A Glimpse Inside NYC's Startup Scene

Like most places, their surrounding culture was a huge influence on their companies. To the point where I'd say these businesses weren't made in New York, they were made by New York.

Can’t live with the daily offerings from Banana Republic, Nordstrom and Fab.com, and yet can’t live without them?

So when one of his business school buddies left his $700 glasses on an airplane, the idea of selling inexpensive eyewear directly to consumers became crystal clear.

Students pay $1,499 per eight- to ten- week course, which include video conferences with career coaches and real world professionals.

Fashion, shopping, and luxury goods for wealthy individuals. There's nothing wrong with creating a business to serve your local market, and in fact that's precisely what you should do -- start with the market you know best. But when people like Bloomberg want to see more hard-core technology coming out of New York like other competing areas, it's a long hard road requiring a massive cultural shift. The engineering school will help, but it's going to take decades to break away from fashion, finance, and food.

But the best part by far:

...we would never speak badly about our city, but the rent is too damn high.

Yeah, well, growing the market for designer underwear sure isn't helping.

This article seems to be a sequence of fluff profiles of companies that already have quite a bit of publicity and success. And are not tech businesses, but merely businesses that effectively use the Internet.

I can assure you that there are many technology driven startups that have genuinely interesting engineering challenges going on in NYC (coupled with viable intriguing business models). These places are not them.

Note: I'm a tad old school in this regard, having a website element to your business can not be a modern definition of a technology company unless every company is a tech biz ... :-)

Apparently "A Glimpse Inside NYC's Startup Scene" == "A glimpse at 8 randomly selected startups in New York City"

A nice treatment of the "scene" would talk about the incubators (TechStars), work spaces (General Assembly), VCs (USV) and meetups. Those are more important to the "scene" than any particular company, at least until one of the tech startups in NYC grows into a 10,000 person company.

Nothing encourages me to close a tab faster than a slideshow-style presentation.

Bonus points if Ghostery blocks the JS required to run it.