April 25, 2024
Feature
Funding Dreams
At age 22, Kortney B. Murray got an early business lesson when she opened a clothing boutique in California.
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Published on 4/12/2023
Florida's Fed Voices
New Florida voices are serving on branch boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where their input will help shape monetary policy.
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Published on 4/12/2023
Setting goals
Hatch says many athletes still seek guidance and advice from him on everything from estate planning to real estate deals. “They say, ‘Hatch, can you take a look at this and let me know if this is on the up and up?' And I never charge anything because I've seen some of my friends and ex-teammates taken advantage of.”
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Published on 4/11/2023
Rising up
After graduating from Bentley University in Massachusetts in 2011 with a business degree, Tom D'Eri joined his father, John, in starting a business designed to employ people on the autism spectrum. Tom's brother, Andrew, who has autism, was aging out of the school system, and Tom knew Andrew's chances of having a career were slim.
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Published on 4/11/2023
Florida Icon: Peter Golenbock
Sports, in a way, is like joining a cult. It becomes very, very important in a wonderful way. I mean, where else can you sit in a stadium and scream your lungs out and not feel like a moron?
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Published on 4/10/2023
Healthy Return on Investment
When store owner Eugene Debs died in 2006, patrons of the corner grocery his family operated in downtown Jacksonville for 90 years lined the streets for his funeral cortege. They did the same for his brother, Nicholas Debs, the last operator of the store, when he died five years later.
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Published on 4/1/2023
An Attack on Poverty
Florida's poverty rate is 13.1%, according to the U.S. Census. In the ZIP codes selected by Florida Blue parent company GuideWell for investments, poverty rates are as high as 32.1%. The Florida Chamber Foundation's Florida Scorecard reports nearly 800,000 Florida children (18.2%) live in poverty, a figure the chamber wants to see fall below 10% by 2030.
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Published on 4/1/2023
Overcoming Obstacles
Physician Kelli Tice needs only to look back one generation in her family to understand the devastation wrought by health inequities: Her grandmother died young from a preventable disease.
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Published on 4/1/2023
Business in a Box
Ben Gaskill and Dan Doromal, both veterans of food service manufacturing, founded Everest Ice & Water Systems seven years ago. Their Apopka-based ice machine company has sold almost 1,000 of its patented ice vending machines, and Gaskill predicts they'll double sales this year.
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Published on 3/31/2023
Skeleton Crew
The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition's robotics team is making significant advancements in two new exoskeleton projects: Quix and Eva.
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Published on 3/27/2023
Marina Repairs
After sustaining damage from Hurricanes Ian and Nicole, St. Augustine will receive $750,000 toward repairs for the St. Augustine Municipal Marina. The total cost for the repairs is projected to be $2 million.
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Published on 3/27/2023
Bionic Hands
Florida Atlantic University engineering and computer science college researchers received $1.2 million from the National Science Foundation to improve the functioning of prosthetic hands. Current prosthetics allow only one grasp function to be controlled at a time.
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Published on 3/21/2023
School of Fish
Fort Lauderdale-based Guy Harvey Foundation has opened the Guy Harvey Academy of Arts & Science within Anna Maria Elementary School near Bradenton.
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Published on 3/21/2023
Educational upgrade: MBA programs in Florida
The esports industry — video games with multiple players that have spectators virtually or in person — had a market value of more than $1.3 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $3.8 billion by 2027, according to Marketwatch.
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Published on 3/15/2023
Promoting Ownership
Small businesses are the “heartbeat” of South Florida's economy, and their soul is cultural diversity, says Brittany Morgan, economic resilience director at the Miami Foundation, which has chosen to promote asset ownership with a $20-million gift from Wells Fargo's Open For Business program.
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Published on 3/15/2023
The Futurist
By now, the usual reasons Wall Street types had for decamping to Florida during the pandemic are well-known: No income tax, an entrepreneurial spirit, welcoming policies and effusive politicians, high-growth potential and minimal regulation.
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Published on 3/15/2023
Insurance: Headwinds
While the Legislature addressed property insurance during special sessions last year, work remains as premiums continue to rise and insurers bail out. In the meantime, health care providers still struggle with rising costs, mental health coverage issues and staff shortages. Also on the agenda, there's opportunity for rare bipartisan agreement on two key issues: Resiliency and water.
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Published on 3/8/2023
Health Care: Lingering Effects
Three years after it began sweeping the country, COVID-19 continues to cast a pall over the state's health care policy arena.
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Published on 3/8/2023
2023 Florida Legislature Priorities
As Florida's population surges and the state posts a record surplus, there are common causes for Republican and Democratic legislators convening March 7: Defending against natural disasters and water shortages, upgrading infrastructure and providing for affordable housing and workforce needs.
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Published on 3/8/2023
Florida Icon: Jenson Van Emburgh
My injury happened during birth. I came out the wrong way. The doctor put too much pressure on my spinal cord and it severed. My parents were told that I had no sensation or motor function from my armpits down and that I would be in a wheelchair for life.
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Published on 3/7/2023
Wasting No Time
About 30% of a typical city's food waste comes from restaurants. Aneshai Smith wants to do something about that while helping restaurants thrive. Her Orlando-based startup, Go See The City, offers digital coupons for deep discounts on unsold food before restaurants close for the day.
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Published on 3/7/2023
Century-old French flavor company Monin finds its North American home in Clearwater
Olivier Monin was only a few years into his tenure heading his family's syrup and flavoring business when he sought a place to build its North American headquarters. Founded in 1912 in Bourges, France, the company had survived world wars, changing tastes and the challenges of international business, but was on the rocks when Olivier, its third-generation leader, took over.
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Published on 3/1/2023
On the Front Lines
In 2014, Michael Obod and his business partner, Yurii Lavrenov, were running a laser tag equipment company in Ukraine, when Russia invaded Crimea. Amid the crisis, a teacher at Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, where Obod had studied, asked him to reserve some small production units to provide simulated combat/virtual reality training systems for the nation's soldiers.
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Published on 3/1/2023
Ripple Effect
Looking for a way to enhance reliability, both during regular operations to keep small problems from becoming big ones and also during emergencies when quickly finding sources of outages is important, FPL began working with Israeli company Percepto in 2018 on using drones to monitor infrastructure and on a nationwide FAA waiver to allow the utility to fly Percepto drones for surveillance and inspection at FPL sites.
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Published on 3/1/2023
Cellphone CSI
Cellebrite, an Israel-based digital intelligence company, works with law enforcement agencies to uncover data from cellphones and other digital devices — a practice now considered as routine as dusting for fingerprints in a crime scene.
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Published on 3/1/2023
