In light of Bill de Blasio being elected yesterday as the new mayor of New York City, I thought I would post this interesting graphic I found on Atlantic Cities:

What it shows is a clear split.

If you live in Manhattan or nearby areas in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, you most likely saw your property values rise from 2008 to 2012. However, if you live on the outskirts of the city, you may have seen your property values fall as much as 20% (the darkest red areas).

This shift back to city centers has been well documented and labeled, by some, as The Great Inversion. But in many ways it’s a symptom of a greater phenomenon at work: rising income inequality.

It’s happening in New York. It’s happening in Toronto. And in many other global cities. New York VC Fred Wilson believes that the solution lies in the three Es: education, empowerment and entrepreneurship. That sounds like a great start to me.

According to a recent report called Building a Digital City, which I found via Fred Wilson’s blog, tech is now the second largest job sector in New York City behind financial services (which includes real estate). There are an estimated 262,000 tech workers in the city earning wages in excess of $30 billion.

This is a really interesting stat that speaks to the diversity of New York’s economy and the ability for it to continually reinvent itself. But what I found particularly interesting, was the following comment by Fred Wilson:

“And the reason tech is growing so fast in NYC is that it is embedding itself in all of these other industries. It’s not entirely clear to me whether Gilt is a tech company or a fashion/retail company, it is not clear to me whether ZocDoc is a tech company or a health care company, it is not clear to me whether Codecademy is a tech company or an education company.”

This is very much the way I think about so called tech companies today. I recently had a Rotman colleague say to me that he felt the startup world was becoming saturated. Everyone is now seemingly working on some new app.

But I like to think of it slightly differently. As Fred’s comment above suggests, a lot of startups today aren’t purely tech companies. They’re just out to solve a problem and it just so happens that technology and the internet are creating all sorts of opportunities for new solutions.

I also read a blog called Platform Connected and the author put it like this:

“In the future, every company will be a tech company. We already see this change around us as companies move to restructure their business models in a way that uses data to create value. We are moving from linear to networked business models, from dumb pipes to intelligent platforms. All businesses will need to move to this new model at some point, or risk being disrupted by platforms that do.”

So there you have it. Software really is eating the world.

In light of Bill de Blasio being elected yesterday as the new mayor of New York City, I thought I would post this interesting graphic I found on Atlantic Cities:

What it shows is a clear split.

If you live in Manhattan or nearby areas in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, you most likely saw your property values rise from 2008 to 2012. However, if you live on the outskirts of the city, you may have seen your property values fall as much as 20% (the darkest red areas).

This shift back to city centers has been well documented and labeled, by some, as The Great Inversion. But in many ways it’s a symptom of a greater phenomenon at work: rising income inequality.

It’s happening in New York. It’s happening in Toronto. And in many other global cities. New York VC Fred Wilson believes that the solution lies in the three Es: education, empowerment and entrepreneurship. That sounds like a great start to me.

According to a recent report called Building a Digital City, which I found via Fred Wilson’s blog, tech is now the second largest job sector in New York City behind financial services (which includes real estate). There are an estimated 262,000 tech workers in the city earning wages in excess of $30 billion.

This is a really interesting stat that speaks to the diversity of New York’s economy and the ability for it to continually reinvent itself. But what I found particularly interesting, was the following comment by Fred Wilson:

“And the reason tech is growing so fast in NYC is that it is embedding itself in all of these other industries. It’s not entirely clear to me whether Gilt is a tech company or a fashion/retail company, it is not clear to me whether ZocDoc is a tech company or a health care company, it is not clear to me whether Codecademy is a tech company or an education company.”

This is very much the way I think about so called tech companies today. I recently had a Rotman colleague say to me that he felt the startup world was becoming saturated. Everyone is now seemingly working on some new app.

But I like to think of it slightly differently. As Fred’s comment above suggests, a lot of startups today aren’t purely tech companies. They’re just out to solve a problem and it just so happens that technology and the internet are creating all sorts of opportunities for new solutions.

I also read a blog called Platform Connected and the author put it like this:

“In the future, every company will be a tech company. We already see this change around us as companies move to restructure their business models in a way that uses data to create value. We are moving from linear to networked business models, from dumb pipes to intelligent platforms. All businesses will need to move to this new model at some point, or risk being disrupted by platforms that do.”

So there you have it. Software really is eating the world.