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New Technology Incubator Opens on Staten Island

By Nicholas Rizzi | May 2, 2016 6:06pm
 The College of Staten Island opened a Technology Incubator at 60 Bay St. in St. George.
The College of Staten Island opened a Technology Incubator at 60 Bay St. in St. George.
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ST. GEORGE — A new incubator to help technology startups and entrepreneurs get off the ground has opened in St. George

The College of Staten Island opened up the facility at 60 Bay St. last week. It's designed to offer new companies office space, workshops and classes.

"The idea of it is to provide resources for potential entrepreneurs and inventors in order to give them the necessary tools they need to develop new products and then take them to market," said Michael Kress, the college's vice president for economic development and technology systems.

"The idea is that we can provide a cost effective incubator solution, much cheaper than Manhattan or Brooklyn, and we're only a ferry boat ride away from Manhattan."

The college is also opening a satellite location nearby at 120 Stuyvesant Place, which will start classes in the fall. Kress said the incubator idea was partly born out of Borough President James Oddo's push to increase technology jobs in the borough.

"Deputy Mayor [Alicia] Glen loves to talk about a five borough tech ecosystem. We have to make sure that indeed it is five boroughs," Oddo said.

"I think this incubator will help foster that."

While not as large as in other parts of the city, the technology industry has started to move onto Staten Island recently.

In 2014, LaunchPads opened the neighborhood's first coworking space in the same building as CSI's Technology Incubator and expanded to double its size this year.

A second coworking space opened a few buildings down, with another one planned as the lead tenant in the under-construction Lighthouse Point development. The city put out a request for proposals to turn a former Department of Health building at 55 Stuyvesant Place into a media and technology hub.

"I think it's small relatively speaking to Manhattan, but we're going in the right direction," Oddo said.

"It's going to take time, but we are absolutely moving in the right direction."

Kress said the incubator would help attract more technology companies to the borough and the college was able to get plans off the ground after it got a $500,000 grant from the City Council.

"I'm proud to have been able to allocate funding for technology incubators throughout the outer boroughs,” Councilman James Vacca, chairman of the Council's Committee on Technology, said in a statement.

"Although the NYC technology ecosystem has typically been Manhattan-centric, we have tremendously talented people throughout the city and we have to continue to increase opportunities for those in the outer boroughs."

The incubator will offer several different tiers of membership for startups: one for "core-companies" that plan to be at the space five days a week and work on it as a full-time job, others that will just drop-in to do some work and attend workshops and a virtual group which will only use the space to attend workshops and have access to online resources, Kress said.

They'll also offer an accelerator program for about eight companies earlier on in their development that will go through regularly scheduled classes and activities at the space, Kress said.

Members in the program — which is expected to start in September — will have an advisory board of teacher and, local business owners and have access to interns that will help them get started, Kress said.