

New York’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg threw down the gauntlet to Silicon Valley on Tuesday in a bid to attract the next generation of technology startups to the Big Apple, listing a number of ways in which New York ranks superior — everything from IT and advertising to fashion and culture.

His message, delivered in a surprise address at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in Manhattan, was clear: Technologists, entrepreneurs and software developers should navigate to New York rather than Silicon Valley or Boston if they want to be where the action is in the years to come, because this is where “the best and brightest … exchange and cross-pollinate ideas” in a culturally and intellectually fertile environment where “intellectual capital is important,” big business thrives, and startups are on the rise.

“In media, advertising and information technology, I really do think that New York is No. 1,” said Bloomberg:

“We already have more information and media jobs in New York City — 315,000 and counting — than any other metropolitan area in the nation. And during the first quarter of this year, venture capital funding in New York increased by 19 percent, even as it went down in Silicon Valley and the rest of the nation. That’s true. This is where it’s happening.”

Indeed, New York tech startups have bloomed in this burg over the past year or so, possibly to some small extent because software developers who may have devised financial formulas in years past are looking for something else to do with their number-crunching, algorithm-cranking abilities. In addition, people themselves move from city to city, and ideas born in Silicon Valley have spread over the internet itself.

Some of the hottest startups are now in New York City, including location-aware startup Foursquare, (even if its prospects of being snapped up by Yahoo seem to have fallen through in light of Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Koprol.)

Still, many of the last start-ups to make it big — Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce, to name a few — did so out west.

“While I don’t know who’s going to create the next big thing in technology, we do know where Bloomberg LP or the next Twitter needs to be headquartered, and that is here,” he counters. “If you want to compete in the big pond, if you want to have a breadth of cultural opportunities and be able to interface with others of the best and the brightest, this is the place to come.”

Alongside most other cities facing a changing worldwide economy, New York is desperate to attract startups that have traditionally been founded in Silicon Valley. Startups are the future now, just as they were back when today’s behemoths were just ideas in a garage. Microsoft, Google, Reuters each have thousands of employees here, but the Big Apple needs more entrepreneurs and geeks, said the mayor, considering Wall Street’s tailspin 20 months ago.

New York is “where it’s happening” in information technology and bio-science, said Bloomberg.

To help firms sprout and flourish in New York’s crowded environment, the city offers loans (especially helpful given today’s banking landscape) and has launched incubators for technologists and freelancers, 10 of whom have since received more than $8 million in venture capital funding, according to the mayor.

And in an unusual move, the City invested $3 million over a year ago in an early-stage investment fund — “the first of its kind outside Silicon Valley” — that snared an additional $19 million from First Mark Capital.

Bloomberg rattled off a few more achievements, like the city’s first investment in a mobile app: city guide MyCityWay, winner of a $300,000 NYC Big Apps contest that encouraged startups to use public data from 30 local-government data feeds. That firm’s NYCWay app in turn houses a wide array of other apps for finding show tickets, jobs, traffic cameras, hotels, citizen reporting, real estate and so on.

News also surfaced that New York plans to partner with “a major university” for a media lab set to launch later this year, along the same lines of those already in place at Stanford and MIT. Finally, the city itself has 3,000 employees and a $64 billion budget, which the mayor hopes “the best and the brightest” see as another employment option.

On a couple of occasions, he recalled his own past — founding Bloomberg LP after being fired from a Wall Street job — as a model for others. Between that and his list of superlatives about the city, he also showed that the city might have the country’s proudest or most boastful mayor, regardless of whatever advantages might exist here for startups.

Local business and real estate are up, boasted the mayor, and New York is the safest big city in the country, “where it’s happening” in information technology and bioscience, the country’s new top tourist destination, and “the capital of the world” in fashion, finance and media.

It also has one heck of a salesman in charge. Or as they call them in the Valley, evangelist.

Top photo: New York City skyline

hyunlab</flickr/Creative Commons

Front page photo: Flickr/Kyle McDane

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