What is the reason that of all the startups, innovations, inventions and great ideas that got to be during past fifteen years, next to none originate in New York and North-East in general ? I think that it's deeply rooted in the nature of New York's private wealth, the type of angel investor one is likely to find here - people of either real estate or Wall Street bottom fishers. People who only appreciate immediate financial gratification, who don't understand innovation and who aren't willing to take calculated risk that carries with it the unknown.

There are very few genuinly interesting startups that come from New York because NY investors only understand the language of swindle; every business transaction MUST have a losing side, a sucker - and since they don't see how they can screw the enterpreneur, they assume that they're being sucked in. People who are used to buying a box of rotten apples for a buck and reselling them for fifty cents a piece will never understand that there is such concept as creating wealth from nothing; that in order to make a billion it's not necessary to rip a million people off. It's the language of landlords, who will much rather get another slum and bleed some more crackheads to death, cut a corner with zoning and another with HUD - that seems so much more attractive then paying coders and researches for some pie in the sky that maybe will never materialize. As a result, even the little technological innovation that we do see here reeks of rip offs and has that slimy, suckery taste to it.

When will this city grow up ?

I met the owners of uncommongoods.com today and I met the owners of "the peanut butter company", "mathmadeeasy.com" & "property shark" last week at the big 880 networking event in Brooklyn last week.

There are start-ups here...

Didn't even start looking. Wrong coast.These are puny attempts. Property Shark - isn't that just what I wrote in the OP ? Where are the googles, ebays, youtubes, skypes - all those billion-dollar valued startups ? I have hard time to come up with a single name that makes a difference ...

PropertyShark rules.