Where is the Top City to Spot Tech Talent?

Move over Silicon Valley. The U.S. may no longer be the top city where technology professionals go to for business.

According to a new study by LinkedIn, four of the top five cities that technology professionals moved to last year were not in the U.S. but in India–Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai.

The trend underscores the technology boom in the south Asian nation, home to some of the world’s largest outsourcing services firms such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, as global corporations poured in money to do everything from write software to run call centers and manage networks.

“This data validates how strategically important India is to companies around the world,” said Nishant Rao, country manager for LinkedIn in India. “It is also very telling of where the talent for technology, which is generally scarce, reside,” he said.

On average, 16% of the new residents who moved to new cities had technology skills, LinkedIn data showed. However, most Indian cities had more than double that average.

The study also shows that most new residents with a technology background were those with software infrastructure and programming skills.

The rankings, released this week by Linkedin were based on analyzing the change in location profiles of its 1.5 million members in 52 cities across the world between November 2012 and 2013. LinkedIn has more than 300 million users world-wide, a third of whom are located in the U.S., its largest market.

India ranks a distant second with more than 26 million users on LinkedIn.

According to LinkedIn data, 44% of the more than 60,000 new residents who moved to Bangalore last year had technology skills.

Compare that with the San Francisco Bay Area, which ranked fifth on the list. The city is the new hub in the U.S. with a thriving tech community, where a number of  technology  firms such as Twitter , Zynga and Dropbox are based.

Close to one in three of the more than 90,000 new residents who moved to the city last year were tech professionals.

“It is hard to find tech talent in the Bay Area,” said Mr. Rao. Also, the high cost of living and rising rental costs make it tough for new talent to live in the city, he said.

The other hubs in the U.S. to which many technology professionals have moved are smaller metropolitan cities such as Seattle and Austin, the data showed.

Down under, Melbourne and Sydney figured right behind the U.S. cities at the tail end of the list.

Below are the top 10 cities to which technology professionals migrated between November 2012 and 2013:

Cities                 Proportion of new residents that have tech skills

1.  Bangalore               44%

2.  Pune                         43%

3.  Hyderabad             43%

4.  Chennai                     38%

5.  San Francisco         31%

6.  Seattle                        29%

7.  Austin                        23%

8.  Melbourne               22%

9.  Sydney                      22%

10. Gurgaon                  21%

Apple Debuts iOS 8 – HealthKit, Third-Party Keyboards, HomeKit, and Much More ::

Apple officially introduced iOS 8 at their WWDC 2014 Keynote address on Monday. New features for the mobile OS include support for third-party keyboards, improved notification features, an upgraded autocorrect feature, a new health tracking component named HealthKit, and much more.

Messaging

Messages gets some great new improvements, including the ability to name conversation threads, the ability to add and remove users from a group conversation, the ability to leave a message thread, and a “Do Not Disturb” feature to allow muting of particularly noisy threads.

Users will also be able to share their location with others in the messaging app, and will have the ability to record and send audio and video messages right within the app. Those messages can be viewed in the app, or even via the lock screen. Users will also be able to hold the phone up to their ear to reply, and the voice message will be sent automatically when the phone is lowered.

HealthKit

HealthKit is Apple’s new API that will collect and consolidate a user’s health information from multiple third-party apps and accessories. A “Health” app will monitor a user’s fitness metrics using that data to establish personalized thresholds for readings.

Apple says they have been working with the Mayo Clinic, and the system will allow doctors and patients to use HealthKit to set those thresholds, notifying doctors automatically in the case of something being wrong.

Notification Center

New interactive notifications will let users pull down notifications and respond to text messages or other notifications without leaving the current app. Users will also be able to interact with notifications on the lock screen. This will allow responding to an iMessage or Facebook post right from the on screen notification.

Keyboard Enhancements

In a move that is likely to be cheered by iOS users, Apple will now allow the use of third-party keyboards, such as Swype, system wide. The keyboards can be used in any app that the normal iOS keyboard can be used in. Apple also introduced a new native iOS keyboard called “QuickType,” which offers predictive word suggestions that adapt to the current situation. QuickType can learn a user’s habits, and language, and Apple assures privacy of the user will be protected.

Siri

Siri got some love with the iOS 8 update, as she gains the ability to be summoned by saying the phrase “Hey, Siri.” A definite plus when using Siri in the car. She also gains Shazam song recognition, the ability to make iTunes purchases, 22 new languages, streaming voice recognition to display search results as users speak, and more.

Touch ID

Developers will now be able to use Touch ID in their apps. While fingerprint data will be safely stored in the A8 processor, Touch ID will be used to automatically unlock passwords that are stored in the keychain in order to grant access to apps.

Family Sharing

The new Family Sharing feature will allow families of up to six members to share the same credit card among their Apple ID accounts. If a child attempts to make a purchase from the iTunes or App Store, the adult will receive a pop-up message on their device, asking them to approve the purchase.

Family Sharing also allows family members to share photos, calendars, reminders, and more amongst up to six users. Brady Bunch, you’re out of luck.

Extensibility 

Apple has included thousands of new APIs for developers in iOS 8, and perhaps the most exciting of those was Extensibility. This feature allows iOS 8 apps to share information with each other and with the Notification Center. The new API allows such features as the filters from third-party apps to be used in the iOS Photos app, and Apple also showed off a Safari extension that brought Bing translation to Safari.

The new feature also allows apps to install widgets similar to Apple’s own Calendar and Stocks widget into Notification Center. A demoed ESPN SportsCenter widgets displayed sports scores within Notification Center.

iOS 8 is available today as a beta for developers, and will be available to the public this fall.