In New York, a Tech Incubator Becomes a Hub of Collaboration

 In 2008, before most people knew what a tweet was, Iain Dodsworth, a
programmer in London, cobbled together a software tool that reorganized
his jumbled Twitter  stream into neat columns. He named it TweetDeck.

Within a few months, it gained the kind of momentum most entrepreneurs
only dream about. Tech bloggers praised it, and users flocked to it.
Ashton Kutcher posted a video online showing him and his wife, Demi Moore,
using the service.

It wasn’t long before inquiries from investors began pouring in. “It was fairly scary,” he said. “I was a one-man company being thrown offers left, right and center from people I didn’t know.”

But then Mr. Dodsworth received a message from a company he did recognize: Betaworks, a New York City technology firm known for its eye for emerging Web services.

“Money is nice, but I actually needed expertise more than anything else,” he said. “Betaworks had a track record in this field back when no one had a track record in this field.”

In the two years since then, Betaworks has become prominent in New York technology circles for helping entrepreneurs fine-tune and expand their companies. The company has guided some entrepreneurs to lucrative sales and helped others raise cash from notable New York and Silicon Valley investment firms.

Such incubators are familiar in more established tech hubs. Silicon Valley, for example, has the technology incubator Y Combinator, and Pasadena has Idealab.

Source : NYT