New York is hoping a nanobiz hub
will keep companies close to home

NEW YORK, Sept. 19, 2002 — The NanoBusiness Alliance (NBA) launched its New York State Hub initiative in Manhattan yesterday, the first of several regional organizations it hopes will spur small tech growth.

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NBA founders Nathan Tinker and Mark Modzelewski told more than 40 people from small tech companies, universities, state agencies and investment firms that the hub’s goals were to “to fuel understanding, discussion, planning, and implementation for area specific nanobusiness development.”

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Tinker and Modzelewski said the hub could advance nanotech in New York by helping startups find legal or consulting services such as those offered by the event’s sponsor, Deloitte & Touche.

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They said the hub will also help fledgling companies find funding sources such as the Angel Investor Network the NBA is working to build. It will also bring together other development agencies such as the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR), and partners such as Albany Nanotech.

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Indeed, with strong backing from state government, IBM and chip consortium International SEMATECH, Albany NanoTech is shaping up into the nexus of small tech in the Empire State. In fact, the hub will have offices in Albany NanoTech’s expanding complex rather than in New York City.

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“Albany NanoTech is taking shape around a fundamentally different paradigm” than a conventional university research center, said Michael Fancher, director of economic outreach. The new model: to help individual companies and the emerging small tech sector reduce the time and cost of commercializing nanotechnology.

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“We call that technology acceleration, and that’s where the NanoBusiness Alliance’s hub comes in,” he said. “They can provide the kind of market development support new companies in a new industry will need.”

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Eric Sun, founder of the New York University spinoff Nanocs International Inc., said that until recently New York was not the right place to launch his company. Sun noted that his NYU colleague Stephen Wilson, founder of C Sixty Inc., which develops nanoscale fullerenes for drug delivery, recently moved his company from New York to Texas, where funding and real estate were more readily available.

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The good news: Sun said that he now has access to facilities at Albany NanoTech and his company is closer to finding funds to move ahead with research on using carbon nanotubes in flat panel and field emission displays.

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