If you stand in Times Square for long enough you will see every person who visits and lives in New York City. The giant screens that fill the sides of every building blast out the message of every major brand on the planet, lighting the streets with so much light it is hard to tell the difference between night and day. It's a cross roads that, at some point, every person in the world with means to travel will eventually pass through.

 

This is a city that takes a licking and keeps on ticking. 9/11, Sandy, stock market crashes, and the Polar Vortex, and yet this is a place that doesn't slow down. As I begin Around the World in 80 Hours, they are awaiting another major winter storm. But there is no sign of people slowing down from the oncoming weather. So when it comes to technology, this is a place to see if an idea is something that will stick. Will it make life easier? Let's approach problems from a new perspective. In some way, it's the problems that have helped make NYC a technology center. 9/11 was what inspired the website meetup.com. Sandy has inspired a start up using car batteries to collectively provide emergency power.

 

NYC is the center of the world when it comes to finance, fashion, art, theater, architecture, media, and so on. As the dust settled on this city after 9/11 and the technology revolution begin to pick up speed, it started to become the a new center of technological innovation.