Hack for Change: Miami, part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, is taking place on June 1st and 2nd. The event is focused on using various government datasets to develop new solutions to some of the country’s oldest problems.

HackaNUI, the natural user interface hackathon sponsored by Microsoft, is taking place June 1st at the Caffeine Spaces in Boca. Over 150 attendees are going to be creating apps for Kinect and several other natural user interface platforms. The SFL Startup Bus will be taking attendees from Miami to the hackathon, sign up for the free networking-on-wheels bus ride.

Several South Florida startups presented at the Florida Venture Forum in Orlando last Wednesday:  Arctico, Bookigee, LearnerNation!, Maxx Technologies, spendLO, and 71lbs.com. More details via The Starting Gate.

Pabla Ayala of pFunk Media has a guest post on The Starting Gate about the recent TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, along with call to action to appy for the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco and TechCrunch Disrupt Europe: Berlin.

TigerDirect.com, The LAB Miami and Refresh Miami are bringing a South Florida Technology Summit to South Florida next week. It will include workshops, tutorials, keynotes and exhibits by top companies such as  Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Dell, Samsung, LG, Toshiba and Canon. The free event will be held from 1p to 9:30p on May 22 at the Miami Airport Convention Center. Tickets are available via fltechsummit.eventbrite.com.

Gui.de had another great week - their COO Leslie Bradshaw was voted one of the top 100 most creative people in business by Forbes, and then the Google TV team showed off the Gui.de app at their Google IO presentation.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k or email andrej@thestartupdigest.com.

Most Interesting Events This Week

Lock it Down with Cryptography (free)

Monday, May 20 @ 7:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

Every networked application has to deal with security threats, and the code in your application might not always be able to deal with them: someone running off with hardware, a malicious DBA, or a zero-day exploit, for example. Cryptography helps in these situations, and is frequently required in a compliance audit too. Protect your data with exciting acronyms such as HTTPS, GPG, AES, RSA, ECC, DSA, and more; learn about the quick and easy ways to get it right, the difficult ways to get it wrong, and the fantastically difficult ways to get it right that particularly esoteric situations will demand.

Code and Coffee in Miami

Tuesday, May 21 @ 7:00AM through 9:00AM | Panther Coffee, 2390 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL

“Code & Coffee is an informal get together to write some code in the morning before the real job kicks in.

RefreshMiami: Demo Night (free)

Wednesday, May 22 @ 7:30PM | Miami Museum of Science, 3280 South Miami Avenue, Miami, FL

Demo night consists of 5 minute pitches followed by 5 minute QA. Judges will be present, and the winning team will get some awesome prizes (yet to be determined).

Beer and Tell Palm Beach: Demo Night (free)

Thursday, May 23 @ 8:00PM | Bar Louie, 200 Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, FL

The focus of this meetup will be demo night. Anyone who has an interesting project or tech demo is invited to bring it to Bar Louie on Clematis (they’ll be on the 2nd floor), where they will set up and talk tech over beer. They will also be announcing the winner of the Palm Beach LED logo contest!

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Open Hack Miami (free)

Monday, May 27 @ 7:30PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything.

THE BASICS - You can hack on anything! Any language, framework, public/open-source, personal, etc. Skill level doesn’t matter. Whether you’re working on Hello World or on increasing your wizarding level. You don’t have to have an idea to hack on! You’re more than welcome to come just to pair with someone.

Micro Venture Capital Club Monthly “Shark Tank” Meeting - May (Miami Beach) ($10)

Monday, May 27 @ 8:00PM | Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Board Room, 1920 Meridian Ave, Miami Beach, FL

The goal of the Micro Venture Capital Club is to link entrepreneurs with great ideas with investors. The event is a “Shark Tank” type meeting where the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors.

Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Thursday, May 30 @ 5:30PM | Palm Beach State Collete, Duncan Theatre, 4200 Congress Avenue, Lake Worth, FL

Learn how Sculley, former leader of Apple and Pepsi, is mentoring South Florida entrepreneurs to create hundreds of STEAM jobs.

Hack for Change: Miami (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:30AM through Sunday, June 2 @ 7:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127

Hack For Change: Miami is helping build a community of civic innovation in South Florida. A wide variety of individuals and organizations have come together to foster of a culture of open government, civic engagement, sustainability and technology for good.

HackaNUI (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:00AM | Caffeine Spaces, 3701 FAU Boulevard, #210, Boca Raton, FL

HackaNUI is the first of its kind Hackathon dedicated to creating applications centered around Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies. HackaNUI is the creation of mLabs and LiveMetrics.

HTCdev Android Workshop: Coding with the HTC One (free)

Thursday, June 6 @ 7:00PM |The Launch Pad at Terremark, 50 NE 9th ST, Miami, FL

In this workshop by Lance Nanek, Developer Evangelist at HTC, you will learn how to write code that takes advantage of the special features of the HTC One superphone. The HTC One supports writing apps that use the IR emitter to control TVs and other devices. It also supports Bluetooth Low Energy, a new standard that allows devices that communicate with the phone to last 6 months to a year on a single coin cell battery. Come learn how to program for these advanced features! Bring a laptop and we’ll help you get a development environment up and running on your computer.

ProductCamp South Florida (free)

Saturday, June 8 @ 8:00AM | Citrix, 851 W Cypress Creek Rd, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309

ProductCamp South Florida is the only full-day unconference for product managers and product marketers in the region. It’s the premier event for product professionals to find out the latest developments, discover new ideas, and network with their peers.

GeekTank ($15)

Tuesday, June 18 @ 6:30PM | Citrix 851 W Cypress Creek Rd Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309

MIT South Florida & MIF have teamed up to offer a lucky winner or winners the opportunity to compete for a $20,000 term sheet from MIF in front of the GeekTank panel for one night only.

If you are a technology startup building a SaaS product, gaming app, mobile app, software product, and/or a social networking product please submit your business plan to MIF via: http://gust.com/angel-group/miami-innovation-fund

Even if you are not a startup, this is a unique opportunity for you to learn and gain first hand insights into how professional angel investors make the decision to put their money at risk.

Miami Nice - SFO transplant’s perspective on our community

I love this article by Brian Brackeen of Kairos, San Francisco transplants who were blown away by our “Miami Nice” - which is what Brian calls the welcoming and helpful attitude he experienced from our startup ecosystem.

XDA:DevCon Mobile conference launching in Miami

Big news - XDA, one of the best-known communities of mobile developers, is launching a new conference called XDA:DevCon. The great news: they chose Miami as their inaugural destination. The conference will be in August. If you jump on the early bird tickets now, they are 50% off. You can take another 15% off early bird price with the code “DEVCON-MIASTARTUP-EB15”.

The Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge Winners announced

The winners of the 15th annual Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge Winners have been announced.

AT&T Miami Legal Hackathon - Miami’s 1st customer/developer collaboration event

The Miami Legal Hackathon - Miami’s 1st customer/developer collaboration event organized by the AT&T Developer Program, Lalchandani Simon PL, Pipeline Brickel, and New Frontier Nomads, in coordination with the Miami Lean Startup Circle and the South Florida Android Developers took place last weekend. 200 people attended, including 30 attorneys who provided input and feedback to the developers, and the collaboration produced 15 competing apps aiming to solve common problems legal professionals face on a daily basis. The Starting Gate has a post on the winning teams. (disclaimer: I am one of the organizers)

Geopon goes to TechCrunch Disrupt, covered in Nibletz

Geopon - a Miami-based mobile advertising platform, presented in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, and, while there, they were interviewed by Nibletz.  

Miami Finance Forum panel: Meet Miami’s Newest Investor Groups

If you are interested in the growing tech investment community in Miami, you should check out this Starting Gate post about the recent Miami Finance Forum panel titled Meet Miami’s Newest Investor Groups.

Miami-based Healthcare seed accelerator announces first class

Project Lift, the new Miami-based, UMLSTP-hosted seed accelerator targeting healthcare-focused startups, announced their first class of companies.

The LAB Miami workshop: Pitching Non-Investors

The LAB Miami is hosting a workshop by Shaun Abrahamson, an early stage investor, advisor, and author, on Pitching Non-Investors. Only 20 tickets total - so hustle!

Ft Lauderdale-based clearCI featured in StartupBeat

clearCI, the Ft Lauderdale-based compeitive intelligence SaaS platform, was featured in StartupBeat.

Cohealo expanding nationally, hiring

Cohealo, essentially a medical device transportation fleet which enables hospitals to share underutilized equipment and instrumentation between their various locations , is expanding their Sales, Operations, and Tech teams in all corners of the country.

Titles inside the Miami StartupDigest editorial

Did you notice the new titles? Does this help you scan the content? Tweet or email me your opinion.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k or email andrej@thestartupdigest.com.

Most Interesting Events This Week

Open Hack Miami (free)

Monday, May 13 @ 7:30PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything.

THE BASICS - You can hack on anything! Any language, framework, public/open-source, personal, etc. Skill level doesn’t matter. Whether you’re working on Hello World or on increasing your wizarding level. You don’t have to have an idea to hack on! You’re more than welcome to come just to pair with someone.

Micro Venture Capital Club Monthly “Shark Tank” Meeting - May (Broward) ($10)

Monday, May 13 @ 7:30PM | Nova Southeastern University, Carl DeSantis Bldg., 3301 College Avenue, Davie, FL

The goal of the Micro Venture Capital Club is to link entrepreneurs with great ideas with investors. The event is a “Shark Tank” type meeting where the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors.

Code and Coffee in Miami

Tuesday, May 14 @ 7:00AM through 9:00AM | Panther Coffee, 2390 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL

“Code & Coffee is an informal get together to write some code in the morning before the real job kicks in.

Google I/O Extended Viewing Party

Wednesday, May 15 @ 12:00PM through Friday, May 17 @ 6:45PM | Planet Linux Cafe, 1430 Ponce De Leon Blvd., Coral Gables, FL

Google I/O Extended lets you experience the magic and innovation of Google I/O remotely. Part viewing experience and part community building.

Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference ($1,495 - $1,695)

Wednesday, May 15 @ 9:00AM through Thursday, May 16 @ 10:00M| The James South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Interactivity Digital promises to be a cutting-edge digital marketing conference and will feature industry-leading keynote speakers and informative panel discussions about such topics as search engine optimization, pay-per click marketing, email marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization and social media. The event will be ultra exclusive— only 150 tickets will be sold to ensure that sessions remain intimate and meaningful and that the networking opportunities remain plentiful.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

RefreshMiami: Demo Night (free)

Wednesday, May 22 @ 7:30PM | Miami Museum of Science, 3280 South Miami Avenue, Miami, FL

Demo night consists of 5 minute pitches followed by 5 minute QA. Judges will be present, and the winning team will get some awesome prizes (yet to be determined).

Micro Venture Capital Club Monthly “Shark Tank” Meeting - May (Miami Beach) ($10)

Monday, May 27 @ 8:00PM | Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Board Room, 1920 Meridian Ave, Miami Beach, FL

The goal of the Micro Venture Capital Club is to link entrepreneurs with great ideas with investors. The event is a “Shark Tank” type meeting where the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors.

Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Thursday, May 30 @ 5:30PM | Palm Beach State Collete, Duncan Theatre, 4200 Congress Avenue, Lake Worth, FL

Learn how Sculley, former leader of Apple and Pepsi, is mentoring South Florida entrepreneurs to create hundreds of STEAM jobs.

Hack for Change: Miami (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:30AM through Sunday, June 2 @ 7:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127

Hack For Change: Miami is helping build a community of civic innovation in South Florida. A wide variety of individuals and organizations have come together to foster of a culture of open government, civic engagement, sustainability and technology for good.

HackaNUI (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:00AM | Caffeine Spaces, 3701 FAU Boulevard, #210, Boca Raton, FL

HackaNUI is the first of its kind Hackathon dedicated to creating applications centered around Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies. HackaNUI is the creation of mLabs and LiveMetrics.

HTCdev Workshop: Coding with the HTC One (free)

Thursday, June 6 @ 7:00PM |The Launch Pad at Terremark, 50 NE 9th ST, Miami, FL

In this workshop by Lance Nanek, Developer Evangelist at HTC, you will learn how to write code that takes advantage of the special features of the HTC One superphone. The HTC One supports writing apps that use the IR emitter to control TVs and other devices. It also supports Bluetooth Low Energy, a new standard that allows devices that communicate with the phone to last 6 months to a year on a single coin cell battery. Come learn how to program for these advanced features! Bring a laptop and we’ll help you get a development environment up and running on your computer.

ProductCamp South Florida (free)

Saturday, June 8 @ 8:00AM | Citrix, 851 W Cypress Creek Rd, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309

ProductCamp South Florida is the only full-day unconference for product managers and product marketers in the region. It’s the premier event for product professionals to find out the latest developments, discover new ideas, and network with their peers.

SFL entrepreneur Stonly Baptiste created a tool called Retwact, which lets you retract an erroneous tweet, and automatically encourages your retweeters to spread the retraction. The tool has struck a chord and gotten a ton of press, including The Daily Dot, GQ magazine, The Atlantic, The Next Web, MSN and Mashable.

Boca-based Linguasys has moved out of the Technology Business Incubator and announced a 1M round from several investors, including Mark Cuban.

Miami-based ContactUs.com raised a $400K seed round led by Miami-based PeopleFund.

The Group of Groups, a loose affiliation of various group leaders, financial institutions, university and government representatives, and other “leaders”, has issued a call for new members.

Michael Moritz, the Chairman of Sequoia Capital posted an article about the New World Symphony titled The Miami Startup Striking the Right Note.

The Starting Gate has posted a summary of the last week’s Rokk Miami event with Brad Feld.

Gui.de was at The Next Web Europe and they won best pitch and were asked to pitch on the main stage - see the video here.

RefreshMiami’s next event will be a Demo Night on 5/22, a series of 5 minute pitches, followed by judging and prizes. Apply to pitch your startup here.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k or email andrej@thestartupdigest.com.

Most Interesting Events This Week

Open Hack Miami (free)

Monday, May 6 @ 7:30PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything.

THE BASICS - You can hack on anything! Any language, framework, public/open-source, personal, etc. Skill level doesn’t matter. Whether you’re working on Hello World or on increasing your wizarding level. You don’t have to have an idea to hack on! You’re more than welcome to come just to pair with someone.

Startup Delray: La vida LOCAL!

Monday, May 6 @ 6:30pm | 100 West Atlantic Avenue Delray Beach, 33444

Learn about the community feedback for Startup Delray’s transformation of space at The Library Delray Beach from stacks of books to coworking and makersapce. We’ll include a feature on 5 LOCAL Delray Beach startups.

Grow Lean with Digital Marketing: How to Find and Retain Customers Online ($35-$50)

Monday, May 6 @ 6:30PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127

Workshop by Katya Constantine, a seasoned marketer with over 10 years of online marketing experience. She has developed a well-credentialized background in marketing for large online brands, such as Expedia and Amazon, having significantly increased online performance at several large web properties. Katya also has a deep background in email and cross-channel marketing.

In this workshop, you will learn:

• How to optimize your costs when it comes to acquiring customers
• Deep dive into a few of the channels
• Learn how to track and measure performance

Code and Coffee in Miami

Tuesday, May 7 @ 7:00AM through 9:00AM | Panther Coffee, 2390 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL

“Code & Coffee is an informal get together to write some code in the morning before the real job kicks in.

Co-Founders Wanted of Miami ($10)

Thursday, May 9 @ 6:30PM | 1010 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, FL

Co-Founders Wanted is an opportunity to find a co-founder for your business, or to help you find a business to join. Brought to you by CoFoundersLab, come meet other aspiring entrepreneurs and build the team to make your business happen. Start networking now by creating a free profile at CoFoundersLab.com!

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Micro Venture Capital Club Monthly “Shark Tank” Meeting - May (Broward) ($10)

Monday, May 13 @ 7:30PM | Nova Southeastern University, Carl DeSantis Bldg., 3301 College Avenue, Davie, FL

The goal of the Micro Venture Capital Club is to link entrepreneurs with great ideas with investors. The event is a “Shark Tank” type meeting where the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors.

Google I/O Extended Viewing Party

Wednesday, May 15 @ 12:00PM through Friday, May 17 @ 6:45PM | Planet Linux Cafe, 1430 Ponce De Leon Blvd., Coral Gables, FL

Google I/O Extended lets you experience the magic and innovation of Google I/O remotely. Part viewing experience and part community building.

Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference ($1,495 - $1,695)

Wednesday, May 15 @ 9:00AM through Thursday, May 16 @ 10:00M| The James South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Interactivity Digital promises to be a cutting-edge digital marketing conference and will feature industry-leading keynote speakers and informative panel discussions about such topics as search engine optimization, pay-per click marketing, email marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization and social media. The event will be ultra exclusive— only 150 tickets will be sold to ensure that sessions remain intimate and meaningful and that the networking opportunities remain plentiful.

RefreshMiami: Demo Night (free)

Wednesday, May 22 @ 7:30PM | Miami Museum of Science, 3280 South Miami Avenue, Miami, FL

Demo night consists of 5 minute pitches followed by 5 minute QA. Judges will be present, and the winning team will get some awesome prizes (yet to be determined).

Micro Venture Capital Club Monthly “Shark Tank” Meeting - May (Miami Beach) ($10)

Monday, May 27 @ 8:00PM | Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Board Room, 1920 Meridian Ave, Miami Beach, FL

The goal of the Micro Venture Capital Club is to link entrepreneurs with great ideas with investors. The event is a “Shark Tank” type meeting where the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors.

Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Thursday, May 30 @ 5:30PM | Palm Beach State Collete, Duncan Theatre, 4200 Congress Avenue, Lake Worth, FL

Learn how Sculley, former leader of Apple and Pepsi, is mentoring South Florida entrepreneurs to create hundreds of STEAM jobs.

Hack for Change: Miami (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:30AM through Sunday, June 2 @ 7:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127

Hack For Change: Miami is helping build a community of civic innovation in South Florida. A wide variety of individuals and organizations have come together to foster of a culture of open government, civic engagement, sustainability and technology for good.

HackaNUI (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:00AM | Caffeine Spaces, 3701 FAU Boulevard, #210, Boca Raton, FL

HackaNUI is the first of its kind Hackathon dedicated to creating applications centered around Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies. HackaNUI is the creation of mLabs and LiveMetrics.

HTCdev Android Workshop: Coding with the HTC One (free)

Thursday, June 6 @ 7:00PM |The Launch Pad at Terremark, 50 NE 9th ST, Miami, FL

In this workshop by Lance Nanek, Developer Evangelist at HTC, you will learn how to write code that takes advantage of the special features of the HTC One superphone. The HTC One supports writing apps that use the IR emitter to control TVs and other devices. It also supports Bluetooth Low Energy, a new standard that allows devices that communicate with the phone to last 6 months to a year on a single coin cell battery. Come learn how to program for these advanced features! Bring a laptop and we’ll help you get a development environment up and running on your computer.

ProductCamp South Florida (free)

Saturday, June 8 @ 8:00AM | Citrix, 851 W Cypress Creek Rd, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309

ProductCamp South Florida is the only full-day unconference for product managers and product marketers in the region. It’s the premier event for product professionals to find out the latest developments, discover new ideas, and network with their peers.

Fast Company magazine has picked Florida as the number 1 state in the US for innovation. They cite several reasons for their decision, including our 2nd-highest rate of new business production in the US, our high position on the Fundable’s VC rankings, the finding by Startup America which says we are the #3 state for annual revenue per startup ($1.2M), and our strong collaborative entrepreneurial community.

As if to illustrate some of the momentum behind that last point, we have the news on OneSpark, the in-person crowdfunding megafestival which recently took place in Jacksonville, attended by an estimated 130K people. Detailed highlights on their blog.

Last week, the Miami Herald published an article from Manny Medina, in which he, in what is likely to be a controversial statement, proclaims that Miami does NOT have tech, and likens our entrepreneurial community to the pre-Art Basel days of the local arts community. He briefly touches on a few areas that need to improve – education, entrepreneur support services, institutional funding, and employee retention, before he goes on to say that he will “put his money where his mouth is” – via the Technology Foundation of the Americas and their primary focus – the eMerge Americas technology conference, an Art Basel for the tech community, if you will. I’m curious to see how this will pan put, and I am encouraged by some of the TFAs early efforts leading up to the inaugural 2014 conference.

Miami Herald also published an article on crowdfunding with a local flavor, with a feature on several local crowdfunded projects and crowdfunding platforms, including the recent wildly successful designed by m campaign (they missed Flomio’s blown out campaign), as well as Synergist, the new crowdfunding platform for social entrepreneurs. They also mention an interesting Miami-based platform for crowdfunding our less worldchanging consumer desires - Danggle, a web app that allows you to ask your friends to help you raise money to buy the things you want, like jewelry, purses, a gadget or a vacation

Speaking of Synergist - the Boca-based crowdfunding and social networking platform for social entrepreneurs – they were just covered by TechCrunch.

And speaking of TechCrunch, several Miami-based companies will be at TechCrunch Disrupt. Pfunk media will be attending as the Miami Herald correspondent, and covering all of the action, which you can follow via @pfunkmedia, @pfunkfsu and @cfunk305.

Will Weinraub and Alfonso Martinez of Miami-based LiveNinja will also be at Disrupt, as part of Disrupt’s Startup Alley.

There is an interesting event with Brad Feld taking place at the LAB Miami today – it’s a 2 part, day long event, put together by Rokk3rLabs and the Knight Foundation, and it starts with an invite-only gathering tasked with coming up with strategies in various areas such as angel and later-stage funding, branding Miami, and attracting and retaining tech talent, followed by a public presentation and book signing.

Miami-based Gui.de has been covered by The Next Web – Freddie Laker makes a few interesting predictions regarding how the way we consume TV content will change over the next 5 years.

The Legal Hackathon Miami – an event that aims to bring together the customer (in this case the Miami legal community) and the makers (developers, designers, marketers and other entrepreneurs) in order to find products worth building – is coming up in less than 2 weeks. The Starting Gate has the details on the event. (disclaimer – my company is co-organizing)

Startup Delray has an event on May 6 called Living la Vida Local. They will be presenting the community feedback on the planned transformation of The Library Delray Beach into a coworking and maker space, as well as feature 5 local startups. The South Florida Startup Bus will be taking the Miami crowd to the event, this time the ride is sponsored and therefore free - hop on for some networking on wheels on your way to the event.

Boca-based GorillaDesk launched last week - a software for service businesses which simplifies and automates client management, job scheduling, and invoicing.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k or email andrej@thestartupdigest.com.

Most Interesting Events This Week

RokkMiami - Brad Feld Presentation (free)

Monday, April 29 @4PM - 5:30PM | The LAB Miami 400 Northwest 24th Street Miami, FL 33127

Brad Feld will be giving a special presentation on building and growing the Miami startup community. First 200 rsvps will get a free copy of his book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, courtesy of Rokk3rLabs and Knight Foundation. The books will be autographed.

Open Hack Miami (free)

Monday, April 29 @ 7:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything.

THE BASICS - You can hack on anything! Any language, framework, public/open-source, personal, etc. Skill level doesn’t matter. Whether you’re working on Hello World or on increasing your wizarding level. You don’t have to have an idea to hack on! You’re more than welcome to come just to pair with someone.

Code and Coffee in Miami

Tuesday, April 30 @ 7:00AM through 9:00AM | Panther Coffee, 2390 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL

“Code & Coffee is an informal get together to write some code in the morning before the real job kicks in.”

Accessibility 101 - What you need to know about accessibility

Wednesday, May 1 @ 7:00PM |

Presented by Bruno Torquato. Informative session about web accessibility.

Content Curation Tools for WordPress ($5)

Thursday, May 2 @ 6:30PM | Nova Southeastern University, Carl DeSantis Bldg., 3301 College Avenue, Davie, FL

Talk by Blanca Stella Mejia, owner of Vizred.com, will be about content curation tools that connect to your WordPress blog. How to use 3rd party tools to create instant content in your niche and automatically post to your WordPress blog on your website.

Blanca has been blogging and using WordPress for four years and is the founder of MiCaminar.com which won the award of Best Inspirational Blogger by Latism.org, the largest Hispanic online community.

TEDx Delray Beach - The Human Experience

Friday, May 3 @ 8:30AM | Delray Beach Center For the Arts,  51 North Swinton Ave, Delray Beach, FL

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Startup Delray: La vida LOCAL!

Monday, May 6 @ 6:30pm | 100 West Atlantic Avenue Delray Beach, 33444

Learn about the community feedback for Startup Delray’s transformation of space at The Library Delray Beach from stacks of books to coworking and makersapce. We’ll include a feature on 5 LOCAL Delray Beach startups.

Grow Lean with Digital Marketing: How to Find and Retain Customers Online ($35-$50)

Monday, May 6 @ 6:30PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127

Workshop by Katya Constantine, a seasoned marketer with over 10 years of online marketing experience. She has developed a well-credentialized background in marketing for large online brands, such as Expedia and Amazon, having significantly increased online performance at several large web properties. Katya also has a deep background in email and cross-channel marketing.

In this workshop, you will learn:

• How to optimize your costs when it comes to acquiring customers
• Deep dive into a few of the channels
• Learn how to track and measure performance

Co-Founders Wanted of Miami ($10)

Thursday, May 9 @ 6:30PM | 1010 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, FL

Co-Founders Wanted is an opportunity to find a co-founder for your business, or to help you find a business to join. Brought to you by CoFoundersLab, come meet other aspiring entrepreneurs and build the team to make your business happen. Start networking now by creating a free profile at CoFoundersLab.com!

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

Micro Venture Capital Club Monthly “Shark Tank” Meeting - May (Broward) ($10)

Monday, May 13 @ 7:30PM | Nova Southeastern University, Carl DeSantis Bldg., 3301 College Avenue, Davie, FL

The goal of the Micro Venture Capital Club is to link entrepreneurs with great ideas with investors. The event is a “Shark Tank” type meeting where the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors.

Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference ($1,495 - $1,695)

Wednesday, May 15 @ 9:00AM through Thursday, May 16 @ 10:00M| The James South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Interactivity Digital promises to be a cutting-edge digital marketing conference and will feature industry-leading keynote speakers and informative panel discussions about such topics as search engine optimization, pay-per click marketing, email marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization and social media. The event will be ultra exclusive— only 150 tickets will be sold to ensure that sessions remain intimate and meaningful and that the networking opportunities remain plentiful.

Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Thursday, May 30 @ 5:30PM | Palm Beach State Collete, Duncan Theatre, 4200 Congress Avenue, Lake Worth, FL

Learn how Sculley, former leader of Apple and Pepsi, is mentoring South Florida entrepreneurs to create hundreds of STEAM jobs.

HackaNUI (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:00AM | Caffeine Spaces, 3701 FAU Boulevard, #210, Boca Raton, FL

HackaNUI is the first of its kind Hackathon dedicated to creating applications centered around Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies. HackaNUI is the creation of mLabs and LiveMetrics.

I’m writing this from Kansas City, home of Google Fiber, several fortune 500 companies, and a vibrant startup ecosystem. Over the last few days, I’ve been inspired by an amazing amount of involvement in the startup community by the local government and corporations (including giants like Sprint, Hallmark and Cerner). CityCampKC in particular was a great peer-to-peer collaborative effort to improve the local community in which all layers of the ecosystem were represented.

Back home in Miami, this week was the week of the business plan competition.

UM announced their Business Plan Competition winners.

FAU did the same for their Business Plan Competition.

Finally, the The Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge announced their top 6 and opened their People’s Pick for voting until 11:59pm tonight - go and vote now!

The first class of startups at the new Venture Hive accelerator just had their demo day - “The Swarm.” The Miami Herald has a writeup.

The LAB Miami hosted a state of latam venture capital panel with Juan Pablo Cappello, Manny Medina, Boris Hirmas Said, Andres Moreno and Cate Ambrose.

Sustainatopia’s 4th annual 3-day Impact Conference is taking place Wednesday-Friday at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The conference is focused on social entrepreneurship, philanthropy and impact investing.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k.

Most Interesting Events This Week

Code and Coffee in Miami

Tuesdays @ 7:00AM through 9:00AM | Panther Coffee, 2390 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL

“Code & Coffee is an informal get together to write some code in the morning before the real job kicks in.”

Refresh Miami: Lean Startup (free)

Thursday, April 25 @  7:30PM | Miami Museum of Science, 3280 South Miami Avenue, Miami, FL

RSVP Here: http://refreshmiami.com/event/refreshmiami-lean-startup/

Have you ever wanted to start your own business?

Do you have a business but need to figure out a way to increase engagement and maximize retention?

Is your first thought “I can’t do this because I’m not a developer.” or “I don’t have the money to have this developed.”

Well then join this month’s Refresh and see how much you can get done with nothing but sweat equity (hard work).

Synergist Campaign Launch (pledge)

Saturday, April 27 @ 8:00AM through 11:30PM

On April 27, 2013, Synergist will make history by being the first crowdsourcing company to raise money themselves using their own platform. They are ready to help people innovate together in a big way, but they need your help to make that possible.

Be a part of this industry-first campaign by registering for a free ticket. You may also donate to the campaign pre-launch, for which you will receive exclusive rewards that will only be available to backers who pledge before April 27.  Fore more details, checkout the link above.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

RokkMiami - Brad Feld Presentation (free)

Monday, April 29 @4PM - 5:30PM | The LAB Miami 400 Northwest 24th Street Miami, FL 33127

Brad Feld will be giving a special presentation on building and growing the Miami startup community. First 200 rsvps will get a free copy of his book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, courtesy of Rokk3rLabs and Knight Foundation. I also think I heard something about a book signing - but don’t quote me on that.

TEDx Delray Beach - The Human Experience

Friday, May 3 @ 8:30AM | Delray Beach Center For the Arts,  51 North Swinton Ave, Delray Beach, FL

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.

Startup Delray: La vida LOCAL!

Monday, May 6 @ 6:30pm | 100 West Atlantic Avenue Delray Beach, 33444

Learn about the community feedback for Startup Delray’s transformation of space at The Library Delray Beach from stacks of books to coworking and makersapce. We’ll include a feature on 5 LOCAL Delray Beach startups.

Co-Founders Wanted of Miami ($10)

Thursday, May 9 @ 6:30PM | 1010 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, FL

Co-Founders Wanted is an opportunity to find a co-founder for your business, or to help you find a business to join. Brought to you by CoFoundersLab, come meet other aspiring entrepreneurs and build the team to make your business happen. Start networking now by creating a free profile at CoFoundersLab.com!

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference ($1,495 - $1,695)

Wednesday, May 15 @ 9:00AM through Thursday, May 16 @ 10:00M| The James South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Interactivity Digital promises to be a cutting-edge digital marketing conference and will feature industry-leading keynote speakers and informative panel discussions about such topics as search engine optimization, pay-per click marketing, email marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization and social media. The event will be ultra exclusive— only 150 tickets will be sold to ensure that sessions remain intimate and meaningful and that the networking opportunities remain plentiful.

Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Thursday, May 30 @ 5:30PM | Palm Beach State Collete, Duncan Theatre, 4200 Congress Avenue, Lake Worth, FL

Learn how Sculley, former leader of Apple and Pepsi, is mentoring South Florida entrepreneurs to create hundreds of STEAM jobs.

HackaNUI (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:00AM | Caffeine Spaces, 3701 FAU Boulevard, #210, Boca Raton, FL

HackaNUI is the first of its kind Hackathon dedicated to creating applications centered around Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies. HackaNUI is the creation of mLabs and LiveMetrics.

You may have heard rumors of a big tech conference coming in 2014, organized by Many Medina, the founder of Terremark. The Miami Herald has an article about the conference, and the STarting Gate wrote about the launch event for Technology Foundation of the Americas, the nonprofit organization behind the conference.

The Starting Gate is pointing out that we’ve been seeing an increase in specialized tech groups and events - such as the Project Lift healthcare accelerator, and the Miami Legal Hackathon - and calls it a sign of a maturing tech community.

Forbes contributor Devin Thorpe interviewed several teenage social entrepreneurs, including our own Jared Kleinert. Jared talked about his plans to use Synergist, his crowdfunding platform, to crowdfund the platform itself. So meta.

Btw, don’t miss the Synergist campaign launch event next Saturday.

Juan Diego Calle, CEO of Miami-based .CO was interviewed for the 500 startups blog: How .CO Kicked Goliath’s Ass

Jacksonville will be home to an “in-person crowdfunding festival”. Nibletz has the deets.

Kristen McLean, CEO of Miami-based Bookigee, a toolbox for self-published book authors, gave a keynote at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change in Publishing Conference. The keynote was extensively quoted in this article.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k.

Most Interesting Events This Week

What’s new in Ruby 2? (free)

Monday, April 15 @ 7:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

Ruby 2.0 came out in February, and has lots of exciting new features to make your scripts and applications easier to write, faster to run, and vice-versa.  

They will cover the following topics:

• What’s new
• What’s better
• How to migrate your software

Google Webmaster Tools (free)

Tuesday, April 16 @ 6:30PM | Planet Linux Cafe, 1430 Ponce De Leon Blvd, Coral Gables, FL

Speaker: Tony Lester, will talk about Google Webmaster Tools: “See Your Website Li-ke Google Sees It With Webmaster Tools”.

Topics will include:

• Its use and how to read it.
• Configuration
• Taking advantage of it.
• Checking your site health

The State of Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship in Latin America in 2013 (free)

Thursday, April 18 @ 6:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

AS/COA and LAVCA will host a forum on venture capital and entrepreneurship in Latin America, corresponding with the release of the 2013 LAVCA Scorecard. Distinguished investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs will gather to explore what governments are doing to promote venture capital and offer an update on startup activity and investments in the region—particularly in the booming tech sector.

Database Design Disasters and an Introduction to TypeScript (free)

Thursday, April 18 @ 6:30PM | Planet Linux Cafe, 1430 Ponce De Leon Blvd, Coral Gables, FL

Richie Rump will be showing some of the most common mistakes when developing databases and how some decisions can turn into disasters. Then, Ross Terman will show a new exciting JavaScript technology, TypeScript. which introduces type-checking and inheritance into the JavaScript family.

They will also  have a giveaway: The first thirty people to arrive at the meeting and that are registered to the dotNet Miami Google Group will receive a 4GB flash drive courtesy of Redgate. They will also be giving away books, swag, and one-month subscriptions to PluralSight.

Fifth Annual Score Business Conference (Boca Raton) (free)

Saturday, April 20 @ 8:00AM | Lynn University, 3601 Military Trail, Boca Raton, 33431

In addition to free workshops and seminars all day long, below are some of the things you can learn or check out at this free event:

• Hear from business owners that are succeeding in this economy and learn how they do it.
• Attend an Introduction to QuickBooks.
• Learn Internet marketing.
• Increase sales by learning the tricks of communicating well with your customers.
• Learn how to use social networking to increase your profits.
• Learn how to get business from the state.
• Learn how to take your business mobile and accept mobile payments.
• Business Women learn how Pattie Light grows her businesses.
• Additionally, Franchise, Retail and Internet experts will be available for those of you that may have such questions.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Refresh Miami: Lean Startup (free)

Thursday, April 25 @  7:30PM | Miami Museum of Science, 3280 South Miami Avenue, Miami, FL

RSVP Here: http://refreshmiami.com/event/refreshmiami-lean-startup/

Have you ever wanted to start your own business?

Do you have a business but need to figure out a way to increase engagement and maximize retention?

Is your first thought “I can’t do this because I’m not a developer.” or “I don’t have the money to have this developed.”

Well then join this month’s Refresh and see how much you can get done with nothing but sweat equity (hard work).

TEDx Delray Beach - The Human Experience

Friday, May 3 @ 8:30AM | Delray Beach Center For the Arts,  51 North Swinton Ave, Delray Beach, FL

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.

Co-Founders Wanted of Miami ($10)

Thursday, May 9 @ 6:30PM | 1010 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, FL

Co-Founders Wanted is an opportunity to find a co-founder for your business, or to help you find a business to join. Brought to you by CoFoundersLab, come meet other aspiring entrepreneurs and build the team to make your business happen. Start networking now by creating a free profile at CoFoundersLab.com!

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference ($1,495 - $1,695)

Wednesday, May 15 @ 9:00AM through Thursday, May 16 @ 10:00M| The James South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Interactivity Digital promises to be a cutting-edge digital marketing conference and will feature industry-leading keynote speakers and informative panel discussions about such topics as search engine optimization, pay-per click marketing, email marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization and social media. The event will be ultra exclusive— only 150 tickets will be sold to ensure that sessions remain intimate and meaningful and that the networking opportunities remain plentiful.

Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Thursday, May 30 @ 5:30PM | Palm Beach State Collete, Duncan Theatre, 4200 Congress Avenue, Lake Worth, FL

Learn how Sculley, former leader of Apple and Pepsi, is mentoring South Florida entrepreneurs to create hundreds of STEAM jobs.

HackaNUI (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:00AM | Caffeine Spaces, 3701 FAU Boulevard, #210, Boca Raton, FL

HackaNUI is the first of its kind Hackathon dedicated to creating applications centered around Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies. HackaNUI is the creation of mLabs and LiveMetrics.

Robert Scoble visited Miami and interviewed a couple of locals at The LAB Miami - check out the interviews: with LAB’s Daniel Lafuente, and with Jose Pimienta of Vinilfy and Dave Notik of Woven.org.

Miami-based itMD and Sarasota-based IntelligentM were 2 of the 13 companies selected to join the inaugural class of GE and Startup Healths 3 year Entrepreneurship Program designed to accelerate the growth of consumer health companies. Details via The Starting Gate, TechCrunch, GigaOm, and this GE press release)

The Miami Herald reports that PE-Nexus, a Miami-based online deal-sourcing platform for the mergers and acquisitions industry, has been acquired by IntraLinks Holdings.

Miami-based Gui.de has been covered by U.S. News.

Tapad, a NYC-based advertising technology company with an office in Miami, just closed their 6.5M series B round.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k or email andrej@thestartupdigest.com.

Most Interesting Events This Week

Open Hack Miami (free)

Monday, April 8 @ 7:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything.

THE BASICS - You can hack on anything! Any language, framework, public/open-source, personal, etc. Skill level doesn’t matter. Whether you’re working on Hello World or on increasing your wizarding level. You don’t have to have an idea to hack on! You’re more than welcome to come just to pair with someone.

The Future of Miami is Here and Now

Friday, April 12 @ 4:00PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

Guest speaker, Salim Ismail is a sought-after speaker, strategist and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. He travels extensively addressing topics including breakthrough technologies and their impact on society. He advises Fortune 100 companies and governments worldwide on the impact of accelerating technologies.

Salim has spent the last five years building Singularity University based at NASA Ames and before that built and ran Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal incubator. His last company, Angstro, was sold to Google in August 2010.

Startup Weekend Orlando ($24/student, $99/general)

Friday, April 12 @ 6:00PM through Sunday, April 15 @ 9:00PM | Seminole State College @ Heathrow, 1055 AAA Drive, Heathrow, FL

They are offering scholarships to help make the event more accesible to students ($24), with the following application: http://www.seminolestate.edu/ced/startup-weekend/media/sw-scholarship-application.pdf.

Startup Weekend Orlando April 12th-14th is a weekend-long, hands-on experiences where entrepreneurs, developers, and designers come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups! Over the course of the weekend entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs gain hands-on experience in validating their ideas with a focus on customer development and lean startup practices. No talk. All action. Launch a Startup in 54 hours. Learn more and register today at: http://orlando.startupweekend.org/

SoFloPhP Hackathon (free)

Saturday, April 13 @ 9:00AM - 7:30PM | Miami Shared 990 Biscayne Blvd. Office 501 Miami, FL 33132

This event is open to ALL South Florida core and front-end devs. We also welcome other groups to come join us from Wordpress, Drupal.  The more the merrier.

Developers, this is a great way for beginning developers (even students) to learn the ropes, as well as a way for advanced developers to enhance their skills while creating apps and mashups using various APIs or maybe even from scratch without using an API.

Game Design dorkShop ($10-$35, $10 off with code: ”digest”)

Saturday, April 13 @ 11:00AM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

Introductory workshop on game design led by University of Miami professors Clay Ewing and Lien Tran. You will learn basic principles and best practices for creating fun and engaging systems, including games and other interactive experiences. After participating in this half-day workshop, you will leave with a prototype for a game, as well as a basic understanding of systems thinking. We will focus on non-digital game creation in our limited time, but these prototypes could also be the starting point for a digital game.

MySQL Boot Camp (free)

Saturday, April 13 @ 1:00PM through 4:00PM | University of Miami, School of Communication, 5100 Brunson Drive, Room 2055, Coral Gables, FL

Join HHMIA for a hands-on MySQL bootcamp with Miami Herald alum turned developer and Hacks/Hackers Miami member, Stephanie Rosenblatt.  Rosenblatt is going to help you learn how to use data beyond Excel. The course will center around taking a large dataset and learning how to derive information from that data. Also, on how Excel and a MySQL table compare — starting by learning a bit about how to work with data in Excel, and then moving into MySQL. You’ll learn how to query, write basic formulas, and find answers. Bring your laptop!

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Refresh Miami: Lean Startup (free)

Thursday, April 25 @  7:30PM | Miami Museum of Science, 3280 South Miami Avenue, Miami, FL

RSVP Here: http://refreshmiami.com/event/refreshmiami-lean-startup/

Have you ever wanted to start your own business?

Do you have a business but need to figure out a way to increase engagement and maximize retention?

Is your first thought “I can’t do this because I’m not a developer.” or “I don’t have the money to have this developed.”

Well then join this month’s Refresh and see how much you can get done with nothing but sweat equity (hard work).

TEDx Delray Beach - The Human Experience

Friday, May 3 @ 8:30AM | Delray Beach Center For the Arts,  51 North Swinton Ave, Delray Beach, FL

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference ($1,495 - $1,695)

Wednesday, May 15 @ 9:00AM through Thursday, May 16 @ 10:00M| The James South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Interactivity Digital promises to be a cutting-edge digital marketing conference and will feature industry-leading keynote speakers and informative panel discussions about such topics as search engine optimization, pay-per click marketing, email marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization and social media. The event will be ultra exclusive— only 150 tickets will be sold to ensure that sessions remain intimate and meaningful and that the networking opportunities remain plentiful.

Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Thursday, May 30 @ 5:30PM | Palm Beach State Collete, Duncan Theatre, 4200 Congress Avenue, Lake Worth, FL

Learn how Sculley, former leader of Apple and Pepsi, is mentoring South Florida entrepreneurs to create hundreds of STEAM jobs.

HackaNUI (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:00AM | Caffeine Spaces, 3701 FAU Boulevard, #210, Boca Raton, FL

HackaNUI is the first of its kind Hackathon dedicated to creating applications centered around Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies. HackaNUI is the creation of mLabs and LiveMetrics.

Miami-based startup Gui.de - platform which “turns your favourite online news and blogs into videos” - seems to be on a marketing blitz. The latest bit of news: they have been chosen as one of the 16 finalists to pitch at the Startup Rally at this year’s The Next Web Conference Europe.

You might recall the SFL Startup Bus experiment (working title - any suggestions for a name?) - a networking-on-wheels experience that took ~30 techies/entrepreneurs from The Caffeine Spaces coworking space in Boca, to the Refresh Miami event at The LAB. The Starting Gate has a post about last week’s bus experiement, as well as the next one (today!). On that topic, check out the next bus, going from RightSpace coworking at UMLSTP, to the Startup Delray Hack the Library event.  (disclaimer: I am involved in the bus project)

Related to last week’s story about the launch of Caffeine Spaces in Boca, the Research Park at Florida Atlantic University and Enterprise Development Corporation of South Florida are expanding the Technology Business Incubator by another 10K sqft.

Nancy has compiled several great examples of South Florida entities getting national coverage - we’ve covered most, but not all, of them, so head on over and check it out.

Incubate Miami alum iCareIntelligence is looking to hire a senior PHP developer / CTO, offering salary + equity.

Clay Ewing and Lien Tran, core faculty members for UM’s new MFA in Interactive Media program, are teaching a Game Design “dorkshop” at The LAB Miami. They will focus on non-digital game creation - game design, rather than game development - so no coding skills necessary. Get $10 off the Non-Member price by using the code “digest”.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k.

Most Interesting Events This Week

Startup Delray:  Hack the Library! (free)

Monday, April 1 @ 6:30PM | The Library Delray Beach, 100 West Atlantic Avenue, Delray Beach, FL

Help Startup Delray transform 5000 square feet at The Library Delray Beach from stacks of books to coworking and makersapce. Entrepreneurs, innovators, designers, makers, engineers,technologists, artists, writers, small businesses, and social enterprises welcome! You bring your creative ideas, and we’ll bring the pizza, water, soda, and wine.

Ancient City Ruby ($299)

Tuesday, April 3 @ 7:00PM through Friday, April 5 @ 7:00PM | The Casa Monica Hotel, 95 Cordova St, St. Augustine, FL

Ancient City Ruby is a two–day single–track Ruby conference in America’s oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida. The program has been designed around Ruby, its popular frameworks, and other relevant technologies of today and the future.

Makin Bacon - API Hackathon presented by Emphasys Software (free)

Saturday, April 6 @ 8:00AM | Right Space 2 Meet, 100 Miracle Mile, #200 Miami, FL

Teams will be building mobile and web apps while competing for prizes and swag, and networking with fellow Miami techies. (and eating bacon!)

Participants will pitch ideas, form teams (or work alone), and build projects based on the listed APIs (see below for full list) to turn their ideas into reality in a limited amount of time.

Teams should be able to show enough to demonstrate their vision, and how they intend to implement it technologically.

Game Design dorkShop ($10-$35, $10 off with code: ”digest”)

Saturday, April 6 @ 11:00AM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL

Introductory workshop on game design led by University of Miami professors Clay Ewing and Lien Tran. You will learn basic principles and best practices for creating fun and engaging systems, including games and other interactive experiences. After participating in this half-day workshop, you will leave with a prototype for a game, as well as a basic understanding of systems thinking. We will focus on non-digital game creation in our limited time, but these prototypes could also be the starting point for a digital game.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

MySQL Boot Camp (free)

Saturday, April 13 @ 1:00PM through 4:00PM | University of Miami, School of Communication, 5100 Brunson Drive, Room 2055, Coral Gables, FL

Join HHMIA for a hands-on MySQL bootcamp with Miami Herald alum turned developer and Hacks/Hackers Miami member, Stephanie Rosenblatt.  Rosenblatt is going to help you learn how to use data beyond Excel. The course will center around taking a large dataset and learning how to derive information from that data. Also, on how Excel and a MySQL table compare — starting by learning a bit about how to work with data in Excel, and then moving into MySQL. You’ll learn how to query, write basic formulas, and find answers. Bring your laptop!

TEDx Delray Beach - The Human Experience

Friday, May 3 @ 8:30AM | Delray Beach Center For the Arts,  51 North Swinton Ave, Delray Beach, FL

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference ($1,495 - $1,695)

Wednesday, May 15 @ 9:00AM through Thursday, May 16 @ 10:00M| The James South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Interactivity Digital promises to be a cutting-edge digital marketing conference and will feature industry-leading keynote speakers and informative panel discussions about such topics as search engine optimization, pay-per click marketing, email marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization and social media. The event will be ultra exclusive— only 150 tickets will be sold to ensure that sessions remain intimate and meaningful and that the networking opportunities remain plentiful.

Continuing to Build Steam…Meet John Sculley

Thursday, May 30 @ 5:30PM | Palm Beach State Collete, Duncan Theatre, 4200 Congress Avenue, Lake Worth, FL

Learn how Sculley, former leader of Apple and Pepsi, is mentoring South Florida entrepreneurs to create hundreds of STEAM jobs.

HackaNUI (free)

Saturday, June 1 @ 8:00AM | Caffeine Spaces, 3701 FAU Boulevard, #210, Boca Raton, FL

HackaNUI is the first of its kind Hackathon dedicated to creating applications centered around Natural User Interface (NUI) technologies. HackaNUI is the creation of mLabs and LiveMetrics.

Bill Batthurst of thereef.biz has a 2-part guest post on The Starting Gate, about the recent official opening of the Caffeine Spaces Coworking space at the Research Park at FAU, as well as about the recent creation of the SFL Group of Groups - an informal group of local community leaders which has been having an eclectic conversation about the past, present and future of the SFL tech/startup community.

Speaking of the Group of Groups, one of the recent outcomes of our conversations is the SFL Tech Bus (working title). As an attempt to bring the various SFL tech and startup communities closer together, CoGo - a Boca-based bus ride-sharing platform - are organizing a bus from Caffeine Spaces in Boca to The LAB Miami for the Refresh event on Wednesday, as a way to transform the grueling 1+ hour commute into pre-event networking on wheels (disclaimer - I am one of the people behind the bus project, so this could be considered a shameless plug).

Stanford Social Innovation Review has an article by Ben Wirz and Juan Martinez of the Knight Foundation about lessons learned while building the Knight Enterprise Fund inside the Knight Foundation.

Kimetric, a recent Miami transplant who is tackling the problem of real-world analytics, by using 3d motion capture to track consumer behavior inside retail locations, was mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article. Kimetric launched at SuperConf and is currently going through the Launch Pad Tech accelerator.

The Street lists Miami as #3 on the list of cities to move to if you are thinking of starting a company. The article states that, according to Kauffman’s forthcoming Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, Miami has one of the nation’s highest levels of entrepreneurial activity per metropolitan area.

Alex De Carvalho has a post on the WLRN blog about the acceleration of the miami tech scene. I love the title: After A Start At Dial-Up Speeds, Miami’s Tech Sector Gains Momentum.

When Auston sent me an email titled “this is why I started SuperConf”, I had to check it out: Luis Bolaños, an FIU student with a video game blog, wrote an inspiring blog post about his introduction to the Miami Startup Community, via the reddit > SuperConf > MiamiTechWeek > UHack funnel. Welcome to the community Luis!

The LAB Miami was featured in a Forbes blog post titled The LAB Miami: Turning South Florida into the Next Startup Hub.

Miami-based integrated communication and collaboration platform Glip has recently opened their beta. The tool is a chat client for your browser, smartphone or tablet, which allows you to have conversations, schedule meetings, track task assignments and share documents with your team members.

Miami-based Shwrum.com recently raised a $50K Angel round, and is looking to hire an iOS developer.

Coincidentally, Miami-based marketplace for mobile developers, GetAppsDone.com, wrote in to let us know they launched a redesigned version of their site last week (hey shwrum - post a listing - we got 2 high-quality responses within a day).

Another job marketplace - Fort Lauderdale-based jobdreaming.com - a website where job seekers can describe their ideal job in one fill-in-the-blank sentence - was named Cool Site of The Day by the Kim Komando radio show. They were also recently featured on the syndicated radio show Elvis Duran in their What’s Trending segment.

Juan Diego Calle of .CO and Freddie Laker of Gui.de were interviewed for the Tech Cocktail’s SXSW video series.

Miami-based LiveNinja - an online marketplace for video-based training, launched a browser extension to augment their product offering.\

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k or email andrej@thestartupdigest.com.

Most Interesting Events This Week

Refresh Miami:  Hardware and Robotics (free)

Wednesday, March 27 @ 7:30PM | The Lab Miami, 400 NW 26th Street, Miami, FL

This event will be covering robots, arduino, and raspberry pi. Learn from experts building their own hardware hacks using raspberry pi, arduino, as well as the latest robotics startups in Miami too.  Everything you’ve ever wanted to learn to build your own gadgets and devices using cheap off the shelf tools.

Working with Git & Modern Web Development with Dart (free)

Wednesday, March 27, 2013 @ 7:00PM | O Cinema, 90 NW 29th Street , Miami, FL

Two speakers, Jake A. Smith, and David Notik.  Smith will talk about working with Git, and will start by building a foundational knowledge of what Git can do for you and how it works, spend some time in the terminal working with the most common Git commands and then launch into some QA to discuss team workflows. Notik will cover modern web development with Dart.

2013 South Florida FIRST Robotics Competition

Thursday, March 28 @ 6PM through Saturday, March 30 @ 6:30PM | Fort Lauderdale Convention Center, 1950 Eisenhower Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316

FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) has been referred to as the super bowl of the mind. Over 2,500 teams compete worldwide in an annual challenge where each team must each build a remote controlled robot out of a standard kit of parts.  FIRST is an acronym of For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. The FIRST Robotics Competition is a great example of education through inspiration, teamwork and self-discipline.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Makin Bacon - API Hackathon presented by Emphasys Software (free)

Saturday, April 6 @ 8:00AM | Right Space 2 Meet, 100 Miracle Mile, #200 Miami, FL

Teams will be building mobile and web apps while competing for prizes and swag, and networking with fellow Miami techies. (and eating bacon!)

Participants will pitch ideas, form teams (or work alone), and build projects based on the listed APIs (see below for full list) to turn their ideas into reality in a limited amount of time.

Teams should be able to show enough to demonstrate their vision, and how they intend to implement it technologically.

TEDx Delray Beach - The Human Experience

Friday, May 3 @ 8:30AM

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

Interactivity Digital 2013 Conference ($1,495 - $1,695)

Wednesday, May 15 @ 9:00AM through Thursday, May 16 @ 10:00M| The James South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Interactivity Digital promises to be a cutting-edge digital marketing conference and will feature industry-leading keynote speakers and informative panel discussions about such topics as search engine optimization, pay-per click marketing, email marketing, analytics, conversion rate optimization and social media. The event will be ultra exclusive— only 150 tickets will be sold to ensure that sessions remain intimate and meaningful and that the networking opportunities remain plentiful.

The annual Entrepreneurs’ Organization kicked off this week at the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, with a keynote address by Daymond John, founder of FUBU, and one of the Shark Tank “sharks”. Check this Miami Herald article for more details.

There is an interesting upcoming event at The LAB: CEO chat with Luis von Ahn, the inventor of reCAPTCHA (the two word captcha that also helps scan books), recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., the “genius grant”) and CEO of DuoLingo, which helps people learn a new language for free while translating the web to different languages. 

Globe St has an interview with Philippe Houdard of the Pipeline Brickell coworking space, titled Why Coworking Is Taking Off in Miami.

Miami-based Weather Puppy was included in Mashable’s list of 10 Must-Have Apps for Dog Owners.

The Miami Herald Business Monday article Building a Tech City: Lessons from both sides of the pond compares lessons learned while building London’s “Tech City” with opinions from several Miami startup community members.

The GDG South Florida and the Miami Android Developers are starting the Miami Open Device Lab - a nonprofit organization which helps anyone access a large number of mobile devices for testing - and they are looking for test devices to kickstart the collection, as well as a venue to host the devices. Contact Nelson if you have a device to donate, or a venue you’d like to open to the community.

Miami-based GradSave (“Kickstarter for college savings”) is looking for a Senior PHP Developer / VP Technology to lead its web development team. They’re well funded and profitable; if you’re interested, you can contact them here.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k.

Most Interesting Events This Week

Miami Ruby Brigade - Show and Tell  (Monthly Meetup)

Monday, March 18 @ 7:00PM | CareCloud Headquarters, 5200 Blue Lagoon Drive, Suite 900, Miami, FL

Build a chat application or Twitter clone in Rails for fun? Come show it off! Working on any cool open-source stuff? Come show it off! Have a cool startup? Come show it off!

SFGDG:  Google AdSense (free)

Tuesday, March 19 @ 6:30PM | Planet Linux Cafe, 1430 Ponce De Leon Blvd, Coral Gables, FL

Guest speaker, Tony Lester will talk about Google Adsense, an easy way to earn money from your Website or Blog.

• The ins and outs of selling PPC
• How to setup account Banned sites and practices
• Selecting the right sites
• How to make money with Adsense Problems and pitfalls
• Helping Conversion Tools and tricks

INCUBATE THIS! What Do Incubators Mean To The Entrepreneur And The Community

Tuesday, March 19 @ 6:30PM | VentureHive, 1010 NE 2nd Ave. Miami, FL

There is a lot of buzz around incubators these days, and they seem to be popping up all over south Florida.  At this event you will hear from those who run incubators, and those who have participated in them how incubators fit into the entrepreneurial ecosystem of South Florida.  What do incubators seek to do for the companies that participate? What do they seek to do for the economy and community at large? What are the different business models that incubators operate under? How can an entrepreneur make use of their resources?

See the Red Z10 LE & All the ways blackberry will pay you for apps! (free)

Wednesday, March 20 @ 7:00PM | Planet Linux Cafe, 1430 Ponce De Leon Blvd, Coral Gables, FL

Come check out the new RED Z10! They have one you can check out!  Also, Damian Montero will show you all the different ways you can make money with blackberry

Startup Weekend Naples

Friday, March 22 @ 5:00PM through Sunday, March 25 @ 8:00PM | VentureX, 9128 Strada Place, Unit #10115, Naples, FL, 34108

Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups!

Think:Code:Meme Impact Obesity Hackathon (free)

Saturday, March 23, 2013 @ 9:00AM through Sunday, Marchy 24, 2013 @ 7:00PM | University of Miami Life Science & Technology Park, 1951 Northwest 7th Avenue Miami, FL 33136

A Hackathon Focused on Obesity In Minority Communities and in Concert with the University of Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute. This is an event focused on the collective challenge of overcoming obesity in our community. The goal is to bring together teams who have a business idea around the topic of managing and reducing obesity.

WordCamp Beginners Workshop (Davie)

Saturday, March 23 @ 8:00AM | Nova Southeastern University, Carl DeSantis Bldg, 3301 College Avenue, Davie, FL

This full day class is especially tuned for those new to WordPress. Topics covered include everything from hosting, making your first post, finding themes, and basic installing of plugins. This workshop is identical to the one in Miami, but held in Davie, FL on March 23rd at Nova Southeastern University. This workshop is recommended for those who live in Palm Beach/Broward Area.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Refresh Miami:  Hardware and Robotics (free)

Wednesday, March 27 @ 7:30PM | The Lab Miami, 400 NW 26th Street, Miami, FL

This event will be covering robots, arduino, and raspberry pi. Learn from experts building their own hardware hacks using raspberry pi, arduino, as well as the latest robotics startups in Miami too.  Everything you’ve ever wanted to learn to build your own gadgets and devices using cheap off the shelf tools.

Working with Git & Modern Web Development with Dart (free)

Wednesday, March 27, 2013 @ 7:00PM | O Cinema, 90 NW 29th Street , Miami, FL

Two speakers, Jake A. Smith, and David Notik.  Smith will talk about working with Git, and will start by building a foundational knowledge of what Git can do for you and how it works, spend some time in the terminal working with the most common Git commands and then launch into some QA to discuss team workflows. Notik will cover modern web development with Dart.

2013 South Florida FIRST Robotics Competition

Thursday, March 28 @ 6PM through Saturday, March 30 @ 6:30PM | Fort Lauderdale Convention Center, 1950 Eisenhower Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316

FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) has been referred to as the super bowl of the mind. Over 2,500 teams compete worldwide in an annual challenge where each team must each build a remote controlled robot out of a standard kit of parts.  FIRST is an acronym of For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. The FIRST Robotics Competition is a great example of education through inspiration, teamwork and self-discipline.

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

This year, I got to experience the frustrating experience that is the Google IO registration first hand. For me, the issue was with Google Wallet. I “got” a ticket several times, but Google Wallet got stuck and I never completed the payment process (although my card was charged successfully, several times).

Here is the email I sent to the Google IO Registration support email:

I managed to get to the purchasing stage 4 times, only to have Google Wallet get stuck at the last step. 

And their response:

Don’t forget that the Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge entries are due today! The Starting Gate blog has a few last minute tips for those of you who are yet to apply.

Ken Beauveis, aka @KenMrCEO has written an interesting post about the Orlando, Tampa and Miami entrepreneurial communities,which he has been visiting over the last year or so, all the way from his home base in Ft Myers.

This week’s installment in the Senzari PR blitz revolves around the public release of the WahWah iPhone app. Deets in The Next Web and PulsoSocial.

The Miami Herald has an article about the new Venture Hive incubator. (Venture Hive is also the home of the Launch Pad Tech accelerator, which is currently midway through their inaugural class of startups)

TechStars has a where-are-they-now-update on the TechStars Cloud 2012 class of startups, including Miami-based Flomio.

CBS4 News has an interview with Matt Haggman of the Knight Foundation, on the new Endeavor Global Miami location. Also check out the accompanying Knight blog post.

Miami-based Gui.de was ranked one of the top 10 most promising startups at SXSW by austintop10.co.

As part of the aftermath of Startup Cities: Miami, The Atlantic posted an interesting video titled Miami Wants to Be the Next Big Start-Up City.

Miami-based Map Your Startup switched to a .co and announced they are expanding beyond Miami to include all of US.

Pharmbid, Inc., a healthcare software platform co-founded by Miami startup lawyer, Kubs Lalchandani, was selected to participate in the inaugural class of the Blue Startups Accelerator based on the Tetris campus in Honolulu, Hawaii.

South Florida based Call Loop were recently selected by the 2012 Twilio Fund with investment from Dave McClure of 500 Startups and SV Angel. They also recently won the Ultimate Marketer Best in Class Award for Online Sales from Infusionsoft.

The Life Science and Technology HUB, a “community of life science and technology industry professionals”, has been hosting monthly events in Palm Beach Gardens over the last 2 years. They are now starting to host gatherings in Miami as well, and the first Miami event is taking place on April 2nd.

Last few weeks have seen a bit of funding activity:
Miami-based DemeRx raised a 5M round.
Boca-based Prong raised a $70K round.
Miami-based JustAskBoo raised a $200K seed round.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k.

Most Interesting Events This Week

OpenHack Miami (free)

Monday, March 11 @ 6:00PM | The Grove Spot, 3324 Virginia Street, Coconut Grove, FL

OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything.

THE BASICS - You can hack on anything! Any language, framework, public/open-source, personal, etc. Skill level doesn’t matter. Whether you’re working on Hello World or on increasing your wizarding level. You don’t have to have an idea to hack on! You’re more than welcome to come just to pair with someone.

Sys admin skills for PHP devs (free)
Thursday, March 13 @ 7:00PM | Revelex Corporation, 6405 Congress Ave, # 120, Boca Raton, FL

This workshop will go over linux and network administration tips, Apache and MySQL configuration, basic security and other related topics.

Beer and Tell: Palm Beach LED Makerspace Start-up Celebration!

Thursday, March 14 @ 8:00PM | Bar Louie, 200 Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, FL

Palm Beach LED is ready to roll out into high-gear with their initiative to build a Makerspace facility in Palm Beach this year. Go and celebrate at Palm Beach Beer and Tell! Please sign their petition of support and fill out the included survey before going! They will make a small presentation about Palm Beach LED and answer questions.

War of the Worlds - UF’s 1st Annual Code and Design War (free)

Friday, March 15, 2013 @ 6:00 PM through Sunday, March 17, 2013 @ 9:00 PM | UF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 686 Museum Rd., Gainesville, FL 32611

War of the Worlds - UF’s 1st Annual Code and Design War, is a team coding/graphics design competition with a common goal: to develop the app that will “save the world”. Together with your team, you will spend 54 hours hacking on code and designing graphics to develop an application that is both functional and beautiful, but also designed to “save humanity”.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Miami Ruby Brigade - Show and Tell  (Monthly Meetup)

Monday, March 18 @ 7:00PM | CareCloud Headquarters, 5200 Blue Lagoon Drive, Suite 900, Miami, FL

Build a chat application or Twitter clone in Rails for fun? Come show it off! Working on any cool open-source stuff? Come show it off! Have a cool startup? Come show it off!

SFGDG:  Google AdSense (free)

Tuesday, March 19 @ 6:30PM | Planet Linux Cafe, 1430 Ponce De Leon Blvd, Coral Gables, FL

Guest speaker, Tony Lester will talk about Google Adsense, an easy way to earn money from your Website or Blog.

• The ins and outs of selling PPC
• How to setup account Banned sites and practices
• Selecting the right sites
• How to make money with Adsense Problems and pitfalls
• Helping Conversion Tools and tricks

INCUBATE THIS! What Do Incubators Mean To The Entrepreneur And The Community

Tuesday, March 19 @ 6:30PM | VentureHive, 1010 NE 2nd Ave. Miami, FL

There is a lot of buzz around incubators these days, and they seem to be popping up all over south Florida.  At this event you will hear from those who run incubators, and those who have participated in them how incubators fit into the entrepreneurial ecosystem of South Florida.  What do incubators seek to do for the companies that participate? What do they seek to do for the economy and community at large? What are the different business models that incubators operate under? How can an entrepreneur make use of their resources?

Startup Weekend Naples

Friday, March 22 @ 5:00PM through Sunday, March 25 @ 8:00PM | VentureX, 9128 Strada Place, Unit #10115, Naples, FL, 34108

Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups!

Think:Code:Meme Impact Obesity Hackathon (free)

Saturday, March 23, 2013 @ 9:00AM through Sunday, Marchy 24, 2013 @ 7:00PM | University of Miami Life Science & Technology Park, 1951 Northwest 7th Avenue Miami, FL 33136

A Hack-a-thon Focused on Obesity In Minority Communities and in Concert with the University of Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute. This is an event focused on the collective challenge of overcoming obesity in our community. The goal is to bring together teams who have a business idea around the topic of managing and reducing obesity.

WordCamp Beginners Workshop (Davie)

Saturday, March 23 @ 8:00AM | Nova Southeastern University, Carl DeSantis Bldg, 3301 College Avenue, Davie, FL

This full day class is especially tuned for those new to WordPress. Topics covered include everything from hosting, making your first post, finding themes, and basic installing of plugins. This workshop is identical to the one in Miami, but held in Davie, FL on March 23rd at Nova Southeastern University. This workshop is recommended for those who live in Palm Beach/Broward Area.

Refresh Miami:  Hardware and Robotics (free)

Wednesday, March 27 @ 7:30PM | The Lab Miami, 400 NW 26th Street, Miami, FL

This event will be covering robots, arduino, and raspberry pi. Learn from experts building their own hardware hacks using raspberry pi, arduino, as well as the latest robotics startups in Miami too.  Everything you’ve ever wanted to learn to build your own gadgets and devices using cheap off the shelf tools.

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

71lbs, a Fort Lauderdale-based startup which helps business collect late shipment refunds, founded by the shipping industry veteran Jose Li, have announced that they have closed their $500K seed round, inked several strategic partnerships including one with Etsy, reached 300 customers, and are looking to hire new employees. For more details, check out their press release,  this Entrepreneur magazine article, and this Starting Gate post.

The Miami Herald Business Plan CHallenge is around the corner - next week! The Staring Gate has posted some answers to commonly asked questions(http://miamiherald.typepad.com/the-starting-gate/2013/03/business-plan-challenge-your-questions-answered-.html).

Boca-based Virtualworks, run by Edward Iacobucci, the founder of Citrix, has hired several Citrix veterans to round out it’s management team.

Boca-based EvoLux, the AirBnB for helicopter travel, won the Sikorsky Entrepreneurial Challenge. Congrats Ray!

Kairos, a facial recognition tech startup that recently relocated to Miami, has been covered by The Next Web. Brian did a great job of describing the community and the benefits of being located here - check it out: Facial recognition startup Kairos chooses Miami as its global launching point.

Remember this?
Props to the Knight foundation for delivering a ton of value to the Miami startup community in the 6 short months since they officially announced their focus on investing in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.
If you want to find out more about Knight’s entrepreneurship focus, from one of the main people behind the above-mentioned ton of value, check out this Miami Herald Q&A with Matt Haggman, Knight Foundation’s Miami program director.

Senzari -> WahWah rebranding has made it onto TechCrunch.

For all of you near West Palm Beach, there is a standing Entrepreneur happy hour on the second Wednesday of each month at the Phillips Point Club, 777 So Flagler Dr.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k or email andrej@thestartupdigest.com.

Most Interesting Events This Week

FTL Meetup: All about WordCamp! (free)

Thursday, March 7 @ 6:30PM | Nova Southeastern University, Carl DeSantis Bldg, 3301 College Avenue, Davie, FL

In honor of WordCamp Miami and the last Fort Lauderdale meetup before their official weekend event on April 5-7, 2013; they’ll be featuring some local WordCamp speakers and all you need to know about WordCamp Miami!

For parking info scroll down on meetup page, below Speakers section.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

OpenHack Miami (free)

Monday, March 11 @ 6:00PM | The Grove Spot, 3324 Virginia Street, Coconut Grove, FL

OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything.

THE BASICS - You can hack on anything! Any language, framework, public/open-source, personal, etc. Skill level doesn’t matter. Whether you’re working on Hello World or on increasing your wizarding level. You don’t have to have an idea to hack on! You’re more than welcome to come just to pair with someone.

Sys admin skills for PHP devs (free)
Thursday, March 13 @ 7:00PM | Revelex Corporation, 6405 Congress Ave, # 120, Boca Raton, FL

This workshop will go over linux and network administration tips, Apache and MySQL configuration, basic security and other related topics.

Beer and Tell: Palm Beach LED Makerspace Start-up Celebration!

Thursday, March 14 @ 8:00PM | Bar Louie, 200 Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, FL

Palm Beach LED is ready to roll out into high-gear with their initiative to build a Makerspace facility in Palm Beach this year. Go and celebrate at Palm Beach Beer and Tell! Please sign their petition of support and fill out the included survey before going! They will make a small presentation about Palm Beach LED and answer questions.

War of the Worlds - UF’s 1st Annual Code and Design War (free)

Friday, March 15, 2013 @ 6:00 PM through Sunday, March 17, 2013 @ 9:00 PM | UF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 686 Museum Rd., Gainesville, FL 32611

War of the Worlds - UF’s 1st Annual Code and Design War, is a team coding/graphics design competition with a common goal: to develop the app that will “save the world”. Together with your team, you will spend 54 hours hacking on code and designing graphics to develop an application that is both functional and beautiful, but also designed to “save humanity”.

Miami Ruby Brigade - Show and Tell  (Monthly Meetup)

Monday, March 18 @ 7:00PM | CareCloud Headquarters, 5200 Blue Lagoon Drive, Suite 900, Miami, FL

Build a chat application or Twitter clone in Rails for fun? Come show it off! Working on any cool open-source stuff? Come show it off! Have a cool startup? Come show it off!

INCUBATE THIS! What Do Incubators Mean To The Entrepreneur And The Community

Tuesday, March 19 @ 6:30PM | VentureHive, 1010 NE 2nd Ave. Miami, FL

There is a lot of buzz around incubators these days, and they seem to be popping up all over south Florida.  At this event you will hear from those who run incubators, and those who have participated in them how incubators fit into the entrepreneurial ecosystem of South Florida.  What do incubators seek to do for the companies that participate? What do they seek to do for the economy and community at large? What are the different business models that incubators operate under? How can an entrepreneur make use of their resources?

Startup Weekend Naples

Friday, March 22 @ 5:00PM through Sunday, March 25 @ 8:00PM | VentureX, 9128 Strada Place, Unit #10115, Naples, FL, 34108

Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups!

WordCamp Beginners Workshop (Davie)

Saturday, March 23 @ 8:00AM | Nova Southeastern University, Carl DeSantis Bldg, 3301 College Avenue, Davie, FL

This full day class is especially tuned for those new to WordPress. Topics covered include everything from hosting, making your first post, finding themes, and basic installing of plugins. This workshop is identical to the one in Miami, but held in Davie, FL on March 23rd at Nova Southeastern University. This workshop is recommended for those who live in Palm Beach/Broward Area.

AT&T Legal/Mobile App Hackathon - Miami (free)

Friday, May 10 @ 6:00PM through Saturday, May 11 @ 10:00PM | Pipeline Brickell, South Tower 8th Floor, 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131

For details, prizes and to register go here.

This event is an experiment in combining the standard hackathon format with Lean-style customer development, with the goal being finding products worth building, rather than simply building products. We will be bringing in legal professionals throughout the 2-day event, as an opportunity to explore their painpoints and collaboratively design solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day operations.

Miami Tech Week just wrapped up and I’m sure most of you are still recuperating. The week was packed with events, with SuperConf as its gravitational center, pulling in a great roster of speakers and workshops, including Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and Alistair Croll, author of Lean Analytics. Besides presenting at SuperConf and teaching one of the SuperConf workshops at the LAB Miami, Neil also taught a workshop at the Venture Hive - a great example of our collaborative community in action.

If you’d like to check out some of the coverage of the events, start with this Herald article, then read about the SuperConf winners on the Starting Gate and The Next Web, check out the SuperConf live coverage archive from Startropica, and meet the UHack winners in this Starting Gate guest post.

If you were looking forward to a break from all the events, you should stop reading now. The momentum continues this Tuesday, with the Miami Herald Business Plan Bootcamp.

On Thursday there is a very interesting Storytelling: Visualization & Modeling workshop at the LAB Miami.

The very next day, at the Venture Hive, we have a presentation from Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper, authors of the Lean Entrepreneur. (the event is free if you purchased the book)

The following week, on March 4th, Ray Kurzweil (!) will be  at FIU, giving a talk on the Acceleration of Technology and its impact on business, economy and the society.

Mike Greenberg, the founder of the FT Lauderdale Hack ‘n Tell, has a guest post on the Starting Gate about creating serendipity in the community, centered around an interesting open lunch initiative.

Naples is having a Startup Weekend event on March 22nd - I encourage you to consider making an appearance for some community cross-pollination.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k.

Most Interesting Events This Week

OpenHack Miami (free)

Monday, February 25 @ 7:00PM | The Grove Spot 3324 Virginia Street, Coconut Grove, FL

OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything.

THE BASICS - You can hack on anything! Any language, framework, public/open-source, personal, etc. Skill level doesn’t matter. Whether you’re working on Hello World or on increasing your wizarding level. You don’t have to have an idea to hack on! You’re more than welcome to come just to pair with someone.

The Miami Herald - Business Plan Bootcamp (free but must register)

Tuesday, February 26 @ 6:30 PM | Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus Auditorium (Room 1261, Building 1, second floor)

Melissa Krinzman, a veteran Business Plan Challenge judge and managing director of Venture Architects, will be leading a panel of experts who will give you advice on crafting a short business plan aimed at grabbing the attention of investors — or judges. If you are entering the Challenge, you are encouraged to bring your entry with you because the panel will critique critical sections of the short plan.

TEDxMIA - TED2013 Live Stream (free but must register & get ticket)

Wednesday, February 27 @ 5:00PM | The Stage 170 Northeast 38th Street, Miami, FL

TED2013: The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered. The line-up features the largest number of speakers in TED’s history — more than 70. That’s because many of the talks this year are shorter. Often 12 minutes or less, instead of 18. And nearly half of the program comes from their first-ever global talent search. Events were held in 14 cities around the world and attracted thousands of applicants, including some truly astounding youngsters.

Beer and Tell: Coconut Creek (free)

Thursday, February 28 @ 8:00PM | World of Beer 4437 Lyons Road Suite E-101 Coconut Creek, FL

For those new to Beer and Tell, it’s a casual meetup for technology lovers and compassionate friends who get dragged along to these sorts of gatherings. It’s a great opportunity to meet others in your community and a nice getaway from the grind. The topics vary but they are inevitably tech focused.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

Beer and Tell: Palm Beach LED Makerspace Start-up Celebration!

Thursday, March 14 @ 8:00PM | Bar Louie, 200 Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, FL

Palm Beach LED is ready to roll out into high-gear with their initiative to build a Makerspace facility in Palm Beach this year. Go and celebrate at Palm Beach Beer and Tell! Please sign their petition of support and fill out the included survey before going! They will make a small presentation about Palm Beach LED and answer questions.

War of the Worlds - UF’s 1st Annual Code and Design War (free)

Friday, March 15, 2013 @ 6:00 PM through Sunday, March 17, 2013 @ 9:00 PM | UF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 686 Museum Rd., Gainesville, FL 32611

War of the Worlds - UF’s 1st Annual Code and Design War, is a team coding/graphics design competition with a common goal: to develop the app that will “save the world”. Together with your team, you will spend 54 hours hacking on code and designing graphics to develop an application that is both functional and beautiful, but also designed to “save humanity”.

The event with the most buzz last week was the Startup City: Miami, a day long event organized by The Atlantic and the Knight Foundation, with over 1100 registered attendees and high profile speakers including Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and Steve Case, co-founder of AOL.

If you missed the event and would like to see what the buzz is all about, you can check out the videos in the livestream archives, or read some of the coverage on the Miami Herald and the Starting Gate.

One of the recurring themes was the importance of the bottom-up, grassroots, entrepreneur-led growth. I would have liked to see more of Miami’s grassroots represented or mentioned at the event, as well as to have had the event integrated into the Miami Tech Week. High-visibility events like this one attract new eyeballs and it would have been great to have had the attendees made aware of the rest of the Miami community.

That said, the event did a great job of starting conversations, bringing people together, importing knowledge and putting a spotlight on our city. Props to the Knight foundation for delivering a ton of value to the Miami startup community in the 6 short months since they officially announced their focus on investing in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Miami Herald Friday Business Report interviewed the founder of Endeavor - the global nonprofit that selects, mentors, supports and accelerates high-impact entrepreneurs - about Endeavor’s new office in Miami, and his views on the city. (you may recall Knight’s $2M grant behind Endeavor’s US expansion; more here)

SuperConf has been named as one of the top North American conferences for entrepreneurs, by the Clarity.fm blog.

Miami-based Vinylfy launched their iOS app which helps record collectors keep track of their record collection.

The Funding Post is organizing a Miami angel and VC event on Feb 28th.

The LAB Miami is holding a carnival themed grand opening celebration on March 2nd.

Senzari is holding a preview of the new version of their music service, WahWah, with the Wahwah Bike and Beer Ride, in partnership with Superconf and LAB Miami. Attendees will ride around Wynwood while listening together to the same music, followed by beer and food trucks at the LAB Miami. Senzari will be giving away a customized Wahwah Electric Bike to one of the attendees.

Beached Miami interviewed Richard Florida about Miami’s future as a startup city.

ProjectLift, the Miami-based seed accelerator focused on the intersection of healthcare and technology, is hosting several open house events, in Brickell, Coral Gables and the Miami Innovation Center. If you are interested in the accelerator, jump on this opportunity to find out more about the program.

Florida Technology Journal reports that Miami-based payment processing startup, BlueKite acquired RedCycle Networks, a developer of bill-payment technology solutions in Latin America.

The Entrepreneurs’ Organization will be holding its global conference in Miami on March 13-17, with over 300 entrepreneurs from 30 countries projected to attend.

Don’t forget that the deadline to enter the Miami Herald’s Business Plan Challenge is March, and check out the 5 reasons to enter the Business Plan Challenge.

The Starting Gate has an interview with the husband/wife team behind Open English.

What else is going on in the Miami startup community? Tweet @andrej_k.

Most Interesting Events This Week

ProjectLift Miami2013: LiftedUp Brickell (free)

Monday, February 18, 2013 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM | RightSpace Management Office Center 1001 Brickell Bay Drive Miami, FL 33131

ProjectLift is Miami’s only seed accelerator specifically focused on the intersection of healthcare and technology! They fund innovation, novel technology, app developers, and IT solutions in the healthcare space—providing the funding, mentoring, and entrepreneurial support necessary to take ideas from seed to successful business.  Join the founders of ProjectLift for a presentation about our unique healthcare seed acceleration program. Meet some of the healthcare professionals behind the program and get a better idea of the types of businesses we are seeking to fund in 2013.

SoFla Android Devs - Everything About Android Location Based Programming that You Were Afraid to Ask (free)

Tuesday, February 19 @ 7:00PM | TBA

This month we have a presentation by Bibhas Bhattacharya, Founder of Vikingo Games, a Miami based mobile gaming startup. He has over 15 years of IT experience specializing in Enterprise Java, Mobile and Web Service.  This talk will explore some of the practical problems most programmers will face when developing a location-based application.

Crowdstorm Book Launch (free)

Tuesday, February 19 @ 6:30 PM | The LAB Miami, 400 Northwest 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127

Shaun Abrahamson will talk about some crowdstorming success and share some of the main ideas from the book. Copies of crowdstorm will be available a the event and Shaun will be on hand to sign them.

Fundraising for Startups with Murat Aktihanoglu (ER Accelerator New York)

Tuesday, February 19 @ 6:00PM | Venture Hive, 1010 Northeast 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL 33132

In this session, Murat will share his experience on the topic of fundraising for startups.  Murat Aktihanoglu is the founder and director of the succesful Entrepreneur RoundTable Accelerator in New York. He is also the author of the book “Building Location-Aware Applications”, published by Manning Publications.

Front End Developers of Miami: Using Chrome Dev Tools & Yahoo! Cocktails, mojito and YUI (free)

Tuesday, February 19 @ 7:00PM | O Cinema, 90 NW 29th Street , Miami, FL

A monthly MeetUp group for Front-End Engineers in Miami. Two talks this month:

SPEAKER #1: How to Effectively Use Dev Chrome Tools with Neeraj Singh

SPEAKER #2: Yahoo! Cocktails, Mojito and yui with Caridy Patino

Refresh Miami:  Technology Meets Food (free)

Wednesday, February 20 @ 7:30 PM | Miami Dade Wolfson Campus, 300 Northeast 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL 33132

Discover the science and technology that is rapidly changing what we eat. This will be less of a typical Refresh event, and more in the style of a TED event. Top chefs will be demonstrating how they use modern technology to innovate in the food industry.

SuperConf 2013 ($175 - $300) ($50 off with code “STARTUPDIGEST”)

Thursday, February 21 @ 9:00AM - Friday, February 22 @ 5:00PM | James L Knight Center 400 Southeast 2nd Avenue Miami, FL 33131

Learn how to grow your startup from 1 to 1 Million users. Learn how to raise your first million in venture funding. Discover how to design apps used by people around the world. Our heroes are going to give you the tools to build super startups.

Wahwah Bike and Beer Ride @ LAB Miami (free)

Thursday, February 21 @ 6:30PM | The LAB Miami, 400 NW 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127

Wahwah is the evolution of Senzari’s music service and to honor its Miami roots, Senzari will be giving members of our community the first ever look into this exciting new service before it launches at SXSW in a few weeks.

Miami Herald’s Small Business Forum ($25)

Thursday, February 21 @ 8:00AM | FIU, South Campus  

The annual small business forum will include interactive opportunities with experts to, learn about financing options, and polish your personal and business brands; in addition to how-to panels and inspirational stories from successful entrepreneurs.

UHack 2013 - Student Hackathon for South Florida (free but must register)

Saturday, February 23 @ 8:00AM - Sunday, February 24 @ 8:00PM| University of Miami - University Center Coral Gables, FL

The University of Miami IEEE and ACM would like to bring you UHack, a 24-hour hackathon (app creation event). UHack will take place at the end of Miami Tech Week. They are open to any student from any educational institution who would like to win great prizes and take some time off their semester by making something fun and possibly win some great prizes.

Think:Code:Meme Impact Obesity Hackathon (free)

Saturday, February 23, 2013 @ 9:00AM through Sunday, February 24, 2013 @ 7:00PM| University of Miami Life Science & Technology Park 1951 Northwest 7th Avenue Miami, FL 33136

A Hack-a-thon Focused on Obesity In Minority Communities and in Concert with the University of Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute. This is an event focused on the collective challenge of overcoming obesity in our community. The goal is to bring together teams who have a business idea around the topic of managing and reducing obesity.

Most Interesting Upcoming Events

The Miami Herald - Business Plan Bootcamp (free but must register)

Tuesday, February 26 @ 6:30 PM | Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus Auditorium (Room 1261, Building 1, second floor)

Melissa Krinzman, a veteran Business Plan Challenge judge and managing director of Venture Architects, will be leading a panel of experts who will give you advice on crafting a short business plan aimed at grabbing the attention of investors — or judges. If you are entering the Challenge, you are encouraged to bring your entry with you because the panel will critique critical sections of the short plan.

TEDxMIA - TED2013 Live Stream (free but must register & get ticket)

Wednesday, February 27 @ 5:00PM | The Stage 170 Northeast 38th Street, Miami, FL

TED2013: The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered. The line-up features the largest number of speakers in TED’s history — more than 70. That’s because many of the talks this year are shorter. Often 12 minutes or less, instead of 18. And nearly half of the program comes from their first-ever global talent search. Events were held in 14 cities around the world and attracted thousands of applicants, including some truly astounding youngsters.

War of the Worlds - UF’s 1st Annual Code and Design War (free)

Friday, March 15, 2013 @ 6:00 PM through Sunday, March 17, 2013 @ 9:00 PM | UF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 686 Museum Rd., Gainesville, FL 32611

War of the Worlds - UF’s 1st Annual Code and Design War, is a team coding/graphics design competition with a common goal: to develop the app that will “save the world”. Together with your team, you will spend 54 hours hacking on code and designing graphics to develop an application that is both functional and beautiful, but also designed to “save humanity”.