You know what they say about New York City: If you can make it here….But let’s skip the clichés and old song lines and get straight to the big news. Welcome to Xconomy New York, the sixth outpost in our rapidly expanding network of local news sites about innovation.
So, all you Big Apple entrepreneurs, it’s time to get excited. The city’s biotech, tech and energy sectors are bustling, and I intend to find all the great stories of innovation that NYC has to offer. Xconomy New York will report with the same journalistic zeal that began in Boston almost four years ago, and which we have since rolled out in Seattle, San Diego, Detroit, and San Francisco.
Why New York? Because if your mission is to be the authoritative voice on the most innovative sectors of the overall economy—life sciences, info tech, and clean technology—then you must be in New York. There’s all kinds of action in digital media (think Foursquare), it’s the place that gave rise to a billion-dollar blockbuster cancer drug (Erbitux, now owned by Eli Lilly), and it’s the home of Wall Street, the place where most of the really big cleantech ideas are getting financed. Hence, we’ve arrived to report on these stories at close range.
New York is home to more than just the bulls and the bears, of course. It’s packed with venture capitalists and top-notch academic institutions with active technology-transfer arms, not to mention that oh-so-vital source of sustenance for the city’s legions of cash-poor entrepreneurs: The best 99-cent pizza slices the world has to offer.
Even though NYC is widely seen as a world capital for finance, media, entertainment, and fashion—and Silicon Valley gets most of the credit as the capital of innovation—there are plenty of great stories of invention to uncover here, too. And many of them are coming from a rapidly expanding group of technology incubators, which include Dogpatch Labs, General Assembly, and NYU Poly.
New York City is also home to pharmaceutical giants
