When Ashley Zegiestowsky, a computer sciences major at Butler University, was hunting for a technology job during her senior year, she took a close look at Silicon Valley, the promised land for young engineers eager to be part of the next big thing.
“It sounded really glamorous,” said Zegiestowsky, 22, who is from Nashville, Tennessee.
However, as she was considering her options, she discovered the Indy Tech Fellowship, a two-year paid internship program in Indianapolis that is backed by a growing tech community and angel investors.
Tech entrepreneurs in Indianapolis are eager to stanch a brain drain from their state’s universities and to lure out-of-state millennials to what they hope can be a prime Midwestern technology center. To that end, they formed the nonprofit TechPoint, which is developing programs like a short-term boot camp for new graduates and internships for college students.
Indianapolis, a city of about 850,000, has long been known as a manufacturing center where air conditioners, cars and car parts are made. It is home to the Indianapolis 500 and the drug giant Eli Lilly & Co. Political leaders have also made the city a sports center, moving the Colts American football team from Baltimore and persuading the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1999 to place its headquarters there.
However, as in many other areas, the city’s manufacturing presence has diminished. Helping to make up for the loss, the city has steadily, if quietly, become a center for new technology, particularly software. Notably, the cloud computing company Salesforce.com Inc, based in San Francisco, announced a plan last year to expand its 1,600-strong workforce in Indianapolis by another 800 employees.
Salesforce already had a toehold in Indianapolis with its 2013 acquisition of the software marketing company ExactTarget Inc for US$2.5 billion.
Armed with about US$18 million in state and local incentives, Salesforce said it would move this year into about 25,827m2 of office space in the 48-story Chase Tower.
The building, which is in the heart of downtown on Monument Square, is to be renamed Salesforce Tower.
Officials at Salesforce declined to be interviewed.
Local tech entrepreneurs and real-estate specialists hope the company’s expansion will help attract more technology companies.
Last year, Indianapolis companies said they planned to create 3,700 new jobs, about two-thirds of those in the tech sector, said Ian Nicolini, vice president of Develop Indy, an economic development agency.
That share is up from about one-fifth of 4,000 new jobs that were planned in 2015, he said.
“It is a city where you have a lot of access to talent,” he said. “It’s easy to find a mentor here.”
Salesforce joins early adopters of Indianapolis such as Angie’s List, the online site for local services and contractors, which moved to Indianapolis from Columbus, Ohio, in 1996, and ExactTarget.
Another Indianapolis company in the city’s tech vanguard was Interactive Intelligence Inc, founded in 1994. It developed call center software and was acquired last month for US$1.4 billion by Genysys Inc, based in Daly City, south of San Francisco.
Officials at Genysys said at the time they still planned a large presence in Indianapolis.
Several start-ups were formed by ExactTarget’s principals after the company was acquired by Salesforce in 2013.
ExactTarget’s founder Scott Dorsey left Salesforce, but stayed in Indianapolis and formed High Alpha, a venture capital firm that provides funds, training and networking opportunities for tech start-ups in Indiana.
He said he stayed in the state because he likes the lifestyle and the workforce. “People are nice, very hard-working and very loyal.”
Still, a cloud hovers over Indiana’s tech landscape. Then-governor of Indiana US Vice President Mike Pence ruffled the tech industry in 2015 when he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which allows businesses to cite religion as a reason to refuse to serve customers — a move that critics said was aimed at the gay community.
Several tech leaders immediately protested. A letter-writing campaign led by a group of tech executives, including Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, urged Pence to stand down, saying the legislation was bad for business, condoned illegal discrimination and muddied the separation between church and state.
Pence said it was not discrimination, but rather a way to ensure religious freedom.
“Technology professionals are by their nature very progressive, and backward-looking legislation such as the RFRA will make the state of Indiana a less appealing place to live and work,” the letter said.
The legislation has had a chilling effect, said David Johnson, president and chief executive of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership and head of BioCrossroads, a new organization whose goal is to build on Indiana’s agriculture sector and mesh it with life sciences and the tech sector.
“Some companies have had a hard time hiring people,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts