By JENNA WORTHAM
The two dozen or so people arranged around wooden tables looked like just another Sunday brunch set in New York. But as they introduced themselves the roll call sounded like a Who’s Who of digital start-ups in the city: Foursquare, Hot Potato, Six Apart, Flickr, Flavorpill, Trust Art, Vimeo.
“There’s a lot happening right here in our ZIP code,” said Dorothy Mc- Givney, a former Google employee who is a co-coordinator of this group, the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, and runs Jauntsetter, a travel site for women. Like the others, she had come to the brunch to help foster the growth of her community of entrepreneurs.
The group is among a growing cluster of informal meet-and-greets for the local technology and media industries.
The buzz surrounding these gatherings is just the latest sign that a decade after the dot-com bust, the Internet economy in New York is springing back to life.
“After the crash, New York was a complete wasteland of dead funds and companies,” says Charlie O’Donnell, an entrepreneur in residence at First Round Capital .
Since then, “the community has gelled,” Mr. O’Donnell says. “ Now we have a critical mass of support and financing.”
New York’s flashier industries, including big media and Wall Street, have long dwarfed the tech sector here. And the dot-com implosion only reinforced that reality. The fledgling tech scene that was being established in the late 1990s crashed as dozens of Internet companies folded and venture capital firms took their investments elsewhere.
During the dot-com boom, “venture capitalists were just throwing dollars at every Internet idea on every street corner,” says Owen Davis, a serial entrepreneur and managing director of NYC Seed, an early-stage technology investment fund. “There was little critical judgment about business models and ideas.”
Since then, Mr. Davis says, the New York technology industry has managed to accelerate despite the economic turmoil besieging other industries.
Helping to give New York an edge is a broader shift in the types of innovation that are gathering speed in the technology industry, says Dale Jorgenson, an economics professor at Harvard University. The infrastructure for mobile communications and computing is now in place, he says, so the next opportunities lie in developing services using that technology.
“They will be behind the next boom in the industry,” he says. B ecause so many industries now grappling with the Internet are based in New York, the city is finding surer footing among its peers as a thriving tech hub.
“Book publishing, advertising, media and even the fashion industry are all located in New York. These are the main industries that are being reshaped and redefined by technology and the Internet,” says AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies regional economics and technology entrepreneurship.
The portfolio of Fred Wilson, cofounder of Union Square Ventures and a force within the New York start-up scene, offers a look at some hot new Web ideas: Boxee, software that pipes video from the Internet to a television; Tumblr, a microblogging platform; and Foursquare, a mobile social network .
“The software business has morphed into the Internet business,” Mr. Wilson says. “Ten years ago, maybe 80 percent of software was being built for enterprise. Now, it’s being written for consumers and is more mediacentric than ever. And, historically, those have been New York’s strongest sectors.”
To be sure, New York is not unseating its West Coast counterpart, notes Ms. Saxenian. “Silicon Valley is always leading the cluster, but it goes through booms and busts like everywhere else.” Nevertheless, she adds, “this is a moment where New York really has the chance to shine.”
Helping to cultivate New York’s revival, entrepreneurs and investors say, is the proliferation of early-stage investment firms, start-up incubators and the cadre of successful serial entrepreneurs choosing to set up shop within the five boroughs of the city.
Ron Conway, a San Francisco financier who was one of the earliest investors in Google, Twitter, Facebook and Zappos, says his fund has 25 investments in New York that account for roughly 20 percent of his portfolio.
“Just a year ago, it was less than half that,” he said in an e-mail message. “New York has become a hotbed of innovation.”
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