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Miami Startup Digest 05-20-2013
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.
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.