Category: Current Events

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 28, 2021)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 26, 2021

Here’s your weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events — plus a little area tech news — for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, June 28 through Sunday, July 4, 2021.

This is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog, Global Nerdy! For the past four years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!

By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.

This week’s events

Don’t forget that this coming weekend is the holiday weekend, with the 4th of July falling on the Sunday. This the one of the slowest weeks of the year, when many people take their holidays, so if your event is scheduled on or near the 4th, make sure you double-check with its organizers to be sure that it’s actually taking place!

Monday, June 28

Tuesday, June 29

Wednesday, June 30

Thursday, July 1

Friday, July 2

Saturday, July 3

Sunday, July 4

Lots of Tampa Bay area news

Upsurge Florida Hosts “Inside the Investor’s Mind” Event to Demystify Early Stage Investing

Who says you can’t come home again? Tech entrepreneur Byron Crowell comes back to Tampa to rebuild company he found two decades ago, and to spur the next generation of local innovators.

Tampa Bay Wave Accepting Applications for 2021 TechWomen Rising Accelerator Program

Cybersecurity firm brings on new marketing chief — Meet KnowBe4’s new CMO, Michael Williams.

New Network Launches To Connect, Support Women Investors in the Southeast

Company says Tampa Bay could be next major technology hub — Tampa Bay could be the next major tech hub, according to Canadian company CodeBoxx, a tech education company relocating its headquarters to St. Petersburg.

Equity firms acquire pair of homegrown Sarasota tech companies — In separate deals, private equity and asset management firms have acquired a pair of Sarasota homegrown tech companies that specialize in online affiliate and pay-for-performance, or clicks, marketing.

Boston-based tech company bets big on Tampa with upcoming hiring spree — Drift, which expanded to Tampa in late 2019 plans to hire more people in the coming months.

Local university among top in the world in developing patents — Tampa’s very own University of South Florida secured nearly 130 patents last year, making it one of the top in the country and world.

Tampa Bay, Orlando partnership hits new evolution to boost investing across the state — The organizations in the partnership will host a “Shark Tank” style event in an effort to increase awareness on investing.

Tech accelerator showcases healthcare disruptors — The Florida-Israel Business Accelerator (FIBA)’s latest Connection to Innovation event welcomed a pair of healthcare startup founders as well as a familiar face in Rachel Feinman, the organization’s former executive director who earlier this year joined Tampa General Hospital (TGH) as vice president of innovation.

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!

Current Events Tampa Bay

Get a job at HireUp Florida Tampa Bay: Thursday 11 am – 2 pm!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 23, 2021

Looking for work in the Tampa Bay area? Check out tomorrow’s virtual event, HireUp Florida Tampa Bay, which happens tomorrow (Thursday, June 24th) from 11:00 a.m. through to 2:00 p.m.!

Here’s their write-up:

This virtual event is powered by HireUP Florida, designed to introduce hiring companies to job seekers as well as provide an opportunity for job seekers to network with each other. In this unique platform, job seekers will have the opportunity to introduce themselves, ask questions, and connect with recruiters for local Tampa Bay staffing firms.
Tickets are first-come-first-served with a wait-list. Register early to secure your spot!
There will be a mix + mingle prior to this event for job seekers to provide event overview details and allow time for networking in a casual environment.

A number of hiring companies will be participating:

Once again, “tickets” to this event are available on a first-come, first-served basis, and there will be a waiting list if the event fills up. Register now and land a job!

Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening at Tampa Bay Tech’s “poweredUP Tech Tracks” tomorrow

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 23, 2021

Tampa Bay Tech, our local technology council, is hosting poweredUP Tech Tracks, a virtual afternoon conference featuring the Tampa Bay area’s top tech people, tomorrow (Thursday, June 24th) from 12:00 to 5:00 p.m. EDT!

Registration for this event is $25 (plus $1.06 processing fee) — you can register here.

Here’s their writeup of the event:

Join us for Tampa Bay Tech’s Q2 signature event! This is a *new* program built specifically for our members and even more specifically, for our tech teams, in partnership with our Emerging Tech Leaders Peer Council. Sessions will be “tech talks” provided by our area technologists, FOR our technologists!
There will be over 20 subject matter experts from companies such as Tech Data, AgileThought, Accenture, AHEAD, AWS, CrossBorder Solutions, Jabil, Microsoft, Nutanix, Salesforce, Schellman, and many more!. Jamie Grant, CIO, State of Florida. will be our Keynote Speaker. You don’t want to miss it!

Agenda

Here’s the agenda for poweredUp Tech Tracks, which has main stage sessions, along with four parallel tracks of breakout sessions, all of which are hosted by local and regional people in the tech sector.

Main stage sessions

12:00	Opening Remarks	Jill St. Thomas, CEO, Tampa Bay Tech
12:05	Welcome and Overview	Jide Sofowora, Product Manager, Jabil Brandon Redding, Senior Account Executive, Salesforce
12:15	Cutting the Cord— Wires Not Included	Scott Webber, Solutions Consultant, Tech Data
12:50	Keynote: State of the State	Jamie Grant, CIO, State of Florida
1:20	Breakout sessions begin on other stages	See Breakout sessions below
1:20	Managing and Paying off Cultural Debt	Quincy Jordan, Digital Transformation and Enterprise Agile Leader, AgileThought
1:50	2021 Tech Investments Already Paying Dividends	Bryn Norton, Vice President IT Solutions, Lumen
2:20	Digital Experience – From Strategy to Product	Kristen Christensen, Digital Experience Studio Director, Accenture
2:50	Work From Anywhere – Shaping the Future of Digital Workspaces	Chris Feeney, Channel Presales Engineer, Mike Barmonde, Business, IGEL Development Manager & Carl Gersh, Senior Director of Marketing, IGEL
3:20	Data Platform Modernization in Healthcare	Lee Pierce, Healthcare Chief Data Officer, Sirius Computer Solutions
3:50	Five Digital Imperatives and Technology Stitching	Pam Coffey, Field CTO, AHEAD
4:20	Staying Competitive in Today’s War on Talent	Scott Wallin, Senior Director, Kforce
4:50	Closing remarks	Jeremy Wilson, CTO, Amscot Financial & Chair of Tampa Bay Tech

Breakout sessions

There are four tracks of breakout sessions, which start at 1:20, immediately after the “State of the State” keynote:

Data sessions
Cyber sessions
Innovation sessions
Software/agile

Data Sessions track

1:20	Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Programmable Data Infrastructure Alex Hesterberg, Chief Customer Officer, Delphix
1:50	AI/ML Laura Squier, AI/ML Specialist, AWS
2:20	Opportunities on Self-Service Analytics Miguel Medina, Director of Data Integration & Analytics, Jabil
2:50	Understanding Social Media and Data Analysis Eddie Morales and Kaitlyn Brooks, CIW – Certification Partners

Cyber Sessions track

1:20	Safer App Development with the OWASP Top 10 Jonathan Singer, SIEM & SOAR Practice Lead, Guidepoint Security
1:50	Lessons Learned From a Year of Remote Security Assessments Jacob Ansari, CISO
2:20	Supercharging Connected Vehicles with Identity Management (From 0 to 60 in Less than a Second) Bill Nelson, President, Identity Fusion
2:50	Ransomware 2021: “The Call Came From Inside the House…” Christopher Bonavita, Technology Solution Specialist, Lumen

Innovation Sessions track

1:20	Borrowing Digital Innovation & Business Transformation Ideas from Non-Conventional Industries Charlie Lawhorn, Chief Digital Advisor, World Wide Technology
1:50	Driving Digital Accessibility Jacque Madison, Senior IT Manager, Jabil
2:20	Powering Collaboration in the Hybrid Workplace Christy Nelson, Global Vice President Strategy & Partnerships, Cyviz
2:50	Easy Road to Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix Clusters Dwayne Lessner, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer, Nutanix
3:20	Creating Sustainable Computer Science Education Luis De Mendoza, Microsoft TEALS

Software / Agile track

1:20	Agile Assessment: Helpful Remedy or Harmful Toxin? Dan Neumann, Principal Consultant, AgileThought
1:50	Scaling Out An Agile- and DevOps-Driven Organization Donald Bickel, Partner, MercuryWorks
2:20	AWS Lambdas Can Be Much More Cory Parrish, SVP of Engineering, Crossborder Solutions
2:50	Building the Modern Mobile Application Prototype (that actually works!) Russell Youngblood, Solution Architect, Outsystems
3:20	Scaling Your Company with GraphQL, Microservices and Kubernetes Josh Rendeck, Director of Platform Engineering, SecureWorks
3:50	Meet MAS Doug Sullinger, CEO, Vendita
4:20	Cloud Architecture for Disaster Recovery Steve Woodard, Solutions Architect, AWS

Current Events Tampa Bay

“How to rock a technical interview”: Tonight at 6 p.m.!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 22, 2021

With the post-pandemic “Great Resignation” (which is expected to happen soon if it isn’t happening already) comes a great number of job opportunities, especially in the tech sector. For many techies, it’s a chance to move to the next step in their career, and for people just getting into tech, it’s their moment to land their first job in the field. That means a tech job search, which in turn means tech job interviews.

Would you like to be ready to rock your next technical interview? If so, you’ll want to catch tonight’s online event, How to Rock a Technical Interview, hosted by Women Who Code Tampa. You can sign up for the event on its Meetup page, which will make the event link available to you.

Kasandra Perez

The event will be hosted by Kasandra Perez of Computer Coach, who’s worth getting to know if you want to get into tech and need to pick up some skills. She’ll walk you through the three core areas of the technical interview. namely:

Coding skills,
Problem-solving, and
Personality.

Providing extra insight into rocking the tech interview will be guest speaker Flow Davis, who’s a Tampa Bay techie with over 13 years of experience developing Digital Marketing Websites and applications for Agencies, Startups & Fortune 500 companies.

At the time of writing, almost 70 people have signed up for this session, which means there are almost 70 Tampa Bay techies who are going to learn tech interview tips, tricks, and techniques that you might not know. Sign up, catch the session, and don’t get left behind!

Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 21, 2021)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 19, 2021

Here’s your list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events — plus a little area tech news — for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, June 21 through Sunday, June 27, 2021.

This week’s ONLINE and OUTDOOR events

I’m holding off on listing indoor in-person events for a little longer. In the meantime, enjoy this list of events that are either online or in-person and outdoors!

Monday, June 21

Tuesday, June 22

Wednesday, June 23

Thursday, June 24

Friday, June 25

Saturday, June 26

Sunday, June 27

Tampa Bay area news

Tampa Bay Tech’s “Tech Tracks 2021” virtual event this Thursday

Tampa Bay Tech is holding Tech Tracks 2021, its big Q2 virtual event on Thursday afternoon. It will feature tech talks provided by Tampa Bay area technologists, for Tampa Bay area technologists. Tickets are $25.00, and are cheaper for Tampa Bay Tech members. Here’s the agenda:

Video: Tampa Bay’s biggest strengths, weakness and opportunities, according to Silicon Valley executives

In this video, Tampa Bay Business Journal’s Lauren Coffey chats with three tech execs on why they moved to Tampa:

Tampa Bay Wave welcomes 15 startups to latest accelerator cohort

From “several hundred” applications, Tampa Bay Wave selected fifteen tech startups from the U.S. and beyond to be admitted to their 2021 TechDiversity Accelerator. Find out more about them here.

7 questions to ask before relocating your startup to Florida

If you’ve got a TechCrunch “Extra Crunch” subscription, you can read the entirely of this article by Embarc Collective’s Lakshmi Shenoy. I don’t have one, so could somebody please tell me what the final 4 questions are?

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 14, 2021)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 12, 2021

It’s mid-June!

Here’s your list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, June 14 through Sunday, June 20, 2021.

How long will this list contain only ONLINE and OUTDOOR events?

A month ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that anyone who is fully vaccinated — meaning that they had their final vaccine two weeks or longer ago — can now stop masking and social distancing, including indoors in many cases. That means this list will start including in-person events, right?

Not just yet. This list will stick to online and outdoor events for the time being.

As I write this:

41.0% of the Florida population has been fully vaccinated (I’m one of them), and 50.8% has had their first dose.
43.1% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, and 52.5% has had their first dose.

Those numbers are a good sign, but they could be better. I’m holding off on listing indoor in-person events until after the 4th of July for the following reasons:

Most of the events aimed at a tech, entrepreneur, or nerd audience are still being held online.
The CDC’s announcement depends on people exercising good judgement. We live in Florida. Do the math.
If the CDC’s call was right, we’ll know by July 4th. If the CDC’s call was wrong, we’ll also know by July 4th.

I’m looking forward to life getting back to normal, but I’m also happy to exercise a few weeks’ worth of caution because I think it’s worth it.

Stay home, stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!

This week’s events

Monday, June 14

Tuesday, June 15

Wednesday, June 16

Thursday, June 17

Friday, June 18

Saturday, June 19

Sunday, June 20

Other area news

Tampa Bay’s tech startup future is female-led
Be sure to check out the recent piece by Tampa Bay Business Journal on the women behind Tampa Bay’s major startup organizations. It’s one of the things that sets Tampa Bay’s tech scene apart from the others.

Celsius Network’s CTO moved to Tampa
Celsius Network’s CTO Nuke Goldstein (an action hero name, for sure!) visited Tampa Bay for a month and ended up moving himself and his family here in May. He’s already had meetings with Mayor Jane Castor and Embarc Collective CEO Lakshmi Shenoy. He says: “I met more friends and connections in one month in Tampa than I did in three years in New York. The people are so friendly and open and energized.”

Company that expanded to Tampa is on a hiring spree
Drift, the Boston-based company that expanded into Tampa, and whose platform assists with B2B buying, has already hired 50 people locally, and is looking to add 40 more.

Tampa fintech startup accepted to prestigious 1871 accelerator program
Trustate, a company that aims to help streamline and automate the estate administration process, has been accepted to the “WMN-FINtech program,” a joint project of BMO Harris Bank and 1871, the Chicago-based incubator that gave us Embarc Collective’s Lakshmi Shenoy.

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!

Current Events Tampa Bay

What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, June 7, 2021)

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date June 5, 2021

Here’s your list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, June 7 through Sunday, June 13, 2021.

How long will this list contain only ONLINE and OUTDOOR events?

Not just yet. This list will stick to online and outdoor events for the time being.

As I write this:

39.6% of the Florida population has been fully vaccinated (I’m one of them), and 49.7% has had their first dose.
41.6% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, and 51.5% has had their first dose.

Those numbers are a good sign, but they could be better. I’m holding off on listing indoor in-person events until after the 4th of July for the following reasons:

Most of the events aimed at a tech, entrepreneur, or nerd audience are still being held online.
The CDC’s announcement depends on people exercising good judgement. We live in Florida. Do the math.
If the CDC’s call was right, we’ll know by July 4th. If the CDC’s call was wrong, we’ll also know by July 4th.

I’m looking forward to life getting back to normal, but I’m also happy to exercise a few weeks’ worth of caution because I think it’s worth it.

Stay home, stay safe, stay connected, and #MakeItTampaBay!

This week’s events

Monday, June 7

Tuesday, June 8

Wednesday, June 9

Thursday, June 10

Friday, June 11

Saturday, June 12

Sunday, June 13

Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?

Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!

Join the mailing list!

Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!