Hood River, Oregon, is a special place. People visit because of the world-class windsurfing, apple and pear orchards, B&Bs and micro-brewed beer. It’s a picturesque town nestled on the banks of the Columbia River, with an old-fashioned downtown that’s home to lots of new coffee shops, restaurants and boutiques. Skiing on Mt. Hood is only a half-hour’s drive away. What outsiders might not know is that a cluster of high-tech companies has also taken root in the area, a trend started in the 1990s when a handful of windsurfing enthusiasts took the same composite materials their boards were made of and used them to design other things, most notably small unmanned military airplanes. Today, the Gorge tech cluster has helped the historically poor area lower unemployment and improve the local economy. You can read more about in my story on Hood River’s booming tech business in“The Gorge Effect,” in the January 2008 issue of Oregon Business magazine.