GOOG makes NYC its second home
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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