Nick Dominguez

Back in the day Reinvigorate was it as far as free hosted stats applications went, but then they went into hibernation and we haven’t heard much from them since. Today, I recieved an email telling me that the beta was open and I could join right away, which I did. So far I really like what I’m seeing and having second thoughts about immediately upgrading my Mint installation.

I went digging through my Gmail account today searching for the first correspondence I had with Brian Breslin, Refresh Miami’s curator and next May it will be about a year from when I first contacted him to get the ball rolling on the Refresh group. It’s been great to see what’s happened in the local community just from Refresh in under a year. designers and community guys have been hired, locals have been spotlighted and companies and schools are pitching in and helping us continue to make connections.This sort of stuff is exactly why the concept of Refresh was even invented. I can’t attribute everything that is going on currently down here to Refresh Miami, but with events like Barcamp and WeMedia it’s clear that something is finally beginning to happen down here and it should be an interesting to see what happens this year.

As a designer you naturally pay attention to packaging and layout when purchasing products. This leads me to wonder if designers by nature pay higher and/or purchase better quality services and products because we are looking for the package, label or identity that appeals to our eye rather then our pocket books.

If you live in South Florida and care about animal rights, PETA is screening “Earthlings” a movie about our absolute dependence and disrespect for the animals we consume. The screening will take place at Nova Southeastern’s Hollywood-Mailman Building in Room 309 3301 College Ave, Fort Lauderdale Florida 33314

WordPress 2.1 is out. Looks like the admin got a facelift.

Humanized is getting some pr from Walt Mossberg and now 37Signals. Looks like the rise of the command line is still happening. Enso Launcher does look like a cool product, a nice piece of software for us who used to use Quicksilver on the mac but are now stuck on Windows at the day job.

Not sure if I qualify for this meme, because I’m way up here in Broward :-), but since Alex tagged me I’ll give it a shot.

1. What do you see as the primary benefits to doing business in Miami?

Great weather, a great pool of local design talent from local schools, diverse community, geographically advantaged.

2. What downsides/obstacles have you encountered as a businessman in Miami?

Transportation in Miami can be crippling.. High real estate prices. Affordable housing/living and transportation issues are going to be a real problem in the next 20 years. Miami does not have the benefit of sprawling out, there just is simply no more space to expand, so fixing these issues is going to be critical.

This isn’t really a problem in regards to Miami but rather South Florida in general. Right now within the tech and web scene the three counties that make up the South Florida are pretty disconnected. There has to be more initiatives like Refresh and local groups to bridge this divide, people in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade don’t know each other and don’t have any idea as to what’s going on in each other’s counties.

Since I don’t run a company I’m going to skip this one.

Miami’s arts and music scene is growing very rapidly, the downtown area is actually becoming a hub for music, this was never the case when I went to see bands play regularly, I think the design district and the redevelopment has alot to do with that. Art Basel has done alot for the arts scene locally I think as well. Real estate will continue to grow despite the poor market right now. I think we’ll continue to see growth in the area of companies doing business on the web. Believe it or not there are alot of companies based in the area they just don’t attract alot of attention.

I would like to see Miami become just as important as Silicon Valley, New York, or even London by attracting and growing companies doing innovative things, again we’ve just started to see the growth of companies in this space in the past couple of years with Scrapblog, iKarma, Multiply This can happen if the local community grows, stays strong and makes the effort to promote the area to the outside world.

I’m tagging Alex H.

Great idea. Coudal should’ve taken it to the next step and actually had these printed up and distributed out to folks who wanted them. Maybe they did.

There’s a West Elm store opening up at Shops at Midtown Miami.

Henrik Larsson, one of the best players to come out of Sweden in the last few years gushes over Cristiano Ronaldo.