[JustTim]

"- I regularly brainstorm with others in the SoFL entrepreneurial and tech circles as we look for ways to grow our community and attract talent to our market."

Tell us more...

Thanks Tim - an entrepreneur/small biz owner who spend half his time in SoFL

[mikegreenberg]

First, welcome to HackerNews. ;)

There are individuals down here who are working on projects, initiatives, and events that will ultimately enrich our community down here. Co-working spaces are growing for entrepreneurs, programmers, and small business owners to get bootstrapped with resources easily. Organizers are creating engaging, educational and inspiring events that are attracting some great attention nationally. There is a need here and figuring out how to address the need is a constant discussion topic among these people.

Personally, I run the South Florida Hack and Tell (http://hackandtell.org) and we're looking to start quarterly workshops that teach a specific topic or technology. There are several who are organizing hack-a-thons and are getting the attention and support of larger companies in Silicon Valley. We have our own conference and tech week in March which has been getting bigger the past few years. Groups of us are involved in the government and city development circles and are working the bureaucratic routes.

If you're interested (I'm speaking to any South Floridian who's interested in growing this community), it's not hard to find out how to contribute to the scene down here and all it takes is getting involved. Feel free to come out to any of the events (http://miamitechevents.com) and start asking what you can do. See what other people are doing. Offer suggestions and insight on what could be done better. Be present.

[JustTim]

"First, welcome to HackerNews. ;)"

Actually been a HackerNews reader/lurker for a while, but never felt compelled to post any comments until reading your post on SoFL entrepreneur groups.

We moved one business (http://EventDecoratingAcademy.com) to Miami about two years ago. We love Miami. It is a much more vibrant community than Milwaukee, where we also have businesses. I am very pro SoFL. Being in an environment like Miami helps one see possibilities you otherwise would not have seen. Some of the fun art work my wife does is at http://GotLatex.com. This work is directly a result from being in Miami.

Our current businesses have physical presence, so we are not a tech folks per se. However every business that wishes to succeed today must have a tech undercurrent/backbone. The main reason I follow HackerNews is to find new ideas for our brick and mortar type business.

I also have an interest in tech since back in the late seventies/ early eighties when I programed metal working machine tools using a teletype to make a paper punch tape to run the program. We also wrote inventory databases using dBase on CP/M machines with 8" 100k floppy drives... yes, back then a whole business could reside on 100k of data. No fancy GUI, turn the machine on a single period was displayed on a monochrome screen.

Tim

[mikegreenberg]

Talk about old school. Glad to have you down here!