A free place for Florida's technology venture community to connect

• JockSpin
• inSkool
• hEar Gear
• On-The-Field
• Cantoche
• YourLifeArchive
• Leaves.com

News & Deals

• America’s Leading Metros for Venture Capital
  

  Venture capitalists are the financiers of high-tech innovation. The unique form of equity financing — which exchanges capital for shares in the enterprises they provide — has fueled the rise of revolutionary companies like Intel in semiconductors, Apple in personal computing, Genentech in biotech, Google in search, and Facebook and Twitter in social media. Silicon Valley has long been the epicenter of venture capital-financed high-technology — something I documented in a series of studies with Martin Kenney of the University of California, Davis, in the mid-to-late 1980s. Our research and the research of others documented the tendency of venture capital and high-tech start-ups to cluster in suburban offices parks in Silicon Valley, the Route 128 suburbs outside Boston, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, aptly dubbed nerdistans. But a number of recent studies suggest the geography of venture capital and start-ups may be shifting to “urban tech,” from this long-held suburban orientation to cities and urban neighborhoods. Such a shift would be in line with more general urban theory which has long seen dense, diverse urban centers — not suburbs — as cradles of innovation. Continue reading

• CareCloud Closes $20M B Round
  

  CareCloud, a Miami cloud-based electronic health record startup, closed $20M in Series B financing led by Tenaya Capital with participation from existing investors Intel Capital and Norwest … Continue reading

• Florida’s talent pool is too lightweight
  

  Some numbers: » Florida, with the nation’s fourth-largest economy, has about 18,600 Ph.D. scientists and engineers in its public and private sectors combined. That’s a big number, but as a share of the overall state workforce, it puts Florida behind 48 states, ahead of only Arkansas and Nevada. To get into the top five, Florida needs to have at least 37,000 Ph.D.s. » Florida has about 10,000 “Carnegie-class, high-research” professors at its major universities. To get to an “average” faculty-student ratio, it should have at least 16,000. Continue reading

• ’6/20 initiative’ to grow local tech ecosystem builds critical mass
  

  What began one year ago with six organizers and a handful of endorsements has grown into a community of people and organizations committed to a goal to improve the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Tampa Bay. The 6/20 initiative attracted 170 pledges and the support of 23 community organizations in its first year, said Daniel James Scott, associate director of the entrepreneurship program at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and one of the initiative’s organizers. Continue reading