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Austin, Texas Leads the Nation in Job Growth

Secret to Austin’s Success: Entire Community Committed to Job Creation

(CBS) The Brookings Institution just looked at how well cities had emerged from the recession. The rankings are based largely on job creating and housing.

Five of the top 10 are in Texas, with the state capital Austin leading the list. CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason reports.

Every time the Austin, Texas company “Bazaarvoice” adds a new employee they bang a gong.

The gong rang 240 times last year at Bazaarvoice. The 5-year-old company hosts and analyzes website customer feedback for clients like Best Buy and Macy’s.

Kelly Grey was the latest hire this week, after moving to Austin from Connecticut with her husband and two kids.

“The economy is doing better here,” Grey said. It took Grey just a month to find a job as a client manager.

According to a recent survey, Austin weathered the recession better than any other place in the country, and now leads the nation in job growth.

Welcome to Jobstown, USA

Projects like Samsung’s $3 billion expansion of its Austin plant have added hundreds of jobs. Austin’s unemployment rate (7.1 percent) is more than two full points below the rest of the country.

Bazaarvoice CEO Brett Hurt thinks Austin’s doing something different.

“There’s an amazing creative energy here,” said Hurt.

Thousands of talented graduates pour out of the University of Texas every year. The state has no income tax, and Austin has low taxes and house prices and a rich cultural scene.

Dave Porter’s job at the Chamber of Commerce is to entice companies from more expensive states like California.

“We are very aggressively recruiting,” he said. California has a “bulls eye right on it.”

California-based SunPower is not leaving the state, but the solar company is opening an operations center in Austin after the city offered up to $900,000 in hiring incentives. SunPower plans 450 hires.

About 80 percent of jobs created in Austin come from local companies. At the Austin Technology Incubator at the University of Texas, Isaac Barchas gives very young companies office space and helps them find funding.

For Austin, nurturing new companies is paying off in jobs.

“It’s really like taking shots on goal,” Barchas said. “You want to have as many shots as you can, because you never know which ones going to put the ball in the back of the net.

“When you score the benefit is huge,” Mason said.

“When you score the benefit can be another Dell or another Google or another Intel.”

Austin’s entrepreneurs say there’s no secret to their success. It’s just an entire community committed to job creation.

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From Light Bulbs to LEDs

In conventional incandescent bulbs, the direct descendants of Edison’s invention, resistance causes a wound tungsten filament inside a globe to heat up and glow when an electric current passes through it. The vast majority of the energy is released as heat, a bit as light. Fluorescent lights work by introducing an electric arc to excite mercury atoms. The excited mercury atoms emit ultraviolet radiation, which is converted to visible light after it strikes a phosphor coating on the inside of the long glass tube (or wound glass tube in the case of compact fluorescent bulbs).

An LED works on an entirely different principle, that of the diode. A silicon-based semiconductor material is used to create a “p-n” (positive-negative) junction. Electrons flow from the p-side, or anode, to the n-side, or cathode, but not in the reverse direction. As the electrons transit the p-n junction they fall into a lower energy level, which causes them to give off a photon of light. The color of the light — red, green, blue, or amber — depends on the semiconductor materials used to make the diode. White light is created by combining light from different colored LEDs, or by coating a blue LED lens with phosphor.

Trends in the computer chip industry are described by Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. The LED industry is driven by Haitz’s law, named for Roland Haitz, a retired engineer who led the optical engineering program at HP for much of his 32-year tenure at the tech company. Haitz’s law predicts that the performance of LEDs — the amount of light that can be produced per diode — increases 20-fold every decade, while the cost of that light decreases 10-fold.
The $100 billion global lighting industry is undergoing radical change: New office buildings and retail outlets are abandoning fluorescent lighting in favor of LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, those tiny, energy-efficient, long-lasting, and blindingly bright points of light. Giants such as GE (GE) and Philips are shifting production from incandescent bulbs to LEDs. Even the local Home Depot (HD) — which today probably stocks only a couple of LED lighting products — will soon carry a bouquet of LED bulbs, ultimately edging out fluorescents and halogen lamps. By the end of the decade, analysts predict, LEDs will be the dominant source for commercial and residential lighting.

LEDs, which are based on a technology similar to that of computer chips, have more in common in their design and manufacture with your laptop than with the incandescent bulb that Thomas Edison patented almost 130 years ago. As lighting goes digital, the industry is likely to encounter some of the same upheaval that took place when television, music, and other businesses shifted away from analog technologies.

Benefits of LED Lighting

The Light Bulb Goes Digital

The $100 billion global lighting industry is undergoing radical change: New office buildings and retail outlets are abandoning fluorescent lighting in favor of LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, those tiny, energy-efficient, long-lasting, and blindingly bright points of light.  By the end of the decade, analysts predict, LEDs will be the dominant source for commercial and residential lighting.

LEDs, which are based on a technology similar to that of computer chips, have more in common in their design and manufacture with your laptop than with the incandescent bulb that Thomas Edison patented almost 130 years ago. As lighting goes digital, the industry is likely to encounter some of the same upheaval that took place when television, music, and other businesses shifted away from analog technologies.

LEDs and Energy Efficiency

Today LEDs are about 10 times more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, which will start being phased out in the U.S. in 2012 (the phaseout of incandescents has already begun in Australia and parts of Europe and South America). LEDs are about two times more efficient than compact fluorescent bulbs — sometimes called “twisty bulbs” because of the distinct spiral shape — which also have a good dose of mercury in them, making disposal problematic (not an issue with LEDs).

The best LED bulbs have a lifespan of about 20 years, assuming three hours of use a day, about 20 to 25 times your average incandescent bulb. And, according to Haitz, who is now retired, performance is only going to get better. “Everything indicates we can do another 10 to 20 years of that improvement trend,” he says.