Tech Central? It’s New York Metro

NEW YORK CITY-Silicon Valley may have the concentration of high tech employment, but New York City has the numbers. The metro area’s tech sector employed 317,000 workers in 2009, the highest number among the nation’s top cities, according to TechAmerica Foundation’s Cybercities 2010 report released earlier this week. The foundation’s report comes a few days after Google opted to put its money where its space is, reportedly signing an contract to buy 111 Eighth Ave, where it already occupies about 500,000 square feet, for $1.8 billion.

As Dan Fasulo, managing director of Real Capital Analytics, told GlobeSt.com last week, while the Google deal may represent the year’s largest single-asset commercial property sale, it’s especially meaningful for the city’s tech sector.  The re-emergence of that sector could get a major boost if Google increases its footprint within 111 Eighth as space becomes available, as has been reported. Google declined last week to comment on published reports about the deal.

“When people think of New York, they often think ‘financial capital of the world,’ ” Peter J. Boni, president and CEO of Safeguard Scientifics Inc. and vice chairman of the board for TechAmerica, says in a release. “However, Cybercities proves that when people think about New York, they should also be equating the city with technology jobs.”

The metro area, including the city as well as 18 suburban counties in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, ranks first nationwide in telecommunications services employment, as well as in Internet services employment and R&D and testing labs jobs. “Clearly, the New York metro area has much to offer in the way of highly skilled workers and world-class research universities and will continue to be a hotspot for technology companies from around the world,” says Boni. Tech employees in the New York metro area earned an average of $98,500 in ’09, 51% more than the area’s average private sector wage.

However, while the ’09 payroll for the high-tech sector—$31.2 billion—also topped the list, as did the metro area’s number of high-tech establishments at 21,800, it’s well down the list in terms of concentration. Nearly 30% of all private-sector workers in Silicon Valley punch a clock at Google and other high-tech firms, according to Cybercities 2010. In New York, it’s 4.7%, ranking it 45th out of 60.

A report last year by the Center for an Urban Future, a New York City-based think tank, noted that the city “could do much more to capitalize on its prowess in scientific research and technological innovation. And the moment is perfect for such an effort—it has never been more important to diversify the local economy and create a powerful new engine for job creation.”

With an eye toward promoting the kind of diversification called for in the CUF report, the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture last week launched the FinTech Innovation Lab. The idea is to seek out the nation’s leading financial technology entrepreneurs, up to six of whom will participate in a 12-week lab program beginning in May 2011.

“The US financial services industry employs nearly 233,000 technology workers, including approximately 25,000 in New York City,” according to a release from NYCIF, the economic development arm of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City. “This is an enormous market and pool of talent that can be leveraged to ensure that New York is the center of the growing high tech sector of the financial services industry.”