By clicking, it counts the download New York, Dec 21 (EFEUSA) .- The landing of giants such as Amazon and Google, the commitment of the financial sector to technology and more than 7,000 emerging companies have definitively consolidated New York as a technological center and as a possible alternative to the Silicon Valley model.
The Big Apple, the traditional economic and cultural capital of the United States, is also today a technological capital, but one that seeks to differentiate itself from its competitors on the West Coast.
“New York is growing in its own way,” says Efe Bryan Lozano, responsible for External Affairs at Tech: NYC, an organization that represents the technology sector in the city.
Faced with a scandal-ridden Silicon Valley and questioned by its isolation from the American reality, New York is promoted as the city where technological brains share the metro with the rest of the population and where the sector offers solutions to other industries and settled.
“We all take the same trains, we walk along the same sidewalks, we have a very different city in that sense and that creates opportunities to build relationships, not only with technology companies, but with other industries,” says Lozano.
An example of this situation is that, instead of purely technological companies, many of the jobs that are generated in New York in this field are in sectors such as healthcare or finance.
In fact, three banks such as BNY Mellon, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley regularly rank among the main demand for technological labor in the city.
Media with a strong digital presence such as Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, Vice or the Oath group (HuffPost, Tumblr or Yahoo!) Are also key players, while more and more companies are offering traditional services, but from a new perspective, such as Oscar medical insurance company or the Blue Apron food supply service.
The next big jump, in any case, comes from the hand of the internet giants and their renewed interest in the Big Apple.
Amazon, which already has more than 2,000 workers in the city, announced in November that it will install one of its new headquarters in the Long Island City (Queens) neighborhood, where it will employ more than 25,000 people.
Google, which has some 7,000 employees at its headquarters in Chelsea, plans to acquire a new office building and could double its workforce in the city, Facebook has about 2,000 people in the city and IBM has chosen it for its artificial intelligence divisions. and cloud services.
Along with them, numerous “startups” from the original “Silicon Alley” or “Callejón del Silicio” -the word game with which the first New York technological focus was christened-are now fully established and have extensive staff.
In total, according to official figures, the digital and technology sector employs about 135,000 people in New York, more than double than in 2010, but other estimates put the figure at more than 300,000, depending on how it is defined what is or not a job in that area.
In 2017, the New York “startups” gathered funding for about 12,000 million dollars, almost twice as much as three years before, figures that in the United States. it only exceeds Silicon Valley.
The local population, in any case, continues to view with suspicion this “boom” and, above all, the disembarkation of large corporations such as Amazon.
Since the company of Jeff Bezos announced the opening of its new headquarters, the city has been the scene of repeated protests from neighbors concerned about the higher cost that Amazon can cause in their neighborhoods and the aid offered by public administrations to attract the company .
The industry understands the reaction, says Lozano, who stresses that the growth of the sector will be beneficial for the entire population and insists on the idea that companies have a different approach in New York.
“There is a commitment of technology to improve New York as a whole,” he says.
