City of Start-Ups?

Forget the massive office parks that have grown up in Silicon Valley, New York is quickly growing its own urban start-up universe. The appeal of the suburbs is wearing thin and talent is flocking to start-ups in New York. New York has passed Boston as the second largest technology hub with no less than 400 start-ups. Many of them are drawn to the urban environment with its wealth of culture and close proximity to venture capital. The city is offering up land and $100M to create a world class science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island and is reviewing proposals from Stanford, Cornell, NYU, University of Toronto, and Carnegie Mellon.

Companies like Google and Facebook have large offices in New York now, drawing talent that prefers bigger cities and all they have to offer. But more interesting are the number of start-ups and the amount of capital that they have attracted. In the second quarter of this year along, 48 start-ups raised more than $416M. Weekly tech hackathon events are attracting the type of people who have been flocking to Silicon Valley for the last two decades. Combined with the investments that Columbia is making in their Science and Engineering schools, the Campus that Bloomberg envisions on Roosevelt Island, it appears that NYC is poised for the rise of Silicon Alley once again.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/11/start-new-york/536/