steep rolling hills, its eclectic mix of architecture (including Victorian style houses and modern highrises), and its being bordered on three sides by the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay. Famous hallmarks and landmarks include the San Francisco cable cars, the Transamerica Pyramid, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island.
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The local economy
A leading commercial center, San Francisco is one of 10 Beta World Cities as ranked by Globalization and World Cities Study Group & Network.
Tourism is a mainstay of San Francisco's economy as it is one of the top ten tourist destinations in the United States and one of the top 50 in the world. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2004, an estimated 15 million tourists visited the city bringing in a revenue of $6.7 billion. The Department of Commerce has recently reported that San Francisco is the third most visited city in United States by foreign tourists after New York and Los Angeles. Conde Nast's travellers guide has ranked the city above Florence, Italy to second place right behind Sydney, Australia. The majority of the tourists come from the UK, Japan, France, and Australia.
The legacy of the California gold rush turned San Francisco into the main banking and financial center of the U.S. West Coast. Montgomery Street in the financial district is known as the "Wall Street of the West". It is the home of the twelfth district of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which the largest in region and economy, as well as major production facilities for the United States Mint. It was once home to the Pacific Exchange before it was bought out by the NYSE owned Archipelago Holdings, and demutualized. Many large financial institutions are based in San Francisco, including VISA, Wells Fargo and Charles Schwab. San Francisco is also home to other major American and international banks, including Barclays and venture capital firms have all set up their regional headquarters in the city mainly to service nearby Silicon Valley.
Recently, San Francisco has been positioning itself as a biotechnology and biomedical hub and research center. In May 2005, San Francisco was chosen as the headquarters of California's stem cell research program. Much of the city's biotech and biomed research has been focused in the new Mission Bay neighborhood in the south east corner of the city.
Entrepreneurship is also a major economic force in San Francisco. Nearly 90% of businesses operating within city limits have fewer than 100 employees.
Source - Wikipedia: San Francisco, California
Recent San Francisco Business News
Links to recent headlines via Topix.net
- Crowded congressional race just one of several Marin contests that figure to be hot in June
- While the primary contest for the new District 2 congressional seat figures to be the most competitive race in the June election, there will be plenty of other action on tap for connoisseurs of political pugilism.
- It's the Mobile Apps Experience That Counts
- User eXperience or UX groups User Interface, User Interaction and Graphic Designs together that in turn aids, how your Mobile Application is perceived, learned and ultimately used .
- Lana Del Rey smolders at Amoeba Records in S.F.
- You could feel the air get sucked out of the room as Lana Del Rey tentatively made her way onto the stage at Amoeba.
- ENK Shows in Vegas and New York to Include Sophisticated Fall-Winter 2012 Line from Skunkfunk
- New, more luxurious fabrics and sophisticated styles define Skunkfunk's Fall-Winter 2012 line of high-end urban fashion, which will be featured next week, February 13-15, at the ENK Vegas Show and February 21-23 at Coterie New York.
- Wharton opens West Coast campus for startup appeal
- The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, the 131-year-old business school in Philadelphia, is counting on a new West Coast campus to raise its high-tech profile. For a decade, the school operated a little-known San Francisco outpost in the former headquarters of Folgers Coffee. The new site, a block from the Bay Bridge, is 37,000 square feet and more closely resembles the area's Internet startups, with high ceilings, exposed brick and the latest videoconferencing equipment. The campus, which opened last month, is part of Wharton's effort to attract aspiring technology entrepreneurs to its master's in business administration program for executives. Most students in the program, ranked first in 2011 by U.S. News & World Report, are in Wharton's hometown of Philadelphia. The new location can accommodate 150 students, a 50 percent increase from the old building. 'This is a much more entrepreneurial and innovation-driven area,' said Bernadette Birt, chief operating officer of the program. The new campus also fosters a spirit of teamwork, she said. 'They hang out together. They relax here as well and get all their work done together.' East Coast business schools are increasingly looking to shore up their West Coast ties, either through satellite campuses or partnerships with other institutions. In addition to letting them draw local students, the programs provide easier access to the world's biggest technology companies, including Apple Inc., Google Inc., Facebook Inc., Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp. New York's Columbia University offers an executive MBA program with the University of California, Berkeley. The new Wharton West is located on the sixth floor of the Hills Plaza building on the Embarcadero, the street that borders San Francisco's eastern waterfront. The school signed a 10-year lease in June and spent the next six months on renovations. The changes included the removal of four columns to create enough classroom space and the installation of a plumbing and electricity system designed to achieve a gold rating by the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards. 'The aesthetics of the space is this blend of trying to bring a traditional approach from Wharton at Penn and blending it with a more open-ceiling, entrepreneurial garage space,' said Douglas Zucker, principal at Gensler, the architectural firm that designed the campus. People are 'coming here because they want to start a company.' Like a full-time MBA program, Wharton's executive MBA degree takes two years to complete. Students from across the country come together every other weekend for classes that typically start on Friday morning and end Saturday evening, allowing them to keep their full-time jobs. The program isn't cheap. Annual tuition runs students $48,550, which is in line with the other top executive MBA programs in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report. Adding in hotel expenses, books and meals, the San Francisco program costs a total of $173,940, or $86,970 a year. The school has more than a dozen professors that fly in from Philadelphia as part of their total course load. John Percival has been making the cross-country commute since the San Francisco school first opened 10 years ago to teach an introductory course in corporate finance. 'The high ceilings, open air and looking out the windows just puts everybody in a better mood, including the faculty,' Percival, 65, said in an interview from the dining room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Part of the San Francisco allure is the proximity to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Since the new campus opened, guest speakers have included Duncan Logan, chief executive officer of RocketSpace Inc., and Jay Jamison, a partner at BlueRun Ventures. Muckai Girish, a Wharton student who works as a vice president at chip-maker Entropic Communications Inc., expects the new campus to put the school on Silicon Valley's radar. 'In the old building, not too many people knew about Wharton here because it was hidden away,' Girish said. 'This gives us an identity.'
- Bay Area native has front-row seat to Vietnam's economic growth
- Fred Burke, a San Francisco-born partner with Baker McKenzie, has watched Vietnam evolve from a poor country into one of the world's hottest economies.
- Rasco's BBQ operates on East Mesa
- Rasco's BBQ serves up pulled pork, beef brisket, chicken, tacos, cheeseburgers, ribs and other items at the Shorty's gas station at 5580 Bataan Memorial East.
- Covington adds 4 Wilson Sonsini lawyers
- The law firm said it hired Michelle Edwards , Eva Wang and Scott Anthony as partners, and Carmen Chang as "senior of counsel." The firm also brought in Wei Zhou , CEO of Centrillion Biosciences in Mountain View, as a senior advisor.
See also
External links
- Official website
- San Francisco business Chamber of Commerce
- San Francisco event calendar
