2014 should go down in Brooklyn History as the year that it became a home for household names. Etsy and Makerbot were here. Kickstarter landed here early in the year and Livestream came a bit later. Both took over large spaces. We called it the new Tech Triangle. Meanwhile, Etsy very publicly signed a ten-year lease in the coming Dumbo Heights developments.
Technical.ly’s national editorial team looked across our markets and discussed some of what we felt like were the biggest stories here, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Delaware and D.C. on the final 2014 edition of the Technical.ly Podcast.
As our founder, Christopher Wink, points out in the conversation, most of the talk is about entrepreneurship. Maybe that’s because there is so much money sloshing around in entrepreneurship that it’s hard to notice anything else. If you think we’re missing big tech news in government, civic or art space, let us know in the comments.
Some other Brooklyn-relevant highlights from our conversation: GamerGate’s Midwood hub, J.B. Michel’s artwork and the ongoing issue of net neutrality, which a few New York companies have really taken a lead on moving the pro-neutrality fight to the next level.
- Download or listen at the bottom of this post, or subscribe to the Technical.ly Podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.
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We’re going to do something soon on what we think some of the biggest topics in Brooklyn were this year.
In the meantime, check out our most popular stories of the year (which isn’t quite the same thing):
- The Adams brothers behind ‘Dwarf Fortress’ game are weirdly brilliant. They showed up at the TWO5SIX conference and were a lot of fun in the most chill way possible.
- Brooklyn real estate is out of step with tech needs. Space here just isn’t as flexible or as wired as it needs to be to hold onto scalable tech companies. The more this reporter covers Brooklyn, the truer this appears to be.
- MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis moves into new innovation role at Stratasys. The founder is no longer CEO at the leader in consumer 3D printing.
- Debut of the new bike from Pensa: the Merge. It didn’t end up winning the contest, but it’s still really cool to look at. The company has made noises since about rolling out parts of the concept as standalone products.
- Here’s a list of every coworking space we know of. This post has proven to be evergreen, so we keep updating it. We plan to continue to do so.
- Big Data the band is ‘complicated,’ like online privacy: musician Alan Wilkis. Watch the video in this post, but don’t watch it at work. You have to make it all the way to the end.
- Netflix goes inside MakerBot with original doc: ‘Print the Legend.’ If you’re into tech entrepreneurship, this is a really great film.
- The 10 biggest tech companies in Brooklyn. Meta.
- How I Work: NPR Creative Director Liz Danzico. A little story with some great big points.
- Susty Party passes on ‘Shark Tank’ investment, gets $6.25M valuation. The sustainable party goods makers drove so much search traffic to our site that two other stories about them could also be on this list (this one is fun). Traditional media can still drive a lot of interest, and theirs is a great story.
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