Technology job openings surged by 8.2% in June, according to job-search site SimplyHired, but some places remain better than others if you’re looking for a tech job. The site's top and bottom five contain a few surprises.

Best U.S. Places To Find A Tech Job

SimplyHired bases its ranking on the number of tech job openings compared to the number of people who are working in the region. The numbers below are based on metropolitan areas as defined by the U.S. census bureau.

The news out of Europe only seems to get worse. Each government bond auction and economic data release piles on the bad news, exacerbated by a series of summits that overpromise and under-deliver. Meanwhile, the policy debate is stuck between those who blame government profligacy and those who point to underlying structural problems that plague European economies. These problems include rigid labor markets, dramatic trade imbalances among countries, and, in many places, stagnant industrial production.

Hope, however, springs eternal, and Europe might look for so-called “green shoots” in an organization called Startup Weekend. Over the past few years, this American nonprofit has quietly but quickly overtaken the continent.

Elite athletes encounter many of the same mental challenges that successful entrepreneurs face on a daily basis, according to JoAnn Dahlkoetter, a sports and performance psychologist in San Carlo, Calif. She should know.

In addition to coaching business leaders, Dahlkoetter currently counts five Olympic gold medalists as her clients. She finds that many of the same strategies athletes use to outwit mental obstacles work in business as well.

Entrepreneurs often specialize in coming up with the big idea. When it comes to management skills, they're usually lacking. With that in mind, the Young Entrepreneur Council asked its own for advice to share with startup founders as they set about building their teams.

Take Time to Train Them

"Many entrepreneurs have the deluded expectation that an employee should show up able to do their job. No matter how competent they are, an employee will require training and integration time. An added upshot, thinking about employee training cycles and growth paths really gets you thinking about how to grow your company."—Charlie Gilkey | Principal, Productive Flourishing

Before my internship here at LinkedIn, I had never spent more than three consecutive days in the Bay Area. Now, I’ve been here for almost three months. Not only have I been able to explore the usual tourist attractions, but I’ve also been immersed in the culture and atmosphere of Silicon Valley. So what makes living in this area such a unique experience?

1. Buzz words are used correctly in everyday conversation

For most people, conversation topics revolve around sports, movies, music, and other hobbies. But here in Silicon Valley, I often overhear heated discussions about the cloud, big data, mobile development, and social graphs… and the speakers actually know what they are talking about! Not only is it fun to work with people who live and breathe these popular buzz words, it is absolutely phenomenal to hear their excitement on the train, at restaurants, and on the bus wherever I go.

The federal chief technology officer Thursday asked leaders throughout government for help in developing a new project to connect agency visionaries with one another. Todd Park said the Innovation Networking Project is in its infancy, but the end goal is to supplement traditional, face-to-face networking with a new method of helping federal employees of like minds and ideas brainstorm.

"We've seen lots of examples of cases where innovators in one agency have one idea; innovators in other agencies actually have the same idea," he said in an interview with Federal News Radio. "And while they couldn't make the idea happen by themselves, if they team up and pool their time, and pool their energy and pool their resources, they can actually make that idea happen."

Ours is the century of the city. For the first time in history, more than half of the people in the world, 3.3 billion of us, live in cities. By 2050, according to the best projections, urbanites will account for as much as 70% of the global population.

Over the next 50 years we will spend trillions of dollars on city building. The question is: How should we build? For many economists, urbanists and developers, the answer is simple: We should build up. But the answer is more complex than that.

Exclusive to Innovation America

by Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute

I started a new blog this week called Trepability. It’s for treps – a.k.a. entrepreneurs – and the people who love them. And while getting the word out, I learned that not everyone knows what a trep is. Even some entrepreneurs.

The most interesting thread in the comments I got from people was that they associated ‘trep’ with trepidation.

Let me distinguish those two words with a bit more precision.

Trep: an entrepreneur, one who incites, energizes, and/or leads an enterprise into existence, generally with great initiative and high tolerance for risk. My kinda people.

As Matt Rizai walked through the cafeteria at WebFilings, the CEO marveled at how many people he ran into whom he had known for 20-plus years.

Most of the major players in WebFilings list Engineering Animation Inc. on their resumes. EAI, an Ames software firm, was bought for more than $200 million about 12 years ago, and Rizai and other leaders got back together four years ago. The camaraderie has been at the center of one of Iowa’s hottest technology companies.

“At times we take it for granted,” Rizai said. “But it’s very important for our culture. That is what gets us excited, and we feel we are really in a special environment here.”

There are so many digital tools for your job search, but what about services that give you the edge when you’re ready to close the deal? Even after you’ve found the perfect position and impressed your potential employer, there is still a major step you must take before you celebrate your new job — providing references.

Sure, you may have appeared stellar on paper and charming in person, but a potential employer is going to want a coworker or superior to corroborate your professional track record and your stated skills. And no matter how prepared you are to give the names and contact information for those who can vouch for you, it always becomes a scramble.

Years from now, will we look back and realize that Apple’s biggest innovation was not a device, but rather a physical gesture?

The right-to-left swiping motion used with Apple devices to sort through photos or to navigate certain apps is quickly altering how we seek and absorb information.

David Payne, chief digital officer of Gannett & Co. Inc., parent company of USA Today, delivered this point eloquently at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit earlier this month. In his opening speech, he pointed out that the digital world changed when Apple introduced “touch” with the iPod and iPhone.

Last week, a remarkable thing happened.  400 people from 49 countries gathered in Silicon Valley for an ambitious vision.

They convened to do something that had never been attempted before: to reinvent the whole notion of economic growth, by shifting the focus from subsidizing individual projects to growing entire ecosystems of vibrant entrepreneurship and innovation.  We call such systems Rainforests.  And rather than just talk in the abstract, attendees actually worked on building real Rainforest solutions, in-person and in real-time.  We literally watched hundreds of “Rainforest Makers” in action.  It was like a Davos for Doers.

It's a good time to be a female entrepreneur.

Over the past 15 years, the number of female-owned businesses has increased more than 54% nationally, according to a study by American Express OPEN.

Between 1997 and 2012, the number of women-owned businesses grew at a pace that was 1.5 times the national average, according to the study. More than 8.3 million businesses--or 29% of all businesses--are now owned by women.

For the most part, the study found, the biggest growth has come in Southern states. States where woman-owned businesses had the fastest growth rates over that time period included Georgia (with 95% growth), North Carolina (83%), Mississippi (75%), and Texas (75%). One Western outlier was Nevada, which had a 92% surge in woman-owned businesses.

If I had been drinking something at the time, I would have spit it all over my screen. That's because I was reading a laptop buying guide that was so superficial, so full of errors, half-truths and oversimplifications, that I couldn't believe my eyes. I won't name any names (cough, The New York Times), but this was my favorite gem: "Most flash drives still exceed 300 gigabytes, which is enough for most people." Um, actually most SSDs start at 128GB.

Here's another: "Battery life specs mean little. Have a power cord with you." Oh, and the processor doesn't matter at all.

Earlier this month, scientists at CERN observed what was most likely the elusive Higgs boson particle. But unless you’re a physics geek, it can be hard to understand just what made the discovery so significant.

Thankfully, the good folks of the Minute Physics YouTube channel have created a three-part video series that does a great job explaining the Higgs boson, mass, and particle discovery. While Minute Physics doesn’t dumb down the science, it does make the discovery a bit easier to understand with clever diagrams and metaphors. Heck, even if you’re a science fan, you’ll probably get a laugh or two.

DreamIt Ventures, a Philadelphia-based startup accelerator, is bringing its three-month bootcamp to Austin. The mentoring program will begin in December and wrap up in time for the companies that take part to pitch to investors during the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in March. “The scene in Austin is really a perfect mix,” said Kerry Rupp, DreamIt managing partner and head of the Austin effort. “It’s got great existing startups, seed capital, experienced service providers, startup leaders and mentors and a university that is pumping out all kinds of interesting ideas and people.”

Crowdfunding is a strategy for raising capital that has quickly gained popularity for startups and investors. Rather than trying to attract a few wealthy venture capitalists, startups attract many investors that contribute small amounts of money to fund the startup. The recent Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, commonly referred to as the JOBS Act, was passed by President Obama on April 5, 2012; it loosened restrictions for startups to raise capital and created new provisions to protect investors investing in startups.

More capital than ever is gravitating toward crowdfunding sites. According to research compiled by Crowdsourcing.org in 2011, roughly $1.4 million were raised through crowdfunding platforms (CFDs) and that number is expected to almost double in 2012. As a result of the massive increase of money flooding in, the number of CFDs is also expected to spike about 60% in 2012 to approximately 530 platforms. Let's take a look at look some of the current top crowdfunding platforms.

Recently, Mark Bittman, minimalist chef-turned-novice-food-advocate published an opinion piece in the New York Times regarding his personal challenges digesting milk. In his article he attempted to dissuade Americans from consuming milk, because according to him it’s not so good for us and we haven’t evolved to drink it. For all his citations and quotes, it turns out that his reasoning isn’t exactly based in peer-reviewed literature (aka Science!).

Rather interestingly, milk isn’t tragically bad for us (1) and the ability to digest the milk sugar lactose is one of the cooler examples of convergent evolution (2). (For a fuller response, see my sweetie Will Fertman’s article Mark Bittman: Don’t be a weasel).

StartUp Health is raising $7.5 million for a fund to advance its goal of investing in 1,000 sustainable health and wellness technology businesses, according to a Form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The StartUp Innovation Fund is the first of multiple funds, according to a source familiar with the fund, and a significant development for the group. So far, it has secured 14 investors, according to the document. StartUp Health runs the StartUp Health Academy, which welcomed its inaugural class earlier this year.

When you are looking to raise venture capital for your startup, you will likely have a better chance if you are in an industry that VCs are hot to invest in. Right now, that means mobile technology, cloud-computing technology, and social computing companies, according to the most recent MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

These types of tech startups have a number of advantages from the investor perspective: they can reach a lot of customers, industry regulation is relatively minimal, and they are relevant, says Mark Cannice, professor of entrepreneurship with the University of San Francisco School of Management.