Silicon Alley gets more street cred

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Meanwhile, New York-based tech reporters are stocking up on energy drinks for this week: Digital Technology Week, coinciding both temporally and thematically with the city's Advertising Week, is going to be a hectic one for the press.

On Monday and Tuesday, the Interactive Advertising Bureau holds its Mixx 2.7 Expo. Plus, on Monday night, sociable geeks will have their pick between a Social Networking Tech Meetup sponsored by Sun Microsystems and an evening of short films sponsored by NewTeeVee, the online video property run by Valley blogger Om Malik's GigaOM. Then, at midnight, the more-than-highly anticipated Halo 3 game for Microsoft's Xbox 360 hits shelves, and a Best Buy store in midtown Manhattan will be the center of launch festivities.

That's just the tip of the Iceberg 2.0. The press will start to flood the cavernous Jacob Javits Convention Center for DigitalLife on Wednesday--the show opens to the public on Thursday--and some will split their time between the Ypulse Tween Mashup and Millennials New York youth-media conferences. (Disclosure: This reporter is moderating a panel at Millennials.)

But when the weekend finally arrives and the high-tech spotlight leaves New York, it's back to business for a technology industry that has grown in leaps and bounds over the past year but is still very much evolving and growing.

"New York, let's be honest, is still a secondary or tertiary technology market," Dobkin said.

Local tech enthusiasts occasionally complain that the lack of a major engineering school in New York puts it at a disadvantage to cities like Boston and San Francisco. But Charlie O'Donnell argued that a lack of available hires isn't the issue.

"The engineer and developer problem is not so much that there aren't enough; it's that the kind of risk profile and career trajectory of the people that are here and capable of it are sort of different" than in Silicon Valley, he said. "If you're a developer here in New York you always have the option to make nice current comp and benefits at Goldman Sachs or some other big company. In the Valley, more of the people in your surrounding network have worked for start-ups, you've seen it go up and down, and you've seen that it turned out OK."

Dobkin agreed that the "developer shortage" problem is a myth, but added that the high cost of quality ad sales departments does make it difficult to be a new-media business in New York. "Most of the companies here are doing ad-supported media models where we're selling advertisements and doing all the things that media companies do," he explained. "To do that, you really need qualified sales people, people who really know the industry and know how to sell the product. For those, we're competing with much larger companies."

But perhaps being a subculture of New York's already-established industries isn't such a bad thing. For one, it's made for a close-knit gaggle of Gotham geeks.

"It's still a very small and intimate industry," Dobkin said. "It's great socially because you make friends and it's a small group of people so you tend to be able to meet everyone. It's great business-wise, because if you're building a company like I am, you're working with the same contacts over and over again. You see them out at bars. It's good for business."

[bluerain44]

It would be nice if it were true...

But Silicon Alley disappeared, totally, after 2001 and 9/11. People were wondering if Wall Street (NY's home town industry) would still exist or decamp for Greenwich, CT. Much of it has, actually (see Jersey City).

This is nice, but NYC won't ever be a Boston, and certainly not an SF.

[danubeway]

There's no shortage of candidates

I hope this tech migration into NYC continues. There's a lot of of transplanted talent in the Bay Area and Seattle. I've worked in both regions for the tech giants and I know of many people who would rather live on the East Coast. Problem is the opportunities in NYC can't compare to the West Coast, but there's plenty of talent willing to go East. Create good tech jobs in NYC and there will be plenty of excellent candidates.