Techweek NY Kicks Off — This Time in Brooklyn
This Tuesday at noon, Qianshang Chen, a former product designer, travelled from Manhattan to Brooklyn’s Industry City. He, along with 50 others, was attending the first event for Techweek New York — a tour around the 16-building complex, which is transforming from a warehouse to a hub of tech startups and artisans.
The week-long technology festival, which started on Monday and is organized by Techweek Inc., aims at fostering the innovation ecosystem by gathering entrepreneurs and tech visionaries. For the first time since it started in New York four years ago, Techweek dedicated a day in Brooklyn.
The event originated in Chicago in 2011 and has now expanded to eight cities across North America. According to Techweek, 5,000 people are estimated to take part in this year’s New York event from October 10th to 14th.
“It’s naive to think technology is only a Silicon Valley thing,” said Amanda Signorelli, the CEO of Techweek Inc., who has seen the change of the startup scene in New York: except for media and design industry, more data-driven technology is booming thanks to more engineering talents and rich financial sources.
Four events were arranged for the first day, including a tour around Industry City, a showcase of startups and two talks about entrepreneurship.
Following the one-hour tour was a nonprofit studio called Eyebeam, which provides sources for collaborative experiments with technology. Visitors crowded into a 50-square-foot room with several different sizes of 3D printers and sampled work like a miniature tower.
“Today’s events cater to young entrepreneurs, so Brooklyn is a great fit,” said Signorelli. “We’ve noticed more startups began to gather here due to the high-level rent and operation cost in Manhattan.”
Participants were divided into several groups and visited the homes of over 400 tenants spanning media, technology, food, fashion and light manufacturing. Li-lac Chocolate, a local food store, shows the assembly line of their products through store windows and provides free samples to try.
The spacious working space and great view of Manhattan in Industry City excited Jonatan Hakansson, a businessman from Sweden, who will launch his company in New York. He asked the event photographer to take pictures of him with the East River and Manhattan’s skyline in the background. “I came to Techweek to look for an office and talents for my own company,” Hakansson said. “This place is super nice.”
But the showcase today wasn’t “tech” enough to some participants. “It’s different than what I have expected.” said Paul Yuen, who works for a startup in the Financial District. “I was hoping they talked more about technology, but they mainly focus on the business.”
The same goes for Qianshang Chen. At 4 p.m., he hurried to his third event, which was 20 minutes away by train from Industry City. Instead of gathering people in one place, Techweek hosted events across the borough to give people more choices, causing some trouble for people like Chen who wanted to participate in several events.
Nevertheless, sitting in Cowork, another office building for startups in Brooklyn, Chen sipped a cider while listening to the talk on entrepreneur’s fears. “It’s the most interesting one I’ve joined so far,” he said. “The first two events are more like advertising themselves. But this one, I can really learn some experience.”
