Miami dot.com to Miami 2.0: What have we learned?

So, let’s start with a confession … I was the ‘Silicon Beach Buzz’ werewolf!

Yes, that’s right … moonlighting after hours back in late-1999 and early-2000, I put out a guerrilla e-newsletter that exploded virally as everyone jumped on the bandwagon (eventually, my good self included!) of the South Florida-based Internet startup phenomenon, comprised largely of Latin American and Spanish-language content portals for just about everything you can imagine — from finance to trade to health to women’s issues and music.

By end-2000, though, Silicon Beach was in serious trouble along with most other dot.com-era startup zones, from Silicon Valley to Austin, from Boston to San Diego to Raleigh-Durham and beyond. Those in South Florida tech who barely managed to stay afloat through the economic doldrums of 2001 were largely put to rest by 9/11 and the shock waves that sent throughout the U.S. economy.

I’ve returned to the somewhat painful reminiscence of less happy days for the South Florida dot.com boom & bust prompted by a coupla three things: one is Stuart Bruce’s reference to the “hype cycle” that accompanies new technologies, in his post about Twitter’s current location on the expectation curve; another is having just reviewed my post of last year at this time about Miami’s tech revival of a different kind in this era of Web 2.0; the other is a really insightful blog post by Jeremiah Owyang I spotted more than a year ago and kept archived, titled Commemorating the Idiocy of the Dot Com Era: Did we Repeat or Reform?

For anyone who wasn’t here, you might ask “Repeat what?” or “Reform What?” For myself, I’m thinking there appear to be quite a few lessons learned that have fortunately since seeped into the general tech and web community consciousness. But, I’d like to enlist the help of some of those who were here then and those who are here now to get their input and insight into exactly what we have learned from Miami dot.com to Web 2.0.

A quick bit of history: from 1998-2001, there appeared a plethora of dot.coms that were spread throughout South Beach and the Design District and up into Aventura, Broward and beyond. There were the notables StarMedia, Yupi.com, ElSitio.com and Patagon.com — whose CEO, Argentine Wenceslao Casares, managed a multi-million dollar sale to Spain’s Banco Santander just prior to the bubble’s burst, perhaps the only truly successful execution of a financial exit for any of the Silicon Beach startups.

But there were many, many more … I left journalism to manage online content at 1hemisphere.com, a b2b e-commerce portal promoting cross-border trade between small- to mid-sized enterprises throughout the Americas. Talk about an idea whose time had/has not yet come!!

For anyone wanting to search the history, still out there is a graveyard of press releases and announcements that read like so many epitaphs on tombstones: partnerships, product releases, closed rounds of funding; even the occasional NYTimes story about a phenomenon that appeared to be promising, yet would soon run out of gas before getting off the runway.

Perhaps the best litany of Miami dot.com startups that literally “went South” can be found in a Hispanic Business magazine article in January 2001 — though I caution if you’re going to read that piece that never, ever did I hear anyone call what was happening here “Silicon Playa.” (Hey, I was Silicon Beach Buzz! so I know … and anyway, that would be like calling the Bay Area “Frisco” … but I digress.) And, David Adams filed a creditable piece for the St. Pete Times months earlier.

When all is said and done, the real question for me from Miami dot.com to Miami 2.0 is … “What have we learned?” Why is it different this time around? What have we taken from that earlier experience of the “static web” and VCs-gone-wild to the current “live web” era and the Web 2.0-driven technology scene that has been developing for awhile now in South Florida.

The past of Miami dot.com is well known. The future of Miami 2.0 is yours to write. Looking forward to your reminiscences, insight and comments!

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