NEW YORK—Entrepreneurs, executives, and investors across different sectors met Monday in a private roundtable discussion, making connections otherwise improbable.
At Keeping the Edge, Avner Ronen, CEO and co-founder of tech company Boxee, said he met with the CEOs of Macy’s and American Express, as well as the president of Cornell University.
“That’s a great thing for entrepreneurs to meet with CEOs of more established companies,” he said. “Those are people you usually don’t come across.”
The summit was convened by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who held a press conference at Boxee’s New York office on West 26th Street to hail the roundtable.
Subjects discussed, according to Bloomberg, included infrastructure (“from building broadband capacity to transportation to access to capital”); education (preparing today’s students “to be tomorrow’s tech leaders”); boosting tech-related school subjects especially coding, engineering, and computer programming; and innovation (“how to create new startups and attract new companies, big and small”).
“These are exciting times in the tech sector and it seems like every week there’s an innovation—a new website or a new app that arrives on the scene,” Bloomberg said. “These days more and more of the big ideas are taking flight right here in New York City.”
Bloomberg said almost 10 percent of the app (mobile application) industry in the nation is now in the New York metropolitan area, citing December 2011 statistics.
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said, “Innovation occurs in cities,” but the cities need the right combination of things, including money, incentives for people to move into the city, and “a committed leader—in this case in the form of the mayor—who’s willing to make it happen.”
Boxee develops devices with the same name that present an alternative to cable television.
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