Baltimore 4th ‘hottest’ startup city by Meetup membership growth [REPORT]

Baltimore has previously measured the growth of its startup sector by the number of pizza slices purchased for the city’s technology Meetup groups.
A new measurement from Philadelphia-based analytics firm RJMetrics skips the pizza and looks at the number of people in those Meetup groups.
While Baltimore ranked 27th among U.S. cities in 2013 for the total number of Meetup members — 13,772 — across 45 Meetup groups RJMetrics counted, it ranks fourth among U.S. cities when it comes to Meetup membership growth since 2012.

Working from the assumption that the quality of a startup city five years from now lies in its human capital, RJMetrics analyzed the tech Meetup numbers in cities across the world.

• RJMetrics counted 16,155 technology Meetups globally.
• About 2.5 million of the total 3.8 million tech Meetup members live in U.S. cities.

Still, nearly 14,000 Meetup members is paltry compared to U.S. cities that have long been considered tech hubs: Palo Alto, San Francisco, Austin, Boston and the like. RJMetrics found that New York City, for example, has a total of 481,584 members in Meetup, which was founded there.
Read the full RJMetrics report