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Riding a wave of start-ups, New York has emerged a national leader in fields that leverage the Internet and mobile technologies’”a development that has provided a key economic boost and left the city well positioned for future tech growth.
The study, “New Tech City,’ conducted by the Center for an Urban Future, concluded that the technology industry is growing faster in New York City than anywhere else in America and that the city now trails only Silicon Valley as a hub for the development of new technology companies.
The study’ s authors, Jonathan Bowles and David Giles, identified 486 technology companies that had been founded in the city since 2007 and determined that the financial crisis and the recession that followed did not slow the industry’ s growth.
A growing number of New York tech start-ups – Foursquare, Gilt Groupe, Kickstarter, Tumblr, ZocDoc, and Etsy, among them – have achieved real growth and become tech stars. If that’ s not enough, more than a dozen well-established start-ups have moved to the city from the Bay Area, Boston, or other locations. Twitter opened a New York office and Microsoft announced its new New York City research lab just last week. All in all, the city has gained more than a thousand web technology start-ups, most of which have been boot-strapped without institutional venture capital investment, according to the report.
Part of the reason for the city’ s emergence, the report says, is the maturity of the high tech sector, which no longer turns on the creation of “the infrastructure and plumbing for the Internet, but about applying technology to traditional industries like advertising, media, finance, fashion and health” – industries for which New York has an “unmatched concentration of talent.”
More info
- Report – New Tech City (PDF file)
- 2012 NYC Digital Start-Up Index (PDF file)