Rachel Haot Explains Why NYC Is The Best Place to Start Your Business

Jeff Weisbein -

Rachel Haot, the Chief Digital Officer in NYC is on stage now at The Next Web Conference in NYC and has shared a bunch of really interesting stats and details about how NYC is becoming a great place to start a business, especially in the tech industry.  Just yesterday, NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg announced that NYC is now number two in the nation in venture capital funding, right after Silicon Valley, it’s also the second largest tech industry.

A few stats from the presentation include, 2.8B in total VC funding received in 2011 a 41% increase from 2010, a total of $378.3 in VC deals during Q1 2012, and of that $378 million, $264.65 million of that was from 68 tech deals during Q1 2012.

Some other neat stats from the presentation:

  • 17 subway stations are hooked up with WiFi in NYC (with more on the way).
  • 26 parks in NYC have WiFi (with more on the way).
  • Verizon FiOS will be available to 93% of households by the end of 2013 and 100% of households by the end of 2014.
  • NYC is pushing for a more open government to spark innovation and has opened up more than 2,000 datasets, including SAT scores by neighborhood, property records, where all the WiFi hotspots are, etc.
  • NYC was the first city to hold a hackathon.
  • The city just relaunched nyc.gov with a fully responsive design, the new design was a result of a hackathon.
  • 7.1 million people are engaging with the city of New York in some way online.
  • You can now tweet or text in your questions to NYC 311.  They also have 12 apps.
  • NYC sent 2k tweets, answered 300+ questions on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy.
  • NYC will soon have its own top level domain (.nyc), will only be available with a NYC address.  It’s the first city to apply for its own top-level domain.