Over 400 tech companies call Santa Barbara home

A quick overview of Santa Barbara

The central California city with the year-round Mediterranean climate weaves a fascinating history of indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and then US history. This three-minute overview touches on the city's layered story, distinct architecture, and many celebrities.

Celebrities love Santa Barbara’s beauty, proximity to LA and the ocean

The city has been home to top actors, TV hosts, and more for decades, particularly in Montecito to the east of downtown Santa Barbara. Locals can see Oprah Winfrey walking on San Ysidro Road regularly (when she’s in town).

Explore Santa Barbara County's biodiversity

As part of one of the world's most biodiverse hotspots, Santa Barbara County is home to thousands of unique species, the majority of which are not found anywhere else in the world. This database compiles facts, photos, and more for each species, sortable by plants, animals, and more.

Google chose Santa Barbara to host its Quantum AI computing project

The project seeks to reduce errors within its quantum computer and integrate 1 million physical qubits (or quantum bits) into the room-sized computer. This powerful device will attempt to solve complex problems in medicine, computing, and more.

University of California Santa Barbara produced 6 Nobel prize winners

The public school system is ranked as the eighth best by Forbes, and 56 of its faculty are members in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. See more figures on the school here.

The top 100 companies in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has pumped out some of the biggest companies in the world, including Apple, Meta, and Google. Thousands of companies operate in the area, ranging from valuations in the trillions to startups only worth thousands.

Hollywood alternative Flying A Studios was housed in Santa Barbara for a decade

Founded in 1910 in Chicago, the American Film Company moved west to Santa Barbara to shoot cowboy westerns. For a decade, the studio was prolific, putting out an average of 242 films a year but collapsed within a decade due to a lack of vision.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

The Y Combinator startup directory includes every company YC has funded

The startup accelerator has funded more than 5,000 companies over the years. This YC-specific search engine lets you look up any company to find out if it's a YC alum.

Many startups in a variety of industries try to reframe themselves as 'tech companies'

Tech is still the dominant industry for startups—in part due to its low barriers to entry, high growth potential, investor preferences, and the proliferation of tech into a wide variety of industries. Sweetgreen, the fast-casual salad chain, for instance, has often referred to itself as a tech company.

Santa Barbara divers helped innovate deepwater diving technology

Divers in the Santa Barbara channel innovated a more efficient type of diving helmet in the 1960s that used helium to allow for longer, deeper excursions for oil surveying, abalone collecting, and more. These innovators have since set the standard worldwide for military and industrial diving.

Many startups now have shoes-off policies

This website keeps track of startups with "no-shoes" offices so you can browse a list of barefoot companies—plus, see which of them are hiring.

The S&P 500 is composed of 500 companies, but has more than 500 total listings

Since some large companies have dual-class stock structures (like Alphabet and Fox Corporation), there are multiple listings on the S&P 500 for the same company. S&P Global has banned and then reversed bans on companies with dual-class structures multiple times since first allowing dual-class stocks in 2014.

In 2020, Palantir moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Denver, CO

Despite being a famous tech startup synonymous with Silicon Valley, Palantir executives and cofounders have criticized tech founders for not taking a bigger role in upholding Western institutions and supporting American defense and intelligence work. That cultural tension is frequently cited as a motivating factor for the company's 2020 move to Denver, CO. In early 2026, the company announced another move to a suburb of Miami, FL.

Reporting on the Santa Cruz storms

The Pulitzer on the Road podcast interviews prizewinners for insights on their work and takes a deep dive into issues relevant to the awards. This episode focuses on Lookout Santa Cruz, a digital California-based outlet that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for its coverage of the devastating storms the region faced in early 2023. Lookout’s reporters discuss the importance of local news coverage.

How Elon Musk's businesses have shaped Texas' Bastrop County

After deadly wildfires in 2011 burned a significant portion of the county, the tech boom in Austin pushed development eastward. Elon Musk has since made the region a key hub of his businesses, including a Tesla gigafactory considered one of the largest factories in the world by volume. Watch this reporter visit the town to hear the pros and cons of the transformation.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

In 2024, 15% of US laborers worked remotely

At the time, Frisco, Texas, had the highest share of remote workers among large US cities, at 34% (or 42,000 people). Frisco was closely followed by Berkeley, California, at 32% (18,000 people).

Some California cities outsource their public services entirely to the county

Southern California's "contract cities" incorporate as municipalities but pay Los Angeles County for police, fire, and other services rather than running their own departments—a cost-saving model common across the region.

UC Santa Cruz's nontraditional mascot was selected by its students

After becoming an NCAA Division III school, UC Santa Cruz ditched its informal mascot, the banana slug, for a sea lion. Students protested and eventually held a straw vote to reinstate the old name, which they saw as an antidote to the hypercompetitive nature of college athletics.

Mall Santas can make five-figures for just six weeks of work

The annual gig requires more dedication than most would expect. Mall Santas undergo training at Santa University, receive a bodyguard, and must stay in character.

A list of MBA jargon, complete with a ‘corporate BS generator’

From the classroom to the boardroom, MBA students hear plenty of corporate jargon in their lifetimes (think: “bandwidth,” “turnkey solution,” “modularize,” and more). This website—a relic from the internet—includes an MBA jargon dictionary and a corporate BS generator tool that creates helpful phrases for office life, like “incubate synergistic e-markets.”

Twenty of the coolest products from CES 2025

This roundup from Cybernews showcases standout CES 2025 innovations—from flying cars and robot dogs to VR headsets and AI-powered gadgets—showing the event’s most talked-about tech.

The amount of plastic chemicals in 300 everyday Bay Area foods

Food production is more complicated than it appears, and manufacturing, packaging, and shipping processes can add significant substances to your food. This massive project compiled data on 300 samples of foods delivered to the San Francisco area, testing for the presence of 18 different kind of plastic. Learn how to read the data here with its helpful guides and then explore the table yourself.

Married computer scientists at Stanford University built the router that became the foundation for Cisco

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner were both computer scientists at Stanford University in 1984 when the pair created a router that connected computers on different networks. The pair asked for Stanford's permission to manufacture the router, but the university declined, and the couple decided to leave their jobs to launch Cisco, one of the tech companies that powers the internet.

Dubai and Barcelona are examples of smart cities

By integrating technology into public transit, utilities, and other municipal systems, these cities aim to reduce costs and enhance the quality of life for their residents. Some of these technologies include adaptive lighting, parking sensors, and underground waste systems.

Comic-Con generates over $165M for the San Diego economy each year

San Diego’s community gets a significant boost from Comic‑Con, which draws around 135,000 attendees annually. It generates over $165M in regional spending—with more than $90M coming directly from visitors—and adds approximately $3.2M in city tax revenue.

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

Venture capital is a form of funding provided to early-stage companies with high growth potential, typically in exchange for an equity (or ownership) stake

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

The use of fungi to detoxify land and water—a process known as mycoremediation—has been used to clean up natural resources affected by the 2025 California wildfires.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

About 2,000 US babies are born annually without some portion of their limbs, potentially leading to a lifetime of pricey prosthetics.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Waves off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, can reach over 100 feet and are caused by the area's deep underwater canyon geography

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' is infamous for having some of the highest industrial pollution, toxic air emissions, and cancer risks in the US.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

El Niño, Spanish for 'the boy,' was named after Jesus Christ because the phenomenon resembled the weather changes observed around Christmastime.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.