New Jersey Tech Weekly’s Top Five Stories of 2011

(Philly Tech News was pleased to form a working alliance with New Jersey Tech Weekly, a website that started up in 2011. Here, its Publisher & Editor Esther Surden shares some inaugural year highlights and its top stories for 2011.)



Esther Surden
Publisher & Editor, New Jersey Tech Weekly

This year has been an exciting one for New Jersey Tech Weekly. After months of preparation, our website finally launched in July. We have been reporting stories from all over N.J. ever since, thanks to the hard work of South Jersey web designer Robert Ortiz, copyeditor Phyliss Greenberg and freelance contributor Alan Skontra and an alliance with Philly Tech News. We’d like to thank the early industry supporters who helped out with our first stories, giving us access to their CEOs and their conferences and events with no strings attached.

We started with nothing but an abiding interest in N.J. tech in all its forms and are pleased to report we are now receiving more than 2,500 unique hits per month. We know that sounds like nothing compared to most websites, but we are still building momentum. We hope to report even greater numbers as word of our web publication spreads further throughout the N.J. tech crowd. In the meantime, we are delighted to present a roundup of the five 2011 stories that attracted the most attention.

By far, our top story was:
Innovation Key to Cognizant Success Says D’Souza at FDU Rothman Event. (This story received more than 3,000 hits on its own.)
Francisco D’Souza, president and CEO of Teaneck-based Cognizant Technology Solutions, recently discussed major innovations that have caused his company to thrive. Chief among them: an innovative business model and investment in developing Cognizant 2.0, a real-time operating system D’Souza says is the “glue” holding his knowledge-based workforce together.
Followed by:

2. SHI’s Thai Lee says Company is in NJ to Stay
We continue our series on the state of the tech business climate in N.J., interviewing, via email, Thai Lee, CEO and president of SHI International Corp.
SHI is a fixture in N.J. The privately held, woman-run IT solutions provider has been located here for 23 years, growing from a $1 million regional value-added reseller (VAR) to a $3 billion global technology company. SHI has recently begun making investments that will allow it to shift to the lucrative cloud computing business.

3. Converge NJ, Home to Many Tech Groups, to Close
Converge NJ, the coworking space in Union, N.J., will close its doors as of October 15. The three-year-old venture is pulling the plug for a number of reasons, among them that people have simply lost interest, founder Steve Guberman said in a post on the Converge home page. The coworking space, open for 14 months, had not yet become sustainable, he added.

4. NJ’s First Tech Accelerator to Focus on Enterprise
Last week N.J.-based investor and software engineer Ken Kay, who is well-known in the angel community as a founder of Jumpstart NJ Angel Network, announced he is launching N.J.’s first tech startup accelerator, Ecelerator. It will be located somewhere in the Newark or Hoboken area. The twist: Ecelerator will focus on business-to-business (B2B) startup opportunities.

5. Asbury Agile Conference Brings New York Tech Scene to Jersey Shore
At the Asbury Agile conference last week about 100 web “makers and doers,” mostly from the Jersey Shore area, listened to a full agenda of useful talks aimed at honing best practices and showcasing local talent.



Esther Surden is Publisher and Editor of   New Jersey Tech Weekly , and a contributor to Philly Tech News. This article originally appeared in New Jersey Tech Weekly.