"The idea is that there is a specific geographical area that all of these companies are trying to penetrate from a labor perspective," explains M&G senior vice president James F. McCaffrey. "California has Silicon Valley, North Carolina has the Research Triangle, and our thought was if you could brand [the Massachusetts high-tech region] a little bit, it would help define it better for everybody."

M&G is certainly doing its part, recently sending out a press kit that included T-shirts emblazoned with a logo reading "Boston's TechnoCorridor: Feel the Burn." The company's research department has kicked in with a report outlining vacancies, rental rates and recent trends in the region, information that will be produced on a regular schedule in the future. Loosely defined, the TechnoCorridor is a 50-square-mile swath that runs north along Interstate 93 to the New Hampshire border, southwest on Route 495 to Westborough, and east on Route 9 into Boston and Cambridge.

Whether the name will catch on is uncertain, but even M&G's competitors acknowledge there is a specific market where the state's technology firms strive to locate. Joseph Fallon of Trammell Crow notes that computer makers dominated much of the region in the 1970s and 1980s before the market crashed. "That's definitely where the lion's share of technology-based companies are located," says Fallon. "It's been that way for 20 years."