By Nancy Dahlberg / ndahlberg@MiamiHerald.com
It seems like everyone is catching startup fever.
Last week’s breakfast event hosted by commercial law firm Bilzin Sumberg was yet another opportunity to explain and share South Florida’s tech-entrepreneurship efforts to date with the greater community. The event, titled “Miami: The Next Entrepreneurial Frontier,” attracted nearly 200 professionals. It wasn’t lost on that well-dressed crowd that what’s good for local technology is good for the economy as a whole.
South Florida’s technology industry has actually been growing for three decades, and there have certainly been ups and downs. But, as the group at Bilzin Sumberg heard, the most recent efforts to accelerate a tech-entrepreneurial ecosystem hub picked up considerable steam the past 24 months with the proliferation of events, conferences, pitch opportunities, incubators and co-working spaces, many of them supported by the Knight Foundation.
The past year saw two big milestones: the inaugural eMerge Americas conference, which attracted 6,000 people to check out what South Florida’s tech community has to offer and served as a gathering space for tech across the Americas, and the launch of 
Endeavor Miami, which accelerates high-growth companies and has already chosen seven entrepreneurs to support. There were also a number of other firsts: the inaugural SIME MIA conference just before Art Basel, the opening of the Microsoft Innovation Center, the first one in the United States, a Miami Mini-Maker Faire that attracted nearly 2,000 people (many of them pint-sized), and last month a focused conference called Fintech Latam.
Also launched: a plethora of programs to teach kids technology and entrepreneurship, including Code Fever, Code Now, Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code and Wynwood Maker Camp, among others. And next week Venture Hive’s TechCEO gets underway for Miami-Dade County high school students, teaching entrepreneurship in the real world. At the higher-education level, Florida Atlantic University rolled out its Tech Runway entrepreneurship accelerator and program and Nova Southeastern is building an $80 million NSU Center for Collaborative Research, with a technology incubator, as well as a new big data center. Miami Dade College rolled out Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses for the community and this fall is Idea Center @ MDC for its 165,000 students.
The Knight Foundation has committed $8 million in 90 investments in entrepreneurship programs, from Endeavor to The LAB Miami, a coworking and education center in Wynwood, to programs and organizations that help startups and the ecosystem with everything from legal help, talent acquisition, funding, communication and more.