Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs say infrastructure spending is near the top of what's being spent in the U.S. as the region expands its commuter rail line, adds to Interstate 4, makes its airport bigger and builds a high-speed rail line to connect the city's airport with Miami. Infrastructure is the platform for attracting more businesses to the region, incubating startups and creating a high quality of life for its' citizens.
Dozens of small and medium tech companies now operate out of the old Church Street Exchange Building. But look closely and you'll see that the percentage of them owned and run by women is relatively low. Florida Institute of Technology wants to change that by helping women open new businesses in tech and across all business sectors. FOX 35's Tom Johnson spent the day with the new center's director to find out how it works.
"The Startup Hour" will couple a "Shark Tank"-like pitch program with new mobile technology that helps viewers who register and are accredited investors navigate compliance documents and back a startup immediately. Business owners who want to be featured on the show, which will film at Canvs coworking space March 26, should submit a video to the show's website. The show's tour kicks off at South by Southwest later this month and will visit cities like Kansas City, Mo., Boston, Pittsburgh and New York City.
Among the games that will get some screen time is Temple Tap, a game built by Orlando development studio Heroic Stand. Temple Tap "They needed games made by indie developers and we had things ready to go," Heroic Stand co-founder Remi Crespo told the Sentinel. Crespo said the appearance started when he ran into a cryptic online posting on a forum that asked for "completed games to show on TV."
they are getting help, and it comes from within the community, including the new downtown Canvs shared workspace, designed to attract and nurture early startups like Salpeter’s. With the planned Creative Village project and a larger UCF satellite campus on the drawing board, government, educational institutions and leading businesses are taking a supporting role, with the stated goal of turning Orlando into one of the Southeast’s premier startup hubs. That suits Mark Salpeter just fine. “I really like Orlando,’’ he says. “I feel (the tech community) is growing a lot and there’s room to grow.
In Orlando’s tech community, entrepreneurs are shunning the idea of intellectual property and embracing collaboration. Meetups and shared spaces are the buzz-words. To talk more about Orlando’s growing tech community 90.7’s Matthew Peddie speaks with Greg Pollack, Founder of Orlando based Code School and tech incubator Starter Studio, Isaac Moredock, Co-Founder and CEO of the Orlando-based automated consumer intelligence software maker Tandem, and Josh Murdock, adjunct Professor and Instructional Designer at Valencia College.
the first thing I saw was the University of Central Florida and the research park that surrounds it. What I saw was a community that had tremendous technology industrial strength surrounding a university that's the second-largest university in the United States. Today, I got to meet some of the students, and those students have every bit as much passion and capability as any entrepreneurial students I've met.
Next up was Orlando-based company Outhouse Games, which showed off the Oculus VR headset. Normally, Outhouse Games develops mobile-based game applications, but after the creation of the virtual reality headset, the company started looking for ways to develop games for the Oculus.