photo from Wikimedia Commons

According to a recent article in Mashable, New York is becoming a hotter and hotter site for start-up businesses and entrepreneurs. Where Silicon Valley is king, NYC, for many reasons, is rising in the ranks.

Young and popular companies like Foursquare and Kickstarter, as well as companies like Twitter and Facebook who have building offices here, are highlighting a vanguard of new and growing tech companies.

In April 2011 there were roughly 15,000 relatively new tech up-starts in the NYC area, but now that number has increased by about 11,000, the article says. It also says that…

“Last year, venture investors plowed $2.75 billion into 390 startups in the New York City area — the most money and investments since 2001, when the dot-com bubble was rapidly losing air in Manhattan’s “Silicon Alley” and everywhere else, too. So far this year, $942 million has been invested in 182 startups in New York.”

That number is merely a fraction of Silicon Valley’s funding —around 12 billion, according to Mashable— but it’s surely an auspicious spurt in jobs, opportunities, and innovation. New York is, actually, the second-largest technology hub in the U.S.

According to a May report by the Center for an Urban Future, New York has surprisingly sprung up to second and is the only major U.S. area to see an increase in venture capital deals between 2007 and 2011. It’s seen a 32% increase over the four-year span, opposed to a 10% decrease in Silicon Valley, 14% decrease in New England, 8% decrease in Orange County, and 11% decrease in the U.S. overall. IT is also the leader in NYC since job growth since 2007. (Publishing down 15.8%… uh oh…)

This is eerily similar to the dot com era, but we’re in a better position right now than we were at that time.

“You can get traction before you have to raise money. The tools are orders of magnitude easier,
and so investors aren’t funding ideas… They’re funding businesses”, Frank Rimalovski, the managing director of the NYU Innovation Fund, said in the report.

These numbers mark an auspicious future for the city’s employment, entrepreneurship, and innovation which, ultimately, marks an auspicious future for the city as a whole.

Who wants to start a tech company?!

Mashable