NY Times April 27, 2014
Predicting that your city will be the next Silicon Valley is simple. But actually making it the next Silicon Valley is something else entirely — as New York is slowly finding out.
A few years ago, officials and executives in New York proclaimed their ambition: to build the city into a powerful hotbed for tech innovation. Officials funneled money into start-up incubators and approved a bid from Cornell University to transform Roosevelt Island into a two-million-square-foot, next-generation technology campus to rival Stanford’s. Social media darlings like Foursquare, in downtown Manhattan, and the crafts retailer Etsy, in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, were hailed as surefire breakouts.
Since then, money has poured into the city’s tech sector — not as much as in Silicon Valley, but at a faster clip. Dozens of homegrown tech companies have attracted millions of users. Start-ups connected with New York’s major industries like media, advertising and commerce are finding particular success.
Read more…