For more information, click here.

Hack For Change: Miami is helping build a community of civic innovation in South Florida. A wide variety of individuals and organizations have come together to foster of a culture of open government, civic engagement, sustainability and technology for good.

It’s our data….let’s make something of it!

Hack For Change: Miami will have three major themes:

The Art of Government Data // #artofgovdata 
We want participants to explore the use of government data sets as the raw material for artistic expression. What do “we” and “our society” look like when visualized by artists working together with programmers? What do we sound like if composers use government data sets as the fuel for composition? Visualize us! Make some music! Here’s a link to one fun example of a team that composed a symphony using the Federal Government’s daily cash balance data stream!

Sustainability // #code2sustain
How can we leverage environmental data to hack solutions for a more sustainable future? #code2sustain will unlock green data sets for innovators to develop game-changing applications.

Code For America Write-a-thon
No coding experience? No problem. Get started with civic hacking with a write-a-thon for MiamiWiki.org with Miami’s new Code For America Brigade and Hacks/Hackers Miami. Your local knowledge, stories and photos will help create and edit a community-driven Wiki about our city that engages visitors and residents.

Other Activities

Miami Dade County has posed two challenges for developers. Different Federal agencies have posted challenges. Teams may want to tackle one of these problems.

ABOUT NDoCH

National Day of Civic Hacking is a national event that will take place June 1-2, 2013, in cities across the nation. The event will bring together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs from all over the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country. National Day of Civic Hacking will provide citizens an opportunity to do what is most quintessentially American: roll up our sleeves, get involved and work together to improve our society.

The event will leverage the expertise and entrepreneurial spirit of those outside federal, state and local government to drive meaningful, technology-based solutions for federal, state and local government. It demonstrates what’s possible when we all work together to strengthen our society and our lives. YOU can make a difference no matter where you live.

BENEFITS

You should participate in National Day of Civic Hacking because the toughest challenges are not one community’s alone to solve. This is a unique opportunity to get involved, connect with others like yourself, and develop technology that will make the world a better place.

o   Demonstrate a commitment to the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration.

o   Exercise a government’s interest in using open data and technology, in partnership with others, to address your local community’s felt needs.

o   Liberate open data that can inform better problem solving in every community.

o   Continue to collectively map a national innovation ecosystem and create new access points to that system.

o   Engage citizens in cities with little technology infrastructure to contribute to changing their community through open source, open data, entrepreneurship and code development.

o   Promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education by encouraging students to utilize open technology for solutions to real challenges.

o   Encourage large scale partnership and mutual understanding.

Published by Venture Beat

By Jolie O’Dell

The promise of social checkins has always been that they’ll make money by revealing to marketers where you are and when you want to buy stuff. Payments startup Square thinks it can do ya one better: telling marketers where you already bought stuff and where you’re likely to want to buy more in the future.

In a chat with The Verge, Square discovery chief Ajit Varma said, “We can tell you that people who like X might also like Y, and it’s a true representation of what you’ve bought.”

Making shopping recommendations isn’t exactly cutting-edge anymore. After all, it’s how old-school behemoth Amazon sells you so much crap and how equally old oldster Netflix keeps you glued to your laptop screen watching old episodes of Breaking Bad long after you should have been asleep.

But Square has a very slight advantage: It knows not only what you buy, but exactly, geographically where you buy it. And it knows not what your interests or “likes” are, but what you actually put plastic to magnetic strip reader for.

The big missing piece in Square’s data treasure trove is something online retailers do very well: tracking what you almost bought and what you might want to look at again, and trying to predict when and where you’ll change your mind and push the button on a purchase decision.

Square has made some big pushes toward more rapid growth (which means more user data) lately. It launched a cheap-o, $300 Business-in-a-Box program to help would-be small business owners get off the ground. And it’s selling its credit card-reading dongles everywhere, from Starbucks to Verizon.

Currently, Square is processing around $10 billion in consumer purchases each year.

The brainstorm, collaboration and dialogue that took place at RokkMiami, were very inspiring and motivated the community to keep that hunger and creativity to continue building Miami as the new hub for innovation and technology.

Brad Feld shared insights and served as a great guide to help identify what has worked in the past and areas that haven’t worked so well. The conversation brought some actionable items that were included in the roadmap.

The video will give you a taste of what happened at this amazing event.

Published by The Miami Herald

By Nancy Dahlberg

What does Miami need to put it on the map as a vibrant tech hub?

That’s the focus of Monday’s Rokk Miami, which will bring together up to 140 people from the community — entrepreneurs, foundations, government leaders, educators, big businesses and others — to assemble a roadmap for building a tech hub. Rokk Miami will be hosted by Miami Beach-based Rokk3r Labs, the Knight Foundationand Brad Feld, the well-known investor and author of Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City who will be at the event to advise and help guide the roadmap process.

The LAB Miami is flying in digital marketing expert Katya Constantine to lead a  workshop on customer acquisition and digital marketing that will address how to best use the channels to acquire and retain customers, how to optimize your costs and track and measure performance. More details on the workshop, taking place May 6, are here:http://labcustomeracquisition.eventbrite.com. Below is her guest post.

By Katya Constantine

2012 brought a lot of change when it comes to social media. We saw the rise of gamification. We saw more analytical tools being launched in the social media world.  We also saw brands trying to figure it out:  What does social media mean to them?  Should they be on Facebook?  Twitter? Pinterest? Google+?  Given the rapid revenue growth and emergence of a number of new platforms, 2013 promises to be an even more exciting year in social media.

Over the last two years, I’ve had the opportunity to be at the forefront of social media trends, as I was responsible for strategy and development of social media for one of the largest consumer brands in the world — Amazon.com, specifically for the movies product line.

Based on that, and what I’ve been seeing happening in social media, here are my predictions for 2013:

1. The rising use of analytics:  Social media is no longer just a brand channel for businesses. It is a fully-fledged marketing channel, just like search and email.  In 2013, brands will start to assign (if they haven’t already) business goals to this new channel.  Thus, we will see a rise in analytics tools to help businesses measure ROI on their social media spend.  We’ll see some better standardization on metrics as well as the tools that allow businesses to succeed.

2. Increased presence of consumer brands across multiple social media sites: Most brands recognize that even if they are not at the front line of a social media, they need to have a presence. In 2012, new social media channels came in to the mix such as Google+ and Pinterest.  Especially in consumer brands, we will see an increase in brands having a presence across all major social media channels. Expect to see more promotions and messages coming in from your favorite brands across multiple sites.

3. The rise of social game-based promotions: It is very common to see sweepstakes as a pathway to grow your fan base.  Expect to see more social media promotions from brands – whether it’s credits, deals, or sweepstakes -  as brands try to grow their fan base as well as customer database.  This is a great way for consumers to learn and to share their favorite brands with their friends but also one of the key ways that a brand has to build its base.

4. The rise of targeted offers:  Brands are becoming savvy in terms of using social media data to target their messages based on demographics, location, your interests… And the leading social media platforms starting with Facebook and Twitter have recently rolled out targeting mechanisms that allow proper targeting at scale.  2013 will become a year of targeted offers being delivered via social media channels.

5. Increased integration between social media and other digital channels: Expect to see brands integrate social media into all of their digital channels, whether its website, email, or search.  Social media will have deep integration whether it’s for personalization or for recommendations – as well the ability to close the feedback loop with other channels. There are some tools out there that are already doing it today.  This will be a standard for how brands engage and bring awareness to their products and services in 2013.

Well, here you go.  These are our top predictions for social media for 2013.  We are yet to see what the next social media channel is that is embraced by brands (mobile messaging, anyone?), but we definitely know that social media is here to stay as an online channel for both B2B and B2C brands.

Katya Constantine is a seasoned marketer with over 10 years of online marketing experience.  Most recently, she was at Expedia and Amazon, leading projects ranging from behavior-based programs to increasing customer acquisition and conversion with great success. Katya is the founder of DigiShopGirl Media and is an active blogger for TechCocktail. Follow Katya on Twitter: @digishopgirl

Brad Feld, Rokk3r Labs and Knight Foundation are hosting:

‘Rokk Miami: A Roadmap for Miami’s
Startup and Technology Community’

A first of its kind event where entrepreneurs and the Miami community come together to map the way towards an innovation and technology driven ecosystem. Check the details at www.rokkmiami.co

April 29th, 2013.

Check out the promo video here

Score one for organically grown tri-county collaboration.

For the first time, startup groups teamed up to offer a bus from Boca to Refresh Miami’s event at The LAB Miami in Wynwood on Wednesday night, with a stop in Hollywood. About 25-30 took the bus and the cost was covered by generous donations. The next bus experiment will be next week — Monday — this time from Miami to the Startup Delray’s Hack the Library event and is also free (more details about the event and Startup Delray are below).

The bus project was executed by Co-Go, a local bus ridesharing platform founded by Rob Eisner, and coordinated by Andrej Kostresevic of New Frontier Nomads and Lean Startup Circle and Irene Revelas of Startup Delray, who handled the logistics and promotion for Broward and Palm Beach counties. Refresh Miami’s “Hardware Hacking & Robotics” event was the first test event and Refresh Miami and Brian Breslin helped promote it, too.

“The story is a nice example of cross-community collaboration. The South Florida “Group of Groups” was having a discussion on how to bring the communities closer together, and one of the big complaints was traffic and commute times,” said Andrej. “While the conversation was going in the direction of how to improve public transportation,  I remembered Co-Go, and suggested we run an experiment to see if there would be interest if the main complaint – long drive in bad traffic –  was removed. The idea was that we would offer a ‘networking on wheels’ alternative to driving by yourself and effectively make the bus itself part of the event experience. The feedback I heard was great – someone said ‘the event started on the bus,’ and that ‘people were talking and switching seats all the time.’ ”

Andrej said the  immediate plan is to keep running experiments “manually” (using eventbrite and manual coordination) in both directions to gauge interest from attendees and sponsors, and see if this can be sustainable. After that, New Frontier Nomads is helping Co-Go build out the platform.

Now what should we call The Bus?

Below is information about the next event offering the bus. Brian Breslin said he would also like to offer the bus for the next Refresh Miami event April 25. Photos here are from the March 27 Refresh Miami event at The LAB.

Hack the Library – Startup Delray April 1

Help Startup Delray transform 5000 square feet at The Library Delray Beach from stacks of books to coworking and makerspace on April 1.  Entrepreneurs, innovators, designers, makers, engineers, technologists, artists, writers, small businesses, and social enterprises welcome!  You bring your creative ideas, and we’ll bring the pizza, water, soda, and wine. Find details here.

The program:

6:30-7:00  Registration

7:00-7:15  Introductions

7:15-8:15  Break into groups to hack the space, imagining coworking and makerspace

8:15-8:45 Groups present concepts for the space

8:45-9:00 Wrap-up

9:00   After Party at 3rd & 3rd (301 NE 3rd Avenue @ the corner of NE 3rd Street in Pineapple Grove)

What is Startup Delray?

According to Irene Revelas, Startup Delray is working in partnership with the economic development team of the City of Delray Beach, the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA); and The Library Delray Beach to create a place, programs, and events in the heart of the community.

“Our solution was to leverage our existing assets, and turn Delray into a Startup City, with The Library as the city’s incubator.  We’re planning to use 5000 SF of existing stack space and create a blend of coworking and makerspace.  We’re excited about offering a 3D printing lab, self-publishing technology, and incorporating meetups, classes, and events in the space,” she said.

“Our goal is to democratize innovation, by creating a space in the heart of the city, on our ‘Main Street’ – Atlantic Avenue,” she continued. For 100 years, the Library has been a familiar and trusted community hub that serves people of all ages and backgrounds.  This project will play an important role in ensuring The Library’s relevance into the next 100 years, Irene said.

Frustration often leads to innovation. For Miami-based entrepreneurs Nabyl Charania and German Montoya, slow product launches proved to be their inspiration.

The problem stems from investors and developers speaking different languages, says Charania, a mathematician who founded software developer Decipher Labs, and Montoya, a former McKinsey consultant, economist and founder of mobile marketing strategy firm Rokk3r Mobile. Too often, investors misunderstand the technology required to generate revenue, while developers misjudge the cost and time of scaling up. As a result, promising products miss their market due to capital, technology or talent gaps.

So, the duo brainstormed a better way to speed up the time to market. Rokk3r Labs, a hybrid investor-accelerator, was their answer. And Miami’s nascent start-up scene and their ties to untapped Latin America served as fertile testing ground.

Charania and Montoya merged their companies in March 2012 into a new business that takes a quant-based approach to project selection. It calculates costs, time-to-market and sales forecasts for seed-to-late-stage ventures. This filter helps Rokk3r Labs choose projects it will in invest in and do technology work for. The company accepts only projects that can be launched in four months.

Related: What to Look for in an Accelerator Program

“Building technology and a business model in parallel helps Rokk3r Labs do in four months what those with just a business plan do in a year,” says Faquiry Diaz Cala, CEO of Miami-based private investment group Tres Mares, who is unconnected to the company but aware of its movements in Miami’s small but growing venture environment. “They’re great coders with a strong business sense.”

A year later Rokk3r Labs boasts operating profitability after $1.5 million in sales, a Colombian subsidiary, a $20 million investment portfolio, 25 employees, and the launch of four of Rokk3r Labs’ 13 projects — 25 percent of which previously won pitch contests, received angel funding or graduated from an accelerator. Next up: expansion in Brazil, Africa and Europe by replicating the company’s quant-based approach and structure through a quasi-franchisee model.

The company’s launched products include LiveNinja, a pay-per-minute Web video instruction site, and Ad Avengers, an app measuring ad performance in real time across social networks and other sites.

Related Video: Finding Your First Investor

Here’s how Rokk3r Labs’ business model works: A developer, designer and business team calculate the cost and time for strategy development, product design, staffing up and technology tweaks, plus market size and price values. If things add up and a management team passes muster, Rokk3r Labs accepts work through sliding scale fees and equity stakes. The company also earns licensing fees from sales linked to work it does for ad agency DDB, as its innovation lab – a wise move for recurring revenue. “They don’t take on pipedream products,” Diaz Cala says. “They test the market at minimal cost and move on.”

Like most new ventures, Rokk3r Labs has faced its share of challenges. Although it’s starting to change, Miami lacks a startup ecosystem. It was also challenging to find talent and keep a fun-but-fast execution culture as Rokk3r grew from five to 25 employees. And as projects scale up, the company may face funding obstacles in Miami. “Can they find funding when opportunities grow?” asks Mahendra Ramsinghani, managing director of Detroit-based First Step Fund and author of The Business of Venture Capital (Wiley, October 2011). “Capital tends to aggregate around Silicon Valley and other regions.”

To maintain a sustainable execution pace, the company offers perks that include free South Beach housing for new recruits, weekly soccer, yoga, meditation and movie nights–and the freedom to launch one’s own project in house. “Harvard and MIT grads are on our team from Europe, Latin America and Canada to drive new product launches, and for the lifestyle,” Charania says.

Rokk3r Labs offers perks such as yoga, meditation, free South Beach housing for new recruits and more, in an effort to keep the team in top form to execute on its initiatives.

Photo courtesy of Rokk3r Labs

Related: Incubator Helps Online Social-Recruitment Tool Take Off 

Rokk3r made a serendipitous discovery in its talent search. Frustrated by $20,000 headhunter fees for sub-par people, the team created an algorithm for matching job vacancies with candidates through social media. “We knew there was a more intelligent, sticky way,” Charania says. Crowdbounty crawls across sites seeking names of people in similar professions ideally suited to make recommendations. If their suggestions lead to a job placement, a bounty provided by the talent seeker is split among the referee, Crowdbounty, and in some cases, the recruit to validate the placement. Employers follow successful repeat recommenders on Crowdbounty, which was launched at a Harvard job fair in February and featured at last year’s Cannes creativity festival.

On the firm’s radar screen? Africa, where mobile computing opportunities abound; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and London, as a European gateway. “We want to replicate our structure and culture in areas where the middle class is exploding,” Nairobi-born Charania explains. “Partners will have equity in th

What happens when an advertising entrepreneur, mobile interface designer and communications expert come together serendipitously to create the next great mobile app?

At Pipeline,  we call it collaborative intelligence – and it’s a phenomenon that happens multiple times each day in our shared workspace community.

Together, these three entrepreneurs are developing an application that will allow mobile users to see an instant personal profile of the caller with data and details pulled from all the social channels in which they are active, from LinkedIn, to Facebook to Foursquare, among others. It instantly provides information about the person that would otherwise have taken precious time to compile.

Entrepreneurs Adam Boalt, David Elgina and Jose Paz were able to develop the mobile application they are currently tweaking and testing because of the synergistic expertise and knowledge working together provided.

The ability of these entrepreneurs to develop an initial idea by pulling together their expertise, knowledge and experience via collaboration proves why it leads to a higher likelihood of success. The increasing demand for collaborative workspace we are seeing in Miami — such as at Pipeline, pictured here — stems from the growing number of entrepreneurs and start-up businesses that are investing and working in our community.

There are a number of benefits to collaborative intelligence, beginning with the ability to share what you know, what you think you know and what you need to discover. By gathering around a table and discussing, debating and developing an idea, entrepreneurs are able to create something that they may never have been able to create on their own.

Challenges still exist when collaborating with people from different disciplines.  Most parties see a problem from their own lens, fail to understand the other issues that may exist and have different levels of commitment. Start-ups and small businesses are often self-financed and require venture capital and family-friends financing to turn an idea into a business. But the end result for these entrepreneurs is not only moving the needle in innovation, but making a profit and achieving success.

In Miami, small businesses and entrepreneurial companies serve as the backbone of the regional economy.  The growth of collaborative intelligence will prove to be the catalyst that creates successful Miami homegrown companies to fuel the future of the local economy.

This, however, is going to take a collective effort on the part of the private and public sectors to support and invest in developing an ecosystem that nourishes small businesses and start-ups, so that they invest in staying and growing here in Miami. For now, we are enjoying the new ideas that are created on a daily basis as a result of the emerging concept of collaborative intelligence within our community.

Todd Oretsky is CEO and Co-Founder of Pipeline, a collaborative workspace at 1101 Brickell Avenue. For more information, visit www.pipelinebrickell.com.

We’ve previously written about how music service Senzari was planning to take on Pandora and traditional radio, launching initially back in 2011 in private beta, before opening to everyone in Brazil, Spain and the US last March.

The Miami-based company then went on to acquire Berlin location-based music startup Wahwah.fm in October last year, before announcing it was taking on the Wahwah branding for its own main service a few weeks back. And today, at SXSW in Texas, Senzari finally launched its new rebranded service, going mobile-only with its first incarnation which is now live in Apple’s App Store. It too will be restricted to the same three countries as before.

Welcome to Wahwah

“After we acquired Wahwah.fm, we went to work to combine the vision of both companies and decided to build a completely new mobile-first experience from the ground up,” explains Bill Hajjar, CEO of Senzari. “We want to be more than just a music player for smartphones, which is the focus for most current services. Wahwah is a real-time, intelligent, social music experience that contextually adapts to whatever the user is currently doing, like driving, cycling, running, cooking or just relaxing, and broadcasts the experience, allowing others to join in and listen in real-time.”

In a nutshell, Wahwah lets users enjoy music with friends and strangers around the world, while participating in their favorite activities. Each station has an activity and location associated with it, so Wahwah is striving to make it easier to find other listeners based on what they are doing and where they are.

For example, if someone is going for a cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge, they can start their own activity-based station, or join someone else that may be cycling somewhere else.

How it works

First up, you will have to connect your Facebook account to even look inside Wahwah, which won’t appeal to everyone. Assuming that’s not a deal-breaker, when you launch the app you’ll first see a series of trending radio stations…that is, stations that are being accessed by the most people. You can also filter by ‘Featured Radios’, which is curated, ‘Radios Around Me’, ‘Friends Radios’ or ‘Radios by Activity’.

Now, the latter of these include ‘Driving’, ‘Cycling’, ‘Cooking’ and more, and all have been specifically programmed for the activity in question.

“We decided to put Trending front and center, to show that it is a real-time service, and people are doing things live right now,” explains Demian Bellumio, COO of Senzari. “We could have put ‘Featured’ there, which has editorial stations from our partners and us for people to choose from, but we think the real-time aspect is a unique experience.”

You can create your own personalized artist-based station simply by entering the name of your favorite artist in the search box.

You can make it private if you like, but Wahwah sells itself as a social app, so making it ‘On Air’ is more in-keeping with the app’s ethos. Ironically, one of the first songs served up on my Bob Dylan-themed station was a George Harrison song called Wah-Wah, but I’ll put that down to a happy coincidence rather than a bizarre marketing stunt.

You can scan the various markets Wahwah is available in (the US, Spain and Brazil for now), and look at current broadcasts by location, while the main menu section gives you access to the ‘Radios’ portal and personal settings.

Here, you can tweak your Facebook sharing/follow settings, or log-out. You can also view your personal profile that shows the number of stations you’ve created, and ‘Following’/’Followers’ count.

You can view the station history, which includes songs-skipped and who else has joined the station to listen. And within the station settings option, you can tell it whether you want everything automated, or opt to gain more control over what it plays.

There’s certainly a lot of potential here for Wahwah, and it does bring a new social-based music service into the mix, but it would be good to see this roll-out globally.

“Technologically speaking, we have concentrated on optimizing the experience for a real-time, personalized and mobile co-listening experience; which is very different than just building a music player,” explained Bellumio. “We try to leverage every sensor of the phone, from the GPS to the accelerometer, to ensure that we can understand the context of the user. This allows us to deliver the perfect song, and do it as close to real-time and as efficiently as possible.”

An iPad-optimized version will be hitting the market too, as will Android and Firefox OS. Interestingly, a Web-based incarnation will be reintroduced for the new rebranded app too, though this is seemingly not even in development yet. The learnings from the mobile app(s) will be used to build this over time.

The new Wahwah app is available to download for iOS now.