Events showcase Miami’s growth as tech center

One by one, representatives from six startup companies walked onto the wooden stage and presented their products or services to a full house of about 200 investors, mentors, and other supporters Thursday at Incubate Miami’s DemoDay in the loft-like Grand Central in downtown Miami. With a large screen behind them projecting their graphs and charts, they set out to persuade the funders in the room to part with some of their green and support the tech community.

Just 24 hours later, from an elaborate “dojo stage,” a drummer warmed up the crowd of several hundred before a “Council of Elders” entered the ring to share wisdom as the all-day free event opened. Called TekFight, part education, part inspiration, and part entertainment, the tournament-style program challenged entrepreneurs to earn points to “belt up” throughout the day to meet with the “masters” of the tech community.

The two events, which kicked off Innovate MIA week, couldn’t be more different. But in their own ways, like a one-two punch, they exuded the spirit and energy growing in the startup community.

One of the goals of the TekFight event was to introduce young entrepreneurs and students to the tech community, because not everyone has found it yet and it’s hard to know where to start, said Saif Ishoof, the executive director of City Year Miami who co-founded TekFight as a personal project. And throughout the event, he and co-founder Jose Antonio Hernandez-Solaun, as well as Binsen J. Gonzalez and Jeff Goudie, wanted to find creative, engaging ways to offer participants access to some of the community’s most successful leaders.

That would include Alberto Dosal, chairman of CompuQuip Technologies; Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of CareCloud; Jorge Plasencia, chairman and CEO of Republica; Jaret Davis, co-managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurig; and more than two dozen other business and community leaders who shared their war stories and offered advice. Throughout the day, the event was live-streamed on the Web, a TekFight app created by local entrepreneur and UM student Tyler McIntyre kept everyone involved in the tournament and tweets were flying — with #TekFight trending No. 1 in the Miami area for parts of the day. “Next time Art Basel will know not to try to compete with TekFight,” Ishoof quipped.

‘Miami is a hotbed’

After a pair of Chinese dragons danced through the audience, Andre J. Gudger, director for the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Small Business Programs, entered the ring. “I’ve never experienced an event like this,” Gudger remarked. “Miami is a hotbed for technology but nobody knew it.”

Gudger shared humorous stories and practical advice on ways to get technology ideas heard at the highest levels of the federal government. “Every federal agency has a director over small business — find out who they are,” he said. He has had plenty of experience in the private sector: Gudger, who wrote his first computer program on his neighbor’s computer at the age of 12, took one of his former companies from one to 13,000 employees.

There were several rounds that pitted an entrepreneur against an investor, such as Richard Grundy, of the tech startup Flomio, vs. Jonathan Kislak, of Antares Capital, who asked Grundy, “why should I give you money?”

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Driver of fatal MIA bus crash that killed two offers his “deepest sympathy.”

The driver behind the wheel of a bus that rammed into an overpass at Miami International Airport — killing two passengers and leaving many more injured — expressed his sympathies Thursday to those affected, while a group of survivors began speaking with a lawyer.

On Thursday, a relative sent out a short statement in Spanish from driver Ramon Ferreiro. In it, Ferreiro extended his “deepest sympathy” to the families of those killed in “the terrible accident.”

“I know there are no words of comfort for what happened, but my family and I are praying for all those affected and their loved ones,” he wrote in Spanish. “I’m emotionally and physically very shocked by what happened, and for this reason I ask you to respect my family’s privacy during this difficult time.”

The crash happened a few minutes before 7:30 a.m. Saturday. The bus carried members of a Jehovah’s Witness congregation on their way to the annual general assembly meeting in West Palm Beach.

Ferreiro, 47, took a wrong turn on Le Jeune Road. He sped past multiple signs warning of the low clearance at the airport’s arrival concourse, smashing the 11-foot-tall bus into an overpass.

Two people sitting in the front were killed; the remaining 30 passengers went to hospitals for examinations and treatment.

As of Thursday, four people from the crash remained at Jackson Memorial Hospital, spokeswoman Lidia Amoretti said. Of the group, three were in good condition and one was in critical.

Another eight people admitted after the crash already had been discharged.

And some of the survivors have begun speaking with West Palm Beach lawyer Patrick Cousins.

Cousins, who also is Jehovah’s Witness, said that members of his religion tend to shy away from legal battles, and that’s why he hopes to settle the matter with the bus service’s insurance company out of court.

The goal, he said, would be to get compensation for costs such as their hospital bills.

“We are not the type of people to create problems or issues,” Cousins said. “But this is not something we really created. We just want to make sure everybody gets their compensation.”

Saturday’s accident appears to be the first blemish on the record of both the driver and the bus company, Miami Bus Service Corp., which is owned by Mayling and Alberto Hernandez.

Ferreiro has a valid commercial driver’s license with the proper endorsement to carry passengers, according to records from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

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For his next crisis

Saving the planet isn’t easy — or cheap — especially in California. The state’s anti-global-warming cap-and-trade program is the latest gimmick to leave it with yet another big hole to fill in its budget.

The Golden State’s new carbon-trading program is the world’s second largest, after the European Union’s. The stated goal is to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and another 80 percent by 2050.

But California held its very first “carbon credit” auction last month — and it was a big disappointment.

Under cap-and-trade, regulators set a limit on how much carbon dioxide a business or utility may release into the atmosphere. (Yes, the government now considers CO2, the same gas you and I release every time we exhale, a pollutant it can regulate.)

AP

Brown: California gov falls billion or so short on revenue anticipated from “carbon credit” sales.

Businesses buy credits from the state, which allows them to “pollute.” Those who don’t exceed their licensed limit on CO2 emissions may sell surplus credits to other businesses that do.

On Nov. 17, California’s Air Resources Board announced the first auction’s results: the full allotment of 23.1 million credits had sold out.

Environmentalists and bureaucrats hailed it as a big success. But the accountants at the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office killed the buzz quickly.

Turns out, state budgeteers had assumed the fisc would balloon with $1 billion in new cap-and-trade revenue in the program’s first year alone. Half of the money would go toward various state initiatives to cut greenhouse gases, and the rest would help balance the state’s perpetually off-kilter budget.

Lawmakers had such high hopes for that cash. So high, in fact, that the money’s already spent.

Now we learn California will likely take in just $191 million, the legislative analyst says. The state already faced a deficit in June, but the disappointing carbon-credit sales mean it will be much larger — $1.9 billion and counting.

That’s tough news, just a month after voters passed a $6 billion tax hike to help fill last year’s $16 billion deficit.

How could regulators and budget forecasters be so far off? The evidence suggests that was the intention.

California’s budget hasn’t really balanced in at least a decade. Year in, year out, state leaders rely on a complex series of accounting gimmicks and far-fetched assumptions to reach “balance.” For example, the state Department of Finance said Facebook’s stock offering would generate a cool $1.5 billion; it was off by at least $625 million.

Supply and demand also helps explain the disparity. The opening bid for California’s carbon credits was $10 per metric ton of CO2. The final bid: just $10.09 per metric ton. Nine cents higher.

Even though the credits sold out, the demand just wasn’t as great as regulators hoped. Right now, businesses — especially manufacturers — aren’t interested in paying a premium for the privilege of “polluting” when they aren’t planning to grow or are looking to abandon California entirely, thanks to the state’s foul business climate.

Comcast just closed its call centers in California, laying off 1,000 workers; Campbell’s Soup this summer announced it would shut down a plant outside of Sacramento, shedding 700 jobs.

But Golden State politics played an even bigger role in the cap-and-trade bust. Despite a sluggish economic recovery and persistently high unemployment, California’s political class holds fast to the idea that the state’s future is green and that a top-down cap-and-trade scheme is the key to it all.

Earlier this year, Gov. Jerry Brown claimed cap-and-trade would pay for his beloved $68 billion bullet train, which is behind schedule and about $60 billion short of funds.

“We do have other sources of money” for high-speed rail, the governor assured an interviewer in January. “For example, cap-and-trade . . . will be a source of funding going forward for the high-speed rail.” Oops.

Nor was that the only goof. As the legislative analyst pointed out, building a high-speed rail system would put a lot of carbon in the air, from all those diesel-burning bulldozers and trucks.

California’s green fantasy appears to have met cold reality. Perhaps, instead of putting faith in policy gimmicks, Brown and his fellow Democrats can try fiscal discipline sometime.

Southern Californian Ben Boychuk is an associate editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a contributor to PublicSectorInc.org.

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New equity options exchange owned by Miami company starts trading on Friday

MIAX Options Exchange, a new fully electronic, equity options trading exchange, said it will begin trading on Friday.

MIAX Options Exchange is based in Princeton, N.J., but its parent company is Miami International Holdings. While MIAX’s executive offices, technology development center and national operations center are based in Princeton, additional executive offices, and a multi-purpose training, meeting and conference center will be located in Miami, the company said.

MIAX Options Exchange’s trading platform has been developed in-house and designed for the functional and performance demands of derivatives trading, the company said.

INA PAIVA CORDLE

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To win in 2014, Florida Democrats must build on momentum

Democrats just concluded their most successful Florida election cycle in more than three decades, not just delivering the state to President Barack Obama and re-electing Sen. Bill Nelson, but also picking up state House, state Senate, and Congressional seats.

But don’t get cocky, Florida Democrats. In many respects, 2014 is more important for the vitality of the party than 2012.

As you prepare to elect a new state party chairman there’s every reason to worry heading into the new election cycle, even against vulnerable Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

You won’t have the massive Obama grassroots machine registering and turning out tens of thousands of new voters. Or a lavishly funded TV campaign like Obama’s. And if past is prologue, Florida Republicans will have far stronger turnout than Democrats.

“Democrats have a long history of not coming out to vote in the non-presidential election years. We’ve seen that four times in a row,” Alex Sink, the 2010 Democratic nominee for governor and potential 2014 candidate, said in a Political Connections interview on Bay News 9.

“The big question I believe for Democrats in the next election is how much of that energy and enthusiasm that we had during this presidential election can carry on to the 2014 races,” Sink said. “I think it’s probably going to be unfortunately very difficult.”

On Jan. 26 in Orlando, Democratic Party leaders will elect a new leader to succeed former state Sen. Rod Smith of Alachua, who took the helm of the state party after a GOP wave left Democrats holding just one of Florida’s six statewide offices, Nelson’s Senate seat.

Against that change of leadership, there is no more important question facing the party than whether it can take advantage of demographic changes in Florida and come even close to following the model set by the Obama campaign.

“We’re at the threshold of a new Florida, and we’ve got to seize that opportunity,” said Alan Clendenin, an air-traffic controller and union organizer in Tampa running for party chairman against Annette Taddeo-Goldstein, a Miami-Dade County businesswoman and former candidate for Congress and County Commission.

“Demographics are on our side, the issues are on our side, the wind is at our back, and we just can’t screw it up,” said Clendenin, 53, whose extensive “Rebrand, Rebuild, Recruit” plan for the state party includes decentralizing to create at least five “regional hubs,” more emphasis on low-dollar fundraising, and a “bottom-up” structure for grassroots organizing.

A key to Obama winning Florida’s 29 electoral votes was his strong performance among African-Americans, Hispanics, and voters under 30 — overwhelmingly Democratic groups that tend to show up in much lower numbers during off-year elections.

“The question is how do we take what is the Obama coalition and translate that to a Democratic coalition that outlasts Obama,” said outgoing party chairman Smith.

Consider that in 2008 the Florida electorate was 42 percent Democratic and 39 percent Republican. Two years later, when Scott narrowly beat Sink, it was 45 percent Republican and 39 percent Democratic.

In non-presidential years, the Florida electorate is invariably older, whiter, and much more Republican.

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In brewing rivalry, Instagram trims ties to Twitter

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc’s recently acquired photo-sharing service Instagram removed a key element of its integration with Twitter, signaling a deepening rift between two of the Web’s dominant social media companies.

Instagram Chief Executive Kevin Systrom said Wednesday his company turned off support for Twitter “cards” in order to drive Twitter users to Instagram’s own website. Twitter “cards” are a feature that allows multimedia content like YouTube videos and Instagram photos to be embedded and viewed directly within a Twitter message.

The move marked the latest clash between Facebook and Twitter since April, when Facebook, the world’s no. 1 social network, outbid Twitter to nab fast-growing Instagram in a cash-and-stock deal valued at the time at $ 1 billion. The acquisition closed in September for roughly $ 715 million, reflecting Facebook’s recent stock drop.

The companies’ ties have been strained since. In July, Twitter blocked Instagram from using its data to help new Instagram users find friends.

Beginning earlier this week, Twitter’s users began to complain in public messages that Instagram photos did not seem to display properly on Twitter’s website.

Systrom confirmed Wednesday that his company had decided its users should view photos on Instagram’s own Web pages and took steps to change its policies.

“We believe the best experience is for us to link back to where the content lives,” Systrom said in a statement, citing recent improvements to Instagram’s website.

“A handful of months ago, we supported Twitter cards because we had a minimal Web presence,” Systrom said, noting that the company has since released new features that allow users to comment about and “like” photos directly on Instagram’s website.

The move escalates a rivalry in the fast-growing social networking sector, where the biggest players have sought to wall off access to content from rival services and to their ranks of users.

“They’re both competing for slices of the same pie, the pie being users’ attention,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst with research firm Gartner.

If Facebook decides to offer advertising on Instagram, it’s important that the users visit Instagram’s own website, said Valdes. “If the eyeballs are elsewhere, you have less to work with in terms of monetization,” he said.

Photos are among the most popular features on both Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram’s meteoric rise in recent years has further proved how picture-sharing has become a key front in the battle for social Internet supremacy.

Instagram, which has 100 million users, allows consumers to tweak the photos they take on their smartphones and share the images with friends, a feature that Twitter has reportedly also begun to develop. Twitter’s executive chairman, Jack Dorsey, was an early investor in Instagram and had hoped to acquire it before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a successful bid.

When Zuckerberg announced the acquisition in an April blog post, he highlighted Instagram’s inter-connectivity with other social networks.

“We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks.”

A Twitter spokesman declined comment Wednesday, but a status message on Twitter’s website confirmed that users are “experiencing issues,” such as “cropped images” when viewing Instagram photos on Twitter.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic and Gerry Shih; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Leslie Adler)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Neon Trees Kicks Off Stageside Live Concert Series

Alternative rock back Neon Trees is kicking off CBS' new concert series, Stageside Live, streaming now!

RELATED: New Music Tuesday!

Neon Trees hit the scene in 2010 with their first major release, Habits, featuring the double platinum lead single, Animal. From there the band made it to No. 6 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart with the release of their second album, Picture Show, in 2012, and it looks to be a promising New Year for the Utah natives, as they're set to join Maroon 5 on their North American arena tour, launching on February 13.

Tonight's performance comes to you live from The Moody Theater in Austin, Texas. Click here to stay up-to-date on who will next appear on the concert series.

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Bet the Ranch on healthy living

If you’re familiar with the Canyon Ranch brand — with its flagship Tucson, Ariz.-based health and wellness resort, where those with the cash get away and get fit — entering Miami Beach’s Canyon Ranch is kind of what you’d expect, if a little more Miami. Ponytailed mothers and daughters lounge in Lululemon. Couples in their twilight years and track pants sip smoothies. Men of a certain age in gym shorts and earbuds stretch out their quads.

If you’ve never heard of Canyon Ranch, as my husband had not before we arrived for a recent weekend stay, you might be in for something of a surprise. The woman who checked us in said, in faux astonishment, staring at the beverage clutched in my husband’s hand, “You can’t drink Diet Coke at Canyon Ranch!” (His response was to chug it. Sufficiently shamed, subsequent Diet Cokes were consumed furtively and off property.)

TWO-BEDROOM TOWNHOUSE WITH DEN, $3.2 MILLION: This oceanfront, two-story, 3,105-square-foot, fully furnished residence is designed by Saccaro USA, the Miami outpost of the Brazilian furniture and interior-design firm. It includes 3 1/2 bathrooms, a kitchen with a cooking island, Sub-Zero and Miele appliances and Italian cabinets, two balconies and selections from Saccaro USA owner Katia Silva, including hand-stitched Brazilian rugs, driftwood tables, textured wallpaper and pieces from designers including Roque Frizzo and Tina Azevedo. Agent: Michael Sadov, Pordes Residential, 786-245-8379

The confusion on his face deepened as she handed us a schedule of exercise classes, a gym bag and a water bottle. As we settled in, even I was impressed by the level of commitment the guests and the resort maintain.

At Canyon Ranch, fries are made from sliced artichoke hearts (mmmm) and bagels from hemp (meh). Everyone works out and, in between, spends hours in monkish brown robes and rubber slippers moving between saunas and “igloos,” rain showers and foot baths.

This is where you go to relax on heated chaises and spend a fortune on spa treatments. (My 50-minute prenatal massage cost $150.) A detox retreat.

Or in Miami, where there are 430 separate condo residences along with the 150 sold-out hotel-condo units, possibly a lifestyle.

Just four years ago, Miami’s Canyon Ranch was another sad example of a big idea gone bust. WSG Development had finished the complex, which included the renovation of the old Carillon hotel flanked by the construction of two brand-new residential towers. A large portion of the condos had sold pre-construction for prices exceeding $1,000 per square foot. Then the economy collapsed. The developer defaulted on loans. Lehman Brothers, the lender, reclaimed the project. And most of the buyers walked away.

It’s taken two brokerages, a 25 to 30 percent price slash and a lot of time for the project to turn around. But turn around it has.

“We started off in the $600s to $700s a square foot,” says Mark Pordes, CEO of Pordes Residential, which Lehman hired to sell the remainder of the building in 2010. “We slowly started to graduate the price as we saw traction in 2011.”

Of the more than 300 units his firm was tasked with selling, Pordes only has three townhouses and “nine or 10” developer units that have yet to come to market. The townhouses are priced upwards of $800 per square foot.

“We came in, we really outreached to the market, we sourced our network, we really had a streamlined marketing plan,” says Pordes, whose firm has something of a reputation for coming in and saving stalled projects. It sold the rest of One Bal Harbour and Terra Beachside, other struggling Miami condo developments. But there are fewer struggling buildings to save in Miami these days.

“We’re looking into some deals in northern Florida, condos on the beach in the Panhandle area. We’re looking at some things in Las Vegas, and we’re looking at some new pre-construction opportunities, because there aren’t a lot of standing inventory opportunities left in Miami and in Aventura and Sunny Isles,” Pordes says. “We’re getting calls and we’re busy.”

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Innovate MIA puts spotlight on startup community

If you think the next week is all about art, you may be surprised to learn there are also six entrepreneurship events vying for your time.

And that is all by design.

In much the way that Art Basel helped put Miami’s arts community on the international map, organizers of the first Innovate MIA hope their weeklong grouping of events will shine a light on the city’s growing tech startup community and its position as the gateway to Latin America.

Many of the events — ending with Florida International University’s Americas Venture Capital Conference — are after Art Basel. That’s also why the third annual AVCC was moved to Dec. 13-14 from its previous mid-November dates.

“Our message is come for Art Basel, and stay for AVCC,” said Juan Pablo Cappello, a lawyer, entrepreneur and investor who is on the steering committee of the venture capital conference and several other Innovate MIA events. And all week, there will be plenty of opportunities for Miami’s entrepreneurs, creatives and investors to mingle with their counterparts from all over the Americas and beyond.

In addition to the AVCC, there’s Incubate Miami’s DemoDay, where its class of startups present their companies, the martial arts-inspired TekFight and HackDay, which dangles a $50,000 cash prize. Endeavor, the global nonprofit that promotes high-impact entrepreneurship in emerging economies, is bringing its two-day International Selection Panel to Miami, and Wayra, an international accelerator, is holding a one-day event to showcase its promising startups from Latin America and Spain. It’s all part of Innovate MIA week: “I don’t think anything like it has ever been organized here in South Florida,” Cappello said.

The AVCC will be the big draw, with about 300 people expected to attend the two-day event at the JW Marriott Brickell. The conference, themed “Data, Design & Dollars,” will feature thought leaders from all over the world, particularly Latin America, and presentations by 29 selected companies. This year, the format has been overhauled and energized, with lots of short talks and more time for question-and-answer sessions and networking, said Jerry Haar, associate dean of FIU’s College of Business, director of the Pino Global Entrepreneurship Center and AVCC co-chair.

The AVCC’s 36 speakers include Martin Varsavsky, Argentine tech entrepreneur, investor and founder of Viatel, Ya.com, Jazztel and FON; Hernan J. Kazah, co-founder and managing partner at Kaszek Ventures and co-founder of Mercadolibre; and Jason L. Baptiste, CEO and co-founder of Onswipe. There’s also Michael Jackson, former COO of Skype and now a venture capitalist; Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of Miami-based CareCloud; and Bedy Yang of 500 Startups.

Chosen from more than 100 applicants, the 29 presenting companies hailing from all over the Americas will be giving either two-minute or five-minute pitches, fielding questions from a panel of judges and competing for prize packages valued at about $50,000. Eight of the startups are from South Florida: itMD, Kairos, Trapezoid Digital Security, Esenem, LiveNinja, OnTrade, Rokk3r Labs and Zavee.

The presenting companies have “proven innovation, proven management teams and the ability to scale well and be a pan-regional player,” said Faquiry Diaz Cala, president of Tres Mares Group and co-chair of AVCC. “The word is out this is a great place to come and pitch to great investors in addition to potentially being one of the prize winners.”

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State high court denies appeals by former Sweetwater cop slated for execution

The Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday denied appeals by former Sweetwater cop and mass killer Manuel Pardo, who is slated to be executed next week.

Prosecutors said Pardo, 56, and cohort Rolando Garcia committed nine murders during the 1980s, ripping off drug dealers and people who could implicate them in the crimes. At a 1988 trial, he admitted the murders, saying he was ridding the streets of the “scum of the earth.”

At trial, lawyers for Pardo — a former highway patrolman, Boy Scout leader and decorated Navy veteran — argued he was insane at the time of the crimes.

After Gov. Rick Scott signed his death warrant in October, Pardo’s lawyers asked Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Stanford Blake to stay the execution, saying Pardo had not been given all the public records associated with his case and that back in the 1980s he was incompetent to stand trial.

Pardo’s lawyers also said state’s method of lethal injection was “cruel and unusual” punishment. Blake denied the appeals.

On Tuesday, the Florida Supreme Court upheld Blake’s decision, saying Pardo’s claims about lethal injection were based on “pure speculation and conjecture.”

Pardo is slated to be executed Dec. 11 at the Florida State Prison in Starke.

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