For the past few months, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been running around New York City talking up its potential to become the best city in America for tech companies, and it seems to be working. A new study published by the Center for an Urban Future reports that New York's tech industry is leading the country in growth and inching up on Silicon Valley in terms of size, according to The New York Times' Patrick McGeehan. In total, 486 companies were founded between 2007 and 2011 in New York. During that same period, the number of venture capital deals in New York increased by 32 percent while they decreased by ten percent in Silicon Valley. “In 2006, I wouldn’t have put New York anywhere on the map [of leading tech hubs],” Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneurship expert, says in the report. “Now it is literally number two."

Bloomberg must be thrilled. The mayor's been incredibly visible in his efforts to support the growth of the tech industry. He's been spotted cutting ribbons at new office openings for Twitter and has even set up a new digital department within the city government to oversee the efforts. Perhaps most ambitious, however, was initiative to build a world class applied sciences campus in the city limits. Beating out schools like Stanford and Columbia, Cornell won the competition and will build quickly to begin classes in September. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have plenty of space in their offices to hire more people, and old school Silicon Valley types are impressed. "There is something going down in New York City below 14th Street and if you have not been paying attention, you should," AOL founder Steve Case wrote in a blog post. "My recent trips to New York have made it exactly clear what is happening here -- a startup revolution."

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Adam Clark Estes