Silicon Alley

Silicon Alley is a nickname for an area with a concentration of Internet and new media companies in Manhattan, New York City. Originally, the term referred to the cluster of such companies extending from the Flatiron District down to SoHo and TriBeCa along the Broadway corridor, but as the location of these companies spread out, it became a general term referring to the dot com industry in New York City as a whole. The name derives from Silicon Valley in California.

Silicon Alley has also been a term used to refer to DUMBO, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Companies that reside in DUMBO range from Web liquid, a digital marketing agency, to Wireless Generation, an education technology company.

The first publication to cover Silicon Alley was @NY, an online newsletter founded in the summer of 1995 by Tom Watson and Jason Chervokas. The first magazine to focus on the venture capital opportunities in Silicon Alley, AlleyCat News co-founded by Anna Copeland Wheatley and Janet Stites, was launched in the fall of 1996. Courtney Pulitzer branched off from her @The Scene column with @NY and created Courtney Pulitzer's Cyber Scene and her popular networking events Cocktails with Courtney. First Tuesday, co-founded by Vincent Grimaldi de Puget and John Grossbart, became the largest gathering of Silicon Alley, welcoming 500 to 1000 venture capitalists and entrepreneurs every month. It was an initiative of law firm Sonnenschein and the Kellogg School of Management, as well as other corporate founders, including Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), AlleyCat News and Merrill Lynch. Silicon Alley Reporter started publishing in October 1996. It was founded by Jason Calacanis and was in business from 1996-2001. @NY, print magazines, and the attending media coverage by the larger New York press helped to popularize both the name, and the idea of New York City as a dot-com center.

In 1997, over 200 members and leaders of Silicon Alley joined NYC entrepreneurs, Andrew Rasiej and Cecilia Pagkalinawan to help wire Washington Irving High School to the internet. This response and the Department of Education's growing need for technology integration marked the birth of MOUSE, an organization that today serves tens of thousands of underserved youth in schools in five states and over 20 countries. After the bubble burst, Silicon Alley Reporter was rebranded as Venture Reporter in September 2001 and sold to Dow Jones. Self-financed AlleyCat News ceased publication in October 2001.

A couple of years after the internet bust, Silicon Alley began making its comeback with the help of NY Tech meetup and NextNY. Since 2003 Silicon Alley has seen a steady growth in the number of start-ups and has joined the ranks of Boston and San Francisco as one of the three leading technology centers in the United States. As of 2007 Google's second largest office is located in New York. And, as of 2009, New York's Silicon Alley has become the startup leader in advertising, new media, financial technologies such as MediaMind, DoubleClick, Roo, IAC, meetup.com and a slew of web 2.0 companies. According to the National Venture Capital Association, 247 venture capital deals worth $1.4 billion closed in New York in 2009, despite the recession and rocky market. New York still ranks third behind Silicon Valley and Boston in the number of deals and overall investment rates, but New York is holding its own against the other big hubs and possibly beginning to increase its share.

A similar area of concentration in London is called Tech City, or Silicon Roundabout, centered around the Old Street Roundabout in Shoreditch in East London.