Nick Dominguez

Now that FOWA and Barcamp Miami have blown through South Florida, I wanted to take a couple of minutes and post some thoughts about the two events.Barcamp Miami this year was definitely  a success, last year we had about 60 attendees, 3 presenting stations about about 10 or so presentations. This year we jumped to 300 registered attendees, 6 rooms and about double or triple the amount of presentations. I can’t thank Alex, Brian, Chris and Mike enough for their work the event would have not been possible without their efforts and a big thanks has to got to Carsonified for letting us squeeze in with the conference, I spoke to Ryan Carson briefly while setting up and he was really supportive of the whole event. Unfortunately I was running around alot so I didn’t catch alot of the presentations, but I was impressed with what the guys from a.viary are doing, I really think that application is going to do well.FOWA was great as well. I didn’t attend any of the workshops but was there for the talks the following day. All the presentations were excellent, but I think the real value to conferences like these is the inspiration you get from attending. For me personally I really like to get my “wheels spinning” from attending events like these. The people you meet, the exchange of thoughts on various ideas really helps you sort of flesh things out in your head. I will also say that it’s just great to have a large conference like FOWA come down to Miami, it sort of legitimizes this area in terms of what alot of us at Refresh and other initiatives have been trying to do for the past couple of years, it gives us exposure and let’s other people know that there is more to South Florida than just beaches and palm trees. So I really hope to have both of these events happen again in conjunction next year, thanks again to everybody.

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.

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.

Mike Gowen from the team behind Tick, an online time tracking application, will be doing a short presentation followed by a Q&A with fellow Refreshers. So, go on over and check out the application and if you have any questions about building, designing or launching a web based application, come out to the meetup and join the discussion. Visit the Refresh Miami site for more details and information.

Miami is fortunate enough to be hosting this year’s We Media conference and although I have never attended, the past topics and speakers have been interesting.

The conference will be running February 8-9 at the Storer Auditorium at the University of Miami. With this conference and with the recent involvement with Refresh Miami it’s nice to see the folks from UM reaching out and doing cool things.

If you’d like to register or get some more information please click over to their site to get the details.

We Media Miami 2006

It seems that lately I’ve been reading or hearing about designers, developers and just people in general that want to leave the South Florida for any number of reasons. My friends want to relocate because real estate costs are atrocious. Designers want to leave because there is a lack of quality interactive and design work. Developers want to leave because there just isn’t enough companies or agencies in the area working on “cool” projects.

I have at one time or another made these same complaints, and when I was in a band, I complained about the South Florida being devoid of any real scene as well. But I’m starting to realize that the complaints are going to have to stop eventually because somebody has to something about it. I’ve been encouraged lately to see things like Refresh Miami pop up.

There are talented designers and developers down here, but they just need an agency to look up to, a group to bring them together and a company to inspire them.

South Florida with all of the hurricanes, high living costs, etc. isn’t that bad of a place to live and work if you make something of it instead of constantly complaining about it. Also, we’re finally getting an IKEA! so things are definetly looking up

Something that I have been hoping for, for a long time is a get together for web designers and web developers in the South Florida area and it looks like this time it might (hopefully) happen. Brian…

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This hurricane definetly took us by surprise, I think most of us thought that it would be arriving at our shores at about a 1 or a 2 category but that was definetly not the case, it hit us at a strong category 3 (125 MPH winds). So 2+ million residents in the South Florida area were left without power for almost a week, as I write this there are still a number of people without power.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this whole episode is how much my neighborhood and pretty much most of my area has changed visually. So many trees have been either stripped of their foliage or have been knocked down that many landmarks and familiar scenes of daily life change in a matter of a day, it’s a quite odd experience and really has to be experience to be fully understood.

I started this week out pretty optimistically about Ivan, but now it seems like little Ivan is getting squirrely on us, this hurricane season has definetly been crazy so far.

To keep that anxiety and fear rolling you can check out the “NOAA”:http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index.shtml site, they even have “RSS feeds”:http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index-at.xml