| July 2006 |
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| This time around, it's products first, profits second |
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| Of all the indicators that New York's tech sector continues to revive, none is more obvious than the glistening Frank Gehry-designed headquarters of Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive Corp., now rising on Manhattan's far West side in the shape of sails against the sky. The Silicon Alley of 2006 is looking far shinier than did just a few years ago.
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Deanna Vincent, a dot-com veteran who helped launch iVillage and who is now VP of Marketing for Pando Networks, says, "I feel the energy is back. Just waiting to cross the street I hear business ideas being kicked around. Here at Pando we're bringing in young, whip-smart developers who are congregating at events all around town." In the past year, Pando has completed a $7 million series B financing round, hired a dozen developers, and is looking for more. "Our office is getting too loud and too cramped, and we're already thinking about how and where to expand quickly."
The latest numbers back up Vincent's perceptions of a fresh Big Apple buzz. Statewide, New York's unemployment rate is at its lowest point since 2001. And in New York City, local worker confidence in the employment market inched up in June to its highest level of the year, according to the monthly Hudson Employment Index.
Meanwhile, the quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey has found that 18 % of the companies interviewed for its most recent report plan to hire more employees in the third quarter, a significant uptick from just 4% in the second quarter, according to Manpower spokesperson Paula Zimmerman.
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| 11% of New York CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter. |
| - Robert Half Technology's third-quarter IT Hiring Index |
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Further confirmation of new hiring energy in New York comes from IT staffing consultancy Robert Half Technology, whose third-quarter IT Hiring Index finds that a net 11% of New York CIOs plan to make new hires this quarter.
And at Dice.com, the number of Big Apple job listings rose a healthy 8% in the second quarter, from 10,825 in March to 11,690 in June.
As is the case in California's Silicon Valley, the resurgence of New York's tech sector is not replaying the late '90s rush to IPOs and paper profits. Instead, smaller and more nimble startups are looking to create good products and services first and then sell to acquisitive behemoths. Today Diller's IAC/InterActive is comprised of 22 companies it has acquired, including Ticketmaster, CitySearch, and Expedia (they generate $6.2 billion in revenue), and Silicon Alley is still buzzing about NBC's $600 million purchase of Deanna Vincent's former employer, iVillage. AOL picked up New York-based Weblogs Inc. for $25 million, and the shoestring operation DailyCandy has been sold twice, most recently for $100 million.
While one of the secrets of the success of startup winners like DailyCandy or Nick Denton's Gawker.com minimedia empire is to keep overhead – and the number of employees – low, the fact that so many of these startups have come along in the past few years keeps the job listings coming. It looks like New York is thriving anew, and the metaphorical tumbleweeds that rolled along Silicon Alley after the dot-com bust have finally blown away.
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| Dice job postings in New York are up 14% since Jan. |
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