New York Isn't Silicon Valley. Thats Why They Like It.

THE two dozen or so people arranged around wooden tables, warming their hands and bellies with steaming mugs of coffee and plates of homemade biscuits, looked like just another Sunday brunch set in New York. But members of this group had braved knee-deep snow to gab about cutting-edge ideas and as they introduced themselves the roll call sounded like a Whos Who of digital start-ups: Foursquare, Hot Potato, Six Apart, Flickr, Flavorpill, Trust Art, Vimeo.

The New York Tech Meet-Up is held monthly, and as many as 700 people attend, a sign of the revival of tech businesses in the city. “There's a lot happening right here in our ZIP code," said Dorothy McGivney, a former Google employee who is a co-coordinator of this group, the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, and runs Jauntsetter, a travel site for women. Like the others, she had come to the brunch to help foster the growth of her little local community of entrepreneurs.

The group had its inaugural meeting in January and is among a growing cluster of informal meet-and-greets for the local technology and media industries. A recent installment of another monthly event, called the New York Tech Meet-Up and held in Chelsea, drew 700 tech enthusiasts.

The buzz surrounding these gatherings is just the latest sign that a decade after the dot-com bust, the Internet economy in New York is springing back to life.

After the crash, New York was a complete wasteland of dead funds and companies, says Charlie ODonnell, an entrepreneur in residence at First Round Capital, which hired him recently when it opened a new office in Manhattan.

“Since then, the community has gelled," Mr. ODonnell says. “We now we have a critical mass of support and financing."

New Yorks flashier industries, including big media and Wall Street, have long dwarfed the tech sector here. And the dot-com implosion only reinforced that reality. The fledgling tech scene that was just beginning to hum in the late 1990s flatlined as dozens of Internet companies folded, pink slips replaced party invitations and venture capital firms took their investments elsewhere.

“During the dot-com boom, venture capitalists were just throwing dollars at every Internet idea on every street corner," says Owen Davis, a serial entrepreneur and managing director of NYC Seed, an early-stage technology investment fund. There was little critical judgment about business models and ideas.

“Since then," Mr. Davis says, “the New York technology industry has been steadily coming back on line and has managed to accelerate despite the economic turmoil besieging other industries."

“Helping to give New York an edge is a broader shift in the types of innovation that are gathering speed in the technology industry," says Dale Jorgenson, an economics professor at Harvard. “The infrastructure for mobile communications and computing is now all in place, he says, so the next opportunities lie in developing new services using that technology. “

“They will be behind the next boom in the industry," he says.