Tech Hubs Flourish Outside of Silicon Valley
Mashable highlights the growth of New York City tech, thanks to NYCEDC’s groundbreaking Applied Sciences NYC tech education and other initiatives to support entrepreneurship in the city:
To help facilitate economic growth in each of the five boroughs, the New York City Economic Development Corporation is following the startup movement closely. It’s a non-profit whose goal is to encourage redevelopment programs and ultimately create new jobs across the city.
The organization has been focused on building an engineering campus — called NYC Tech Campus (Applied Sciences NYC) — in the boroughs. With Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology partnerships, the initiative will provide 20,000 construction jobs and 8,000 permanent jobs, along with more than $23 billion in economic activity over the next 30 years.
Learn more at NYCEDC.com/tech.
With this news, you’d think Bobby Valentine is now managing New England’s tech scene:
New York’s share of venture capital dollars has doubled over the last ten years while its rival, Silicon Valley, has grown at a much slower pace and New England has sputtered, a new study from the Center for an Urban Future shows.
Between the first quarter of 2003 to the first quarter of this year, the New York area’s share of VC investments surged to 11.4% from 5.3%.
Silicon Valley’s share rose to 31.7% from 28.6% over the same period while New England’s share fell to 10.2% from 14.8%.
Read more in NY Daily News. Go #NYCTech!
Chart: Center for an Urban Future report
NYC BigApps Jobs and Economic Mobility Hackathon
Photos and blog post by Noelle Marcus, Project Manager, Center for Economic Transformation
The two-day NYC BigApps Jobs and Economic Mobility Hackathon at New Work City on April 20-21 featured speakers and experts from New York City’s top organizations fighting poverty and solving key workforce development challenges.
We kicked off the weekend with two stirring keynotes from Tom Hilliard, a senior fellow at the Center for an Urban Future, as well as an inspiring testimony on the power of civic technology from Austin’s hottest socially driven startup, Aunt Bertha. Fourteen teams demoed their projects and apps on Sunday night to a notable group of judges from The Huffington Post, Aunt Bertha, Robin Hood, Coatue and Blue Ridge Foundations.
$5,000 in cash prizes were awarded to three great teams whose apps best address problems related to Jobs and Economic Mobility:
First Prize: Child Care Desk
Child Card Desk helps you find quality child care near you. We aim to show real time availability and social rankings for this essential service, making a terrible experience pleasant and useful.
Second Prize: Plexx
Plexx is a training center in your pocket. We build a mobile training portal where young people without a college degree can learn the skills they need to obtain an entry level job and build a career.
Third Prize: App.lied.at
Job seekers apply for a lot of jobs through various job board sites. It’s hard to keep track of where you applied. We’ve fixed this problem.
Honorable Mention: Helping Hands
Helping Hands is a mobile app and website that hopes to take some of the luck out of the equation, and make the help that’s out there more accessible, organized, and give people a positive voice from their peers.
Browse all the Jobs NYC BigApps projects!
The hope is to build an ecosystem like Haifa’s, where industry and academics feed off each other.
The Technion: Israel’s Hard Drive (The New York Times)
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is Cornell’s partner in creating an ambitious graduate school for applied sciences and engineering in New York City, Cornell NYC Tech.
New York Daily News reports that KisiBox, developer of smartphone-managed keys for buildings, apartments, and other spaces, wins the fourth annual NYC Next Idea global business plan competition:
KisiBox, a “personal doorman,” allows users to access their homes via their mobile device by simply pressing a button from anywhere in the world.
While comparable technology already exists, KisiBox brings something new to the table: users can share those virtual keys with others for however long they like.
The team from Germany will receive $35,000 to assist them in launching their innovative business in New York City. Read more on NYCEDC’s blog.
Above: A 15-minute matchmaking session between Weill Cornell Medical College (Clinical and Translational Science Center) and an early stage health technology company at Blueprint Health.
Read more about two exciting matchmaking sessions held by PILOT Health Tech NYC, a new initiative that provides funding of up to $100,000 each to innovative proposals to pilot new health technologies in New York City healthcare services organizations.
New York’s tech dominance grows: City ranks No. 2 in list of most tech companies sold last year (via NY Daily News)
According to PrivCo, 100 local tech companies were acquired in New York last year, up 8% from ’11 and far ahead of Boston, which had 62. New York also had the biggest private tech deal of the year. #NYCTechCity
NYC BigApps Is Coming Soon
Move over Samsung – The Next Big Thing is almost here. We are working with CollabFinder to bring the biggest, boldest, and best BigApps ever! While we can’t divulge our secrets yet, yesterday we gave a sneak peek at Social Media Week event: “We Built this City: The State of Civic Technology, with Code for America and IDEO.”
Entering its fourth year, the NYC BigApps competition promotes government transparency and innovative new technologies by challenging mobile and web developers to create cool, free apps for New Yorkers using City data.
Get involved: Sign up now at www.nycbigapps.com to be the first to know about any updates on New York City’s ultimate open data software challenge. Trust us – you don’t want to miss a thing.
Let’s Hear It for #NYCTechCity
We want to hear from you why New York City Tech is best – and far superior to its numerous urban siblings laying claim to the title “tech hub.”
Tweet it, Instagram it, Tumble it, Pin it, Vine it, you name it. Show us why #NYCTechCity is best, especially following yesterday’s news on the front page of amNewYork that New York City’s tech businesses are leaving other cities in the dust. 2012 was a great year, with NYC tech acquisitions totaling $8.3 billion, ranking it #2 in the nation. Or follow up on the State of the City address (#SOTC2013), where Mayor Bloomberg highlighted the City’s ongoing efforts to “further expand New York’s role as a global tech hub” and “lead the innovation economy of tomorrow.”
So, as Jay-Z says, let’s hear it for New York. Be creative, be clever, be witty – heck, we’ll even permit a bit of snark as long as you’re not a meanie – and have fun! Tag your photo with #NYCTechCity. We’ll reblog and post a gallery of our favorite images we find that best capture why NYC Tech is the best (and better than the rest).
Collage created by Betsy Scherzer/NYCEDC
Photo credit: Grace Cheung/NYCEDC via Instagram
Today’s cover of amNewYork says it all:
