Digital.NYC: The First Ecosystem Hub
On October 1st, 2014, after more than two years of partnership and development, Gust proudly joined the Mayor of the City of New York and IBM in announcing the launch of Digital.NYC, NYC’s new official hub for tech and startups. In the first 36 hours, mentions of the hub were viewed more than 42 million times on social media, and over 100,000 pages on the site were perused. News outlets from USA Today to Mashable to Brooklyn’s Technical.ly praised the hub and its place in the community. For the Gust team, we couldn’t be happier about the warm welcome.
The Digital.NYC hub (an “Ecosystem Hub” as we call it behind the scenes) features every resource and insight for the NYC tech and startup scene including news, jobs, courses, events, blogs, and even available workspaces. This timely information is complemented by searchable, user-managed profiles of every startup, investor, incubator, and accelerator in NYC. Every resource with an address is also integrated into a unified map, where users can peruse the City’s resources in relation to where they live or work.
Content on the hub is drawn from established resources in real-time, such as AlleyWatch, TheMuse, Meetup, CourseHorse, PivotDesk, and over a dozen others. Most of the profiles of startups and investors are provided by Gust. If any member of the community is not using these established resources they can add themselves to the hub via simple forms found on most of the site’s pages. All content is reviewed and ultimately posted by dedicated in-house editors. As the permanent online hub for NYC, Digital.NYC provides a valuable resource to every member of the community that has an interest in this burgeoning economy.
Digital.NYC is the result of a public-private partnership between NYCEDC, the NYC Mayor’s Office, IBM, and Gust. The concept originated with the City and was ultimately built by Gust. IBM partnered to provide sponsorship and hosting on it’s Bluemix cloud platform. The public-private partnership has provided an invaluable benefit to all parties.
For the City, including the de Blasio administration and NYCEDC, the partnership has yielded an enterprise level online platform, a private sector team dedicated to accountability and agile, ongoing improvements, and most importantly an invaluable resource for accelerating the economic development of the region.
For IBM, Digital.NYC provides exclusive community-building in the fastest growing tech ecosystem in the world. This exposure helps in recruiting entrepreneurs for their rapidly growing Global Entrepreneur Program, as well their integrated suite of cloud services targeted towards tech and startup community members.
The tremendous native equity inherent in the City of New York and IBM has been invaluable for pushing the initiative forward, from both a public and commercial perspective. Together, as a team with Gust, the initial results have been extraordinary.
For Gust, Digital.NYC represents a new paradigm for connecting the early-stage ecosystem. Our vision has always been to facilitate the connections between entrepreneurs and early stage investors. From our inception we have been perfecting this process from the perspective of deal flow. Digital.NYC represents our first MVP for facilitating these connections from the perspective of content, and invites new audiences on the fringes of the early-stage economy.
There is no greater power than what results from the seamless connection of physical communities to the information and knowledge that surrounds them. Digital.NYC is the first in the world to make this connection for a localized entrepreneurial community in a comprehensive, meaningful way, and certainly won’t be the last.
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