NYCEDC

Sonpreet Bhatia, Puneet Mehta, and Archana Patchirajan are co-founders of MyCityWay, a mobile application provider and developer of NYC Way.

From 1995 to 2005, immigrants founded 44 percent of New York City’s startups, according to a four-part research study led by Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa. Such companies created hundreds of thousands of jobs and are helping the City and our country stay competitive in the cutthroat global technology industry.

We’re perfect examples of what those immigrant entrepreneurs look like today. Our journey began in India, but we came to New York after the dot-com bust to attend graduate school and find better opportunities. Though San Francisco’s Silicon Valley is often considered the heart of tech innovation, New York was the obvious choice to us. Last year, we spent 40 frenetic days creating from scratch, NYC Way, our winning mobile application in the City’s inaugural BigApps competition that let software developers like us figure out the best ways to make local government data more accessible to the City’s residents and tourists. Our lives haven’t been the same since.

Building on our wins for Investor’s Choice, Popular Choice, and Honorable Mention for Best Overall App in the competition, our company, MyCityWay has created apps for other cities, including Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. We also became the first company seeded by the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a $22 million fund managed by the City’s Economic Development Corporation and FirstMark Capital that provides technology startups with early-stage capital. With the $300,000 investment, we were able to move our offices from Jersey City to new space in Manhattan, and we’ve added two additional employees.

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Over the holidays, we whittled down our list of 160 submissions from around the world to the top 20 teams in this year’s NYC Next Idea competition. If you’re not familiar, NYC Next Idea is our annual competition—now in its second year—inviting undergraduate and graduate students from international schools to develop innovative business plans that will be executed in New York City. Six finalist teams will be flown to New York City next spring to present their business plans to the judges and network with NYC-based investors, entrepreneurs, professors, and government officials. The winners will receive cash prizes of $20,000 for the graduate track and $15,000 for the undergraduate track.

View the NYC Next Idea 2010–2011 Semifinalists on our website now, where you can also learn more about the competition. NYC Next Idea is sponsored by NYCEDC in partnership with Columbia University. 

For the latest updates, follow NYC Next Idea on Twitter @nycnextidea.

It’s easy to imagine Will Smith tearing through this space in a post-apocalyptic blockbuster—or Lady Gaga filming an atmospheric dance sequence for a music video.

Can you guess which NYCEDC property this is? Hint: It’s somewhere within the five boroughs, and is available for film production and cultural events. (Leave your guesses in the comments section… then click the photo for the answer!)

We have several properties in our portfolio that are large spaces perfect for set production, film and television production, photo shoots, and art installations.

Visit our online library for more available NYCEDC film production locations at www.nycedc.com/film.

Taking a page from the NYC BigApps playbook, Congress yesterday passed the America COMPETES Act to provide federal agencies with authority to conduct open government competitions. 

When we launched the first NYC BigApps Competition in October 2009, we saw it as a way to make our government more transparent, while also providing local developers with the opportunity to perfect technology around which they could start new businesses. Essentially, we challenged software developers to create digital applications using datasets that had previously sat unused on City servers. In our inaugural year, we received 85 submissions—more than other open government initiative nationwide. The winner of the Popular Choice and Investor’s Choice awards, MyCityWay, went on to receive millions of dollars in VC funding (including from the City’s own NYC Entrepreneurial Fund) and has since expanded its application to 40 cities around the world.

This year, as VC titan Fred Wilson writes in his recent A VC blog post, we’ve ramped up our efforts, releasing 350 datasets from more than 40 City agencies and commissions. With all the new technologies released over the past year—from the iPad to Android operating systems—we expect developers to embrace the challenge and show the rest of the country just how innovative New York City’s startup community has become.

It’s not too late to submit your own big ideas; the application deadline is January 26^th. For more information, visit the NYC BigApps website.

Click the map to find a complete listing of our affordable workspaces in New York City.

Taking the leap and starting a new venture? We know that the City’s economic future depends on entrepreneurs developing their innovative ideas here. We also know that the first few steps out of the starting gate can pose significant challenges—not the least of which is finding affordable office space. That’s why the Bloomberg Administration established a City-sponsored business incubator network to provide new ventures with access to lower-cost workspaces, as well as mentoring and networking services to increase startups’ opportunities for success. 

No matter your industry—fashion, food, new media, technology—there is affordable workspace available where you can work alongside other self-starters, sharing best practices and pitfalls to avoid. 

Take a look at our network of City-sponsored incubators:

• 160 Varick Street targets technology startups in areas like clean energy and bioscience
• Hive At 55 caters to media freelancers in Lower Manhattan
• CFDA Fashion Incubator provides emerging designers with below-market rents in the Garment District
• chashama connects artists with vacant real estate at subsidized rates at the Brooklyn Army Terminal
• Sunshine Bronx Business Incubator, opening early next year, will provide space for Bronx-based startups
• La Marqueta, opening early next year, is a kitchen incubator in East Harlem for food entrepreneurs

Startup businesses at City-sponsored incubators have raised more than $20 million in venture funding and created over 150 new jobs. Some tenants have already graduated into market-rate space and continue to expand. For more about the benefits of shared workspaces, check out this article that features Hive At 55:

• “How to Get the Most out of Your Co-working Space” – Inc.com

In the next phase of the High Line, stretching from 20th Street to 30th Street, here are some features to look forward to:

• The “Chelsea Thicket” - a forest of evergreens at 22nd Street
• Seating made out of reclaimed teak, opening up into a grassy lawn
• A “Woodland Flyover” where visitors can walk 8 feet above the ground at the tree canopy level, while a fertile valley lies beneath
• Wildflower field of perennials
• Radial, curved seating along 29th and 30th Streets
• Views of the Hudson River and the East River
• See-through, exposed areas that allow visitors to examine the steel structure that undergirds the park
• Two additional elevators, for a total of 4 elevators to access the High Line

Read The New York Times article for more descriptive imagery of the park.

• “High Line’s Next Phase: Less Glitz, More Intimacy” - NYTimes.com

NYCEDC is overseeing the construction of the High Line, along with partners Friends of the High Line and NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. We’re working hard to ensure that the park is ready to open next spring! View photos below from our recent visit, and learn more about NYCEDC and the High Line.

The road north towards the new section of The High Line. (Hit “Read More” to see more photos after the jump.)

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New York City is transforming into a global 21st century capital of innovation, but we can’t get there without reinforcing the building blocks of an innovation economy—science, technology, engineering, and math.

That’s why today at Google’s Manhattan offices, Robert Steel, NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, announced big news—that New York City is seeking a partner in the academic world to create a new, state-of-the-art engineering and applied sciences research campus. By working with the City’s existing top-notch academic institutions to strengthen New York City’s applied science capabilities, especially in fields that lend themselves to commercialization, we are taking measurable steps to capture the considerable growth in the science, technology, and research sectors and maintain a diverse and competitive economy.

Watch a Bloomberg TV interview with Deputy Mayor Steel as he discusses the new initiative.

Read the press release, as well as NYCEDC’s official Request for Expressions of Interest, for more details on the new initiative, including suggested sites for the applied sciences research facility: the Navy Hospital Campus at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Goldwater Hospital Campus on Roosevelt Island, Governor’s Island, or the Farm Colony on Staten Island.

Around the web:

• NYC Seeks to Lure Top Science University – WSJ.com
• To Attract the Next Google, the City Seeks a New College – NYTimes.com

After three collaborative design workshops in 2010, the City and local community are steps closer to developing a vision to improve the pedestrian environment above the BQE between Atlantic and Hamilton Avenues. View the final workshop presentation that displays the three proposed plans to “fix the ditch” – Maximum Green, Connections, and Green Canopy – and check out visual community feedback to get a sense of what people particularly liked and didn’t like about each plan.

View more renderings, and learn more about the BQE Enhancement project. Drop a comment below or tweet @NYCEDC to let us know your thoughts about the design concepts.

Last week was a big week for our “brain exchange” programs, where entrepreneurs and startup talent gathered together in New York City to explore synergies and make connections. On Monday, December 6th, we kicked off NYC Venture Fellows, which pairs local and global rising star entrepreneurs with successful business mentors who will help them navigate the terrain of starting a business in one of the world’s most lucrative markets. (View photos from the launch event.) The next evening, our second NYC Startup Exchange drew high-tech entrepreneurs and investors together at the Frank Gehry-designed IAC building to talk business ideas (photos from the evening) and learn about our programs. We also hosted delegations from London and China throughout the week to show them why setting up shop in New York City makes for good business. 

All of these programs are just part of a suite of NYCEDC initiatives to bring talented New Yorkers together, so they can exchange ideas and advice, and create a vibrant, supportive community where they can launch fresh new companies.