Tag: tech

• Tech is now the second largest job sector in New York City

  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.

  2013.10.09

• Gentrification and corporate shuttle buses

  A couple of months ago I had coffee with an urban planner who had recently relocated from the Bay Area back to Toronto. One of the interesting things that came up during our conversation – that I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to before – was how corporate shuttle buses (from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and so on) could be impacting cities.

  On the surface, they seem fairly benign. Most of the big tech companies are located outside of San Francisco, but young smart people today like living in cities. So let’s run shuttles buses that take people back and forth. Employees get to live the life they want and employers get broader access to human capital. It seems like a win-win.

  But in reality, some argue that these shuttles buses reinforce a powerful trend already plaguing the region: The alienation of non-tech people. George Packer of the New Yorker called the buses “a vivid emblem of the tech boom’s stratifying effect in the Bay Area.”

  What I wonder though is to what extent these buses are not just an emblem, but an actual driver of stratification and other negative outcomes. The first concern that comes to my mind is the possibility for this to lead to infrastructure disinvestment. Already there seems to be a philosophical divide around transit (see BART strike).

  Wired just published an interesting set of maps that try and map “Silicon Valley’s gentrification problem through corporate shuttle routes.” They’re worth checking out. It’s also interesting to see how they collected the data; it was a fairly messy process.

  2013.09.07

• Insta-Rich: $1 Billion for Instagram

  Valuation: $500 million last week; $1 billion this week.

  Insta-Rich: $1 Billion for Instagram

  2012.04.10