You are here
Maria Teresa Cornetto
Content Written by Author
Manufacturing is alive in NYC, it’s smart and helping fight Covid-19. A new type of low-cost ventilator – priced at $3,300 vs standard ventilators, which typically cost more than $30,000 – has been developed in only one month thanks to two New York based entrepreneurs: Scott Cohen, co-founder of the technology center New Lab, which is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Marcel Botha, founder and CEO of 10XBeta, a “product development firm creating future-shifting products where speed-to-market is paramount,” which is in the New Lab.
Data are so important to understand and fight coronavirus. The NYC based startup Cuebiq is helping thanks to its “COVID-19 Mobility Insights“: “We understand this is a tough time for businesses as well as consumers. As part of our commitment to sharing data for the greater good, Cuebiq is providing free access to mobility and store visitation patterns during the COVID-19 crisis to help businesses as they look to adjust their strategies to meet this new and uncertain market.”
“With this single investment I’m done. As soon as I get my liquidity event I will party like there’s no tomorrow.” This is what Brian Cohen told us in 2012, when Alessandro and I interviewed him for “Tech and the City”. The investment was in Pinterest, the popular social network used to share photos, organized as collections of pictures on a pin board. Founded in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, by three youngsters under 30, and launched in March 2010, Pinterest has become one of the most visited sites. “I helped them start and guided them as a mentor to become what they are,” said Cohen, who is Chairman of the New York Angels since October 2011. He was one of the very first investors in Pinterest.
Now Pinterest is valued $12 billion or more and has just confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering that should happen in the next few months.
Another exit for a NYC startup: Authorea, co-founded by the Italian astrophysics Alberto Pepe, has been acquired by Atypon, the leading online scholarly publishing technology company. “I want to bring sexy back to science”, Pepe said when he launch his startup in 2012 with Nathan Jenkins. “Our mission – Pepe now explains – has been the same from day one: to improve the ways in which researchers write and publish their work. We’ve felt that science writing and publishing are not as modern as they could be, which is why we built Authorea, so that research documents can exist on an open, online, data-driven, interactive platform.”
Did you know that Amazon.com is Staten Island’s largest private sector employer? Since 2017 Jeff Bezos’s company operates a $100 million, 855,000-square-foot fulfillment center that employs a 4,500 full-time workforce. Now Amazon.com has leased a second warehouse in the borough for distribution purposes. The new 450,000-square-foot building will be on Staten Island’s West Shore in Matrix Global Logistics Park, next to the first one.
Last year, Amazon abandoned its plans to locate a second headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City after facing a backlash over a state and city package of up to $3 billion in financial incentives. Although the company pulled the plug on that project, it said it would continue to add jobs in New York City, writes the WSJ.