New York City will hold its first-ever Tech Day on April 19 in the Flatiron District for startup tech companies. Organizers behind the expo hope to feature 200 New York City-based companies and invite thousands of attendees to raise publicity for the startups.
"There's a lot of startups in NYC that are just really heads down at their computers in their offices working their hearts out on their startups and they don't really get the exposure," NY Tech Day co-founder John Petersen said. "We want to make sure that we're giving them the platform to show off what they're working on and we think that this was an opportunity to show off to their peers and other startups."
NY Tech Day will be modeled after a science fair — each participating company will have a booth to showcase what they have to offer, ranging from product demonstrations to open job positions.
Following the expo, there will be an award ceremony where featured speakers will talk about the future of technology innovation in New York, and some companies will receive prizes.
In order to participate, each company has to abide by three loosely held criteria: It must be a startup pertain to technology and have its base in New York.
Attending the event will be free to the public through registration, but there is a limit to the number of attendees. Funding for this free event is made possible by the $385 registration fee required from participating startups.
Jon Chan, a senior at Gallatin School of Individualized Studies who has launched his own startups, said publicity is vital to the success of all companies.
"The really big differentiating factor [among all the different startups] is marketing or publicity or getting awareness about how your product is," he said. "If you want make it viral the only way you get people to do that is by having people to talk about it. Nobody will talk about your app if nobody knows about it."
