In the spirit of creating a lively discourse about the South Florida Tech Community, I figure I should revisit where my involvement began. This story begins in 2005.

Prior to the creation of RefreshMiami I had been to maybe a handful of Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce events, in particular the tech committee events, and was completely unaware of any other pre-existing groups. When I created Refresh Miami 4 years ago (registering the domain and setting up the google group yada yada), I was looking to connect with other geeks and web professionals. I wanted to find a group of people to bounce ideas off of and to share tips and techniques with for building things on the web. Along the way I’ve met lots of great people, lots of characters, and been continuously impressed with the caliber of people down here in South Florida. As a native South Floridian, yes there are some of us still left here, I’d set my expectations incredibly low for what to expect from tech in South Florida. Yet despite my initially low expectations, I now believe we have the pieces here to build a vibrant and prosperous technology community in this area.

When Refresh began, I had no expectations for it. I’d have been perfectly content if it hadn’t grown beyond a few dozen people. I didn’t care. I had no financial reason for needing Refresh to be big. It was purely a social outlet for me. Over the years I’ve come to realize there are some major benefits to the Refresh community by having it grow (job opportunities, business partnerships, increased exposure, etc.). So who knows, maybe my naivete in the beginning was detrimental to the growth of Refresh. Maybe had I been more focused on growth and expanding it, it could be 10x bigger than it is now. It is possible, but I think we would have imploded as a community if it had grown too fast. Refresh has a very tight knit community, much more tightly knit than any other group of its size I’ve seen in South Florida that is loosely formed around a professional or educational interest. These bonds are one of the reasons why I love Refresh. The discussions that emerge throughout the community are the other.

Refresh is about communication, ideas, and their free exchange. Refresh is about democratizing the tech discussion. This ethos is why we let anyone with an idea to share present (excluding sales pitches, those are strictly forbidden; if I am going to see a sales pitch, I better be getting tickets to Disney World or something). So Refresh was started to spark the discussion. These discussions have spread and flourished throughout South Florida, many spawning their own social groups.

When I hear complaints/comments about the community having too many meetups and tweetups, I think we as a community have done our jobs well. The fact that there is now enough demand for discussion about Social Media to warrant its own club is fantastic. Same goes for PHP, Ruby, SEO, WordPress, whatever. The more clubs/groups/meetups, the better. That means there are enough people living in our community who are so passionate about technology that they need to find other people to meetup with to bounce their ideas off of, and to share tips and techniques for their particular craft.

I can only hope that these new groups in turn spawn a thousand more groups on every topic from using iPhoto to Photoshop, iMovie to Premiere, iWeb to machine language.

I can only hope the next 4 years are even more exciting. So let’s get out there and spark a discussion. Cheers to you South Florida, for Refreshing this community.

In this seemingly interminable series, which has covered everything, then shifted to the government, then local business, most recently the individuals, and now we’re taking a look at the role of the money men in relation to the future of tech in south florida.

The primary reason I hear from entrepreneurs/startup guys here in South Florida for considering leaving the area is not lack of access to talent, but lack of access to money. Now we all know South Florida has a lot of money flowing through it (despite the city of Miami technically being one of the “poorest” ), though very little of it in the form of venture capital. There are a lot of rich individuals flowing through our neck of the woods as well, as is evident by the bevvy of Bentleys and Ferraris spotted on any day of the week down Brickell Ave or Ocean Drive.

According to crunchbase there are only 8 financial organizations with offices within 200 miles of Miami, FL with 25 investments. Though this really doesn’t account for the 30+ companies throughout South Florida which have taken venture funding from sources all over the country and the world (again according to CB). [Bridget Carey mentioned some larger figures in her Silicon Beach article, I'm not a journalist, so I don't know where to look for those figures, ask her ]

[note: I started writing this months ago, and never got around to finishing it. So excuse the fact that my train of thought sorta splits here]

My theory is that the well heeled investors that typically spend down here in South Florida, spend on Bio-Tech, for one reason: they get it. Bio-tech investing is simple to grasp: fund research or ideas to solve a tangible problem (cancer, drugs, viruses, bacterias, etc.). Software investing is tougher to put a finger on it. Imagine you’re not in the loop so to speak and someone comes up to you and tells you they need a million bucks to create a new elastic computing system that will revolutionize the data transfer systems being used in data centers. WTF does that even mean to someone without a technical background? Nothing. There are no tangible problems or issues that this solves to the non-technically inclined.

So what is it that we need to do in order to attract Investors? Well this ongoing chicken/egg situation isn’t as bad as one would think. Realistically with the affordability of servers and software these days, anyone can build a prototype quickly and easily, and get it to a stage where it becomes an easier sell to investors. But the beauty of being somewhere substantially cheaper than Silicon Valley, New York, London, or Tokyo, we can build out our prototypes quickly and cheaply. You don’t need a million bucks here to get to that series A or even the Angel round. You need creativity and hustle. Miami is a city filled with HUSTLE. People are very hard working here. Every morning from 5am on our highways are packed with people commuting long distances to work long hours in order to make ends meet.

Miami is the american dream realized for much of our population. We have people from all over the world who come here for a second chance. So we can’t sit around waiting for money and opportunity to come to us. We need to pull ourselves up and get to work. If we start building cool, innovative stuff, paired with our South Floridian work ethic, the money will flow. I guarantee it.

After having organized the second Facebook Developer Garage in Miami this past weekend, it got me thinking about the other developer platforms out there, and why some are successful and some not. One of the key examples that came to mind was that of LinkedIn. You would think that LinkedIn would have a thriving developer community because LinkedIn has millions of users, all validated to some degree, a strong social graph, and its oriented around making $.

Well to date (after almost a year of having a developer platform) there are only 10 applications in their directory. TEN APPLICATIONS. So why are there only 10 apps serving a community of some 30 Million+ users? Basically LinkedIN didn’t take their community seriously. They seem to have rushed their platform announcement out and pushed it to a handful of elite/select developers whom they knew, and then never bothered to get around to the rest. They saw everyone else jumping on the OpenSocial/platform craze and I’m sure their investors told them they better be on that train as well.

So why do I think LinkedIN has been dragging their feet on their platform while everyone else is welcoming developers in with open arms? I think its about money. They see the facebook economy surpassing $500 Million a year and don’t want to have that go on in their site and miss out on taking a large cut. The other thing they fear is that they charge for services on their site and they could all easily be replicated through apps and again they would lose out on the revenue from those functions. Why would you pay for job postings if I could build a free jobs app and get you just as much exposure, or email contacts or crm, etc.

So what has LinkedIN done so far? Just link to the OpenSocial documentation and suggest you email them if you have an app you want included. No sandbox to test, no documentation on which LinkedIn specific calls you can make, what data you have available to you, nothing. Way to build a garden, then throw up a gate around it and not let anyone in.

What should they be doing though, is build or partner for their own transaction engine, require that app developers who charge use their engine (its only fair), then open the flood gates. That $50M they made last year from their own small set of services would explode to making $200-$300M from shares of other transactions throughout the system. Just build out their own set of tools in partnership with sites like Monster.com or others to supplement their own existing toolset, and let the community fill in the thousands of holes that will surely arise. Its not like your own internal team can build all those tools and monetizing apps on its own. So focus on building the platform + payments and you’ll have a killer role.

So I’ve uploaded the 2 videos from refreshmiami august meetup. In the first one I talk about marketing on social networks/the social graph. The second part I discuss the facebook platform, which if you know me is my current obsession at the moment.

So here we go.

RefreshMiami – 082907 – Brian from brbreslin and Vimeo.

facebook:

RefreshMiami – 08.29.07 – Facebook from brbreslin and Vimeo.

So for those of you in Miami this coming wednesday, you might want to check out the August Refresh meeting. I’ll be one of the two featured speakers (the other being my good friend Alex de Carvalho ).

I will be talking about facebook primarily, but also the social graph (network to you noobs), and how it all ties into your business. So if you are interested in understanding the way the new facebook and other social platforms are going to be changing the way business on the net works, then definitely come by. The event is open to anyone, and I am guaranteeing* it will be interesting .

*Note guarantee not redeemable in 1st world countries.

So while walking through the expo part of the SXSW conference today I ran into a guy who I had lunch with randomly a year ago at the 37signals getting real workshop! Turns out this guy, Bryan Zmijewski, has created this new type of stock photo site called LuckyOliver. LuckyOliver is a new type of stock photo site, similar to iStockphoto, but with its own twist. Plus the whole site is built on Rails.

I haven’t had too much chance to run through it yet, but the interface is gorgeous. Anyway, I encourage you to support this cool team of people, and maybe take a look at photos of some beautiful places.

First off, thanks to everyone for coming out and participating in Barcamp: Miami last night. Also I’d like to thank Alex, Nick, and Kim for doing all the organizing and coordinating, this event wouldn’t have come together if it wasn’t for them. Big thanks to UM school of communication, the Knight Center, Aurora Ventures, and Scrapblog for offering their sponsorship assistance.
So we had a great turnout, over 60 people showed up! We had a great assortnment of presentations by a number of highly interesting and enthusiastic presenters. Hopefully we can get some of these presenters to upload the videos/slides/notes over the next few weeks.

When is the next barcamp? You decide! We’re thinking sometime in the next 6 months(august?). We’ll keep you posted right here though.

So a distant relative of mine, Jorge Arango, in Panama (the country, not the party town in Florida) just posted info about their first usability/IA workshop in the area. UXCamp Panama was probably the first of its kind in all of central america, just don’t quote me on that.

Its great to see growth in the communities of web developers all over the world. Now if only we could get the UXCamp to come here to Miami too…