Ooooooh! Maybe Valley Innovation Is about to Restart...

As a Valley-based business reporter I get chills (the good kind) when I read Jim Cramer -- or another of his pretending-to-get-tech Wall Street peers-- say something like this. Because as soon as people say innovation is dead in the Valley, it seems to slowly restart. Among other bon mots, Cramer told an audience at New York's "Hey! Us too!" Internet Week that there was more innovation going on in the Rust Belt than Silicon Valley.

I've been outspoken that there's not a lot of great Web innovation going on right now, but Cramer's statement is a stretch even for me. You know what Cramer misses? (Other than the under the radar work happening in clean tech, biotech, etc. The Valley is a big place after all.) He's focused on product innovation, which has somewhat stalled in the Valley's Web scene in aggregate. But business model innovation is where the Valley is at as Web companies and others in areas like open source hunt to find ways to turn insane audiences into cash. Memo to Jim: That's what made Google worth $175 billion today. The search engine was hardly a new-fangled application.

What I love about guys like Cramer is they tout they were rabid Google bulls "early on." Early = Once the S-1 was filed and we all saw the kind of numbers Google was putting up. Props to them for knowing the stock was worth more than $85 a share. But that's not the same thing as spotting "innovation," Wall Street. Just wondering how often Cramer actually comes out here....because I seem to see him on the Mad Money set just about everyday...or goes to the Rust Belt for that matter...

All snarking aside, I don't usually bash Cramer, because I think he's an amazing showman and knows the public markets better than I do. And I have a total appreciation for the rigors of being on camera everyday. But don't try to play the startup game, pal.

Oh! My favorite part: Cramer says TheStreet.com is one of those lone well positioned Web properties. Because so many young people are flocking there. Yeah, that one doesn't even need a snarky graph.