one for growing businesses. The metro Austin area has much lower housing
costs than the San Francisco Bay Area's Silicon Valley, but much higher housing
costs than many parts of rural Texas. As a result of the high concentration of
high-tech companies in the region, Austin was strongly affected by the dot-com
boom in the late 1990s and subsequent bust. Austin's largest employers include
the Austin Independent School District, the City of Austin, Dell, the U.S.
Federal Government, Freescale Semiconductor (spun off from Motorola in 2004),
IBM, St. David's Healthcare Partnership, Seton Family of Hospitals, the State
of Texas, the Texas State University, and the University of Texas at Austin.
Other high-tech companies with operations in Austin include 3M, Amazon, Apple,
Hewlett-Packard, Google, Qualcomm, Inc., AMD, Applied Materials, Cirrus Logic,
ARM Holdings, Cisco Systems, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Face book,
eBay/PayPal, Bioware, Blizzard Entertainment, Hoover's, Intel Corporation,
National Instruments, Rackspace, RetailMeNot, Rooster Teeth, Spansion, Buffalo
Technology, Silicon Laboratories, Xerox, Oracle, Hostgator, Samsung Group,
HomeAway, and United Devices. In 2010, Facebook accepted a grant to build a
downtown office that could bring as many as 200 jobs to the city. The
proliferation of technology companies has led to the region's nickname,
"the Silicon Hills", and spurred development that greatly expanded
the city.
Austin is also emerging as a hub for pharmaceutical and
biotechnology companies; the city is home to about 85 of them. The city was
ranked by the Milken Institute as the No.12 biotech and life science center in
the United States. Companies such as Hospira, Pharmaceutical Product
Development, and Arthro Care are located there.
Whole Foods Market (often called just "Whole
Foods") is an upscale, international grocery store chain specializing in
fresh and
