How can non-silicon valley CIO/ CTOs keep up with the pace and change of technology the way we in the bay area do?

Keep up on the reading, listening to podcasts, your own professional and personal circles

Read, read, read. TechCrunch, CrunchBase are good sources for startups/emerging trends. Talk to vendors, try stuff out (e.g. conduct POCs) and lean on your network. There is no magic bullet.

Hacker News is the best option in my opinion.

A lot of it is reading the right channels. If one follows the right people, Twitter can be useful. HackerNews and Reddit (I know, not what you'd expect) also have targeted, low-noise channels run and read by technophiles.

There is also the counterintuitive point that oversampling what's new actually leads to noise. (Taleb makes this point in Antifragile.) Time itself is a filter of "what's good", so a lower sampling frequency of the right channels can yield more signal. Reddit allows for such filtering. The technical content (e.g. in r/dataengineering and other technical subreddits) tends to be good.