New York Gets Googled The Big Apple has become an epicenter of tech talent and innovation -- and Google's second home. By John Foley, InformationWeek Feb. 17, 2007
Step out of New York's 14th Street subway stop, turn up Eighth Avenue, and there, in the heart of Chelsea -- amid the traffic, delis, pizzerias, and restaurants -- is Google's largest software engineering center outside of Mountain View, Calif. Within the massive former headquarters of the New York Port Authority, Google software engineers and other tech professionals work in small teams on dozens of projects, including the search company's Bigtable storage system, Spreadsheets application, and Google Print Ads marketplace for newspaper advertising.
Why is Google making the Big Apple its second home? Proximity to Madison Avenue and the media companies -- the four major TV networks, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., Hearst, New York Times Co., Bloomberg -- is only part of the answer. The New York metro area is emerging -- or re-emerging -- as one of the hottest technology centers in the world. Silicon Valley and Redmond, Wash., may spring to mind as the software havens of the United States, and new hubs like Bangalore, India, are flourishing overseas, but the New York area employs more technology people than any place in North America. The greater New York area employed 813,000 people in technology- related jobs in 2005, according to U.S. government labor statistics crunched by the New York Software Industry Association, compared with 283,000 in San Francisco and San Jose.
New York has the infrastructure -- the telecom networks, office space, lawyers, and other professional services -- and local schools keep the talent pipeline full. Prestigious research facilities such as IBM's Watson Research Center to the north and Bell Labs to the west began employing computer scientists more than 45 years ago, and the area's universities -- the City University of New York, Columbia, New York University, Polytechnic, Princeton -- keep churning them out.
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