New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued his tour of the city's startups today, stopping by Boxee's Manhattan headquarters with Google's Eric Schmidt in tow.
Bloomberg touted New York City as a hub of innovation, where the technology sector is bigger, more diverse, and more innovative than ever before. The New York metro area is now No. 1 in job growth in the mobile app industry, he said.
"These are exciting times in the technology sector," he said Monday afternoon, flanked by Boxee employees.
Bloomberg, however, said he wants to do more than just grow the city's tech empire; he wants to keep it alive. To do so, NYC has established business incubators around the city to help entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground. Bloomberg also pointed to a digital map the city unveiled in May that shows which local tech companies are hiring and where.
Bloomberg also touted the city's Venture Fellows program, which selects 20 to 30 "rising star" business people from around the world and provides them with an opportunity for mentorship and networking. Bloomberg's administration has also set up an entrepreneurial firm to provide tech startups with early-stage capital – the first of its kind outside of Silicon Valley, the mayor said.
"As a startup, we draw energy from lots of places – customers, our team, the environment," Boxee's marketing director, Andrew Kippen, said after Monday's press conference. "To have a city like New York that supports us and wants the company to thrive is energy and reaffirming."
Bloomberg's not done yet, though. He recently convened a group of top tech executives for a roundtable – dubbed Keeping the Edge – to discuss education, infrastructure, and innovation in New York's technology sector. He cited local companies like Foursquare, Tumblr, Skillshare, Seamless, Etsy, and, of course, Boxee, as part of the growing effort.
Starting a company in New York "is probably the best place in the world to do that," Boxee CEO Avner Ronen said Monday.
Kippen mirrored that thought, saying that Silicon Valley is often the right place to go to build websites, while New York, where there is "so much industry," Kippen added, stands as a great locale for creating things – apps, 3D printers, robotics, and more.
"This is the Big Apple, and for those people who really want to be challenged mentally, this is where you want to be," Bloomberg concluded. "Those kinds of people also tend to have the skill sets required by technological companies."
Google's Schmidt, meanwhile, called New York's commitment to making the city a viable alternative to tech-center Silicon Valley a "true innovation."
"This is going to be a phenomenal growth story for New York for years to come," he said.
In Dec. 2010, Google paid a reported $1.9 billion for the Manhattan building that has housed its New York City employees since 2006.
In the last year or so, Bloomberg has made a point to stop by and partner with some of the city's most notable names in tech, from Yelp and Twitter to Facebook and Microsoft.
Earlier today, meanwhile, Bloomberg congratulated mobile payment firm Square for its acquisition of New York design firm 80/20. "Together, we will reimagine and redesign how people communicate through commerce everyday, all around the world," 80/20 said in a note on its website.
For more, see PCMag's review of Boxee Live TV, as well as our interview with CEO Avner Ronen.
For more from Stephanie, follow her on Twitter @smlotPCMag.
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