Friday's Afternoon Update

What you need to know about Florida today

| 2/8/2013

As blizzard hits, state aims ads northward

Visit Florida, the state's tourism agency, has kicked off a new ad campaign aimed at luring tourists from cold-weather markets entitled "Must be the Sunshine." An initial television commercial is slated to run during Sunday evening's Grammy Awards show in the greater Detroit area, depicting a family in the afterglow of a Florida vacation. [Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune]

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Small Businesses 10 Years Later: Where Are They Now?

For this year’s Small Business issue, Florida Trend looked at what happened to some of the Florida companies that made Inc.’s list of fast-growing companies and our own Florida Small Business issue from 2003.

Some sold. Some entrepreneurs moved out of state. Some companies no longer exist. But some kept on growing.

» Small Businesses 10 Years Later: Where Are They Now?

KSC seeks Sandy money as ocean chews toward launch pads

NASA longs to explore liquid planets but will first have to fend off our own watery world. That could take upwards of $45 million. Two launch pads hold the future of human spaceflight, but an ever-encroaching ocean imperils their future. [Source: Florida Today]

New restaurants aim to help turn Miami Health District into a destination

Gorgonzola pizza with white truffle oil, Chilean sea bass, imported Italian prosciutto and craft beers are run-of-the-mill fare in Miami’s trendier neighborhoods from Miami Beach to the Miami Design District. But such a trendy menu isn’t what you would expect on the edge of Overtown in the area broadly known as Miami’s Health District. [Source: Miami Herald]

» FRIDAY PREVIEW: Coming next week to FloridaTrend.com:

Big-Picture Legal Trends: The recession has exposed structural flaws in the business models of many law firms.
Tech and the Law: Lawyers haven’t always been the most tech savvy professionals, but tech experts say that’s changing.
Florida Icon: Ruth Alexander: A conversation with the creator of the women's athletics program at the University of Florida.
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Startups and tech companies are finding help in Miami-Dade from many sources.

» You'll find all these stories first on the Daily and Afternoon Pulse e-mails.

Publisher's Column
Sharp Growth in Florida

Everyone interested in the future of Florida should pay special attention to numbers just released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Over the year mid-2011 to mid-2012, Florida gained 235,306 residents — that’s a 1.2% rate — to register 19.3 million. By year-end 2012, Florida should have reached about 19.5 million, forecasters have projected. I never believed the myth that Florida depopulated during the great recession of 2008-10, but I’m simply stunned by this amount of growth.