Christie M Farriella/for New York Daily News
Coalition for Queens Founder Jukay Hsu in his office in Long Island City, Queens.
Add Queens to the list of locales seeking to become Silicon Valley East.
The state Regional Economic Development Council announced on Wednesday that it will give $125,000 to help create a tech incubator in Long Island City that will encourage innovative start-ups in the borough.
“We want to give people opportunities to learn about tech, to learn how to code and have the opportunity to create their companies,” said Jukay Hsu, president of Coalition for Queens, a local tech group that is spearheading the project.
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The incubator will provide a co-working space for roughly 40 entrepreneurs, Hsu said, as well offer classes and business support. He hopes to open sometime next year near Court Square.
The Coalition is partnering with Cornell NYC Tech and Queens College to tap the expertise of their computer science faculties and offer opportunities for students.
“There’s a lot of people out here looking to start up businesses,” said Bruce Jones, director of the Schutzman Center for Entrepreneurship at Queens College. “We need to capture it.”
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Developing the borough’s tech sector is a top priority, said Jack Friedman, executive director of the Queens Chamber of Commerce. “These are all high-paying jobs,” Friedman said. “They’re highly in demand.”
The incubator will benefit from Long Island City’s proximity to Manhattan — and to the Cornell-Technion Innovation Institute — but he hopes it will create new jobs in the borough and that start-ups will hire locally.
The neighborhood is just across the river from the tech campus that is slated to open in 2017 on Roosevelt Island.
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And it is beginning to become known as a burgeoning tech hub.
There are now dozens of tech companies in Queens, Hsu said. And they include the popular music streaming service Songza and online television company Aereo.
Incubators give entrepreneurs a place to test out ideas and network, said John Biggs, an editor at TechCrunch.com, which covers tech start-ups. “It is sort of a farm team for the big leagues,” he said.
But not all of the new businesses will stay local, he warned.
“Queens is not that far from Manhattan, but the mental distance is pretty far,” Biggs said. “You can incubate it in Queens and then move it into San Francisco or Manhattan.”
